Leaving Tokyo - Hakone

Sunday morning we actually woke up properly and made it to Shinjuku Station to catch the 10:10 Romance Car to Hakone.  The Romance Car is just Odakyu’s name for an express train and Hakone is one of the most famous onsen – hot spring towns in Japan.  Unfortunately, we didn’t go to sleep nearly as properly, so V ended up with a little over an hour of sleep and I had three or four.  Oh boy.

Hakone is an hour and a half by train and with our train arriving in town before noon, we decided to head to eat lunch first.  Why so early?  Because we had scoped out a place that served tofu katsu, but only served 50 dishes a day.  The website said that we should reserve ours ahead of time, but when I called, the lady on the other end told me they don’t take reservations…

Regardless, we got to Hakone – Yumamoto and immediately switched trains to the Hakone Tozan Train.  This little tram crawls all the way up a mountain and ends in a town called Gora.  The car occasionally stops and then reverses direction onto a new set of tracks in order to keep climbing the mountain.  Sure it’s scenic, but its god awful slow and took us forty minutes packed into the car to travel probably a handful of kilometers.  

Once at Gora we headed to 田むら銀かつ亭 (Tamura Ginkatsutei) for lunch.  I don’t think we had anything to worry about because it seemed very unlikely that they would run out of the tofu katsu.  When we got there, they were calling out number 36 and we were 56.  Everybody was ordering the exact same thing, too.  Still 56 was called in something like thirty minutes and we sat down inside to enjoy this:

Yessir.  It was well worth the little effort and wait we put in.  Tofu fried katsu style?  I approve.  We also picked up a soymilk pudding to go and ate that on our way to Owakudani.  I wasn’t sure what to expect from it, but it ended up tasting kind of like sweet and light tofu.  Pretty good though. 

Getting to Owakudani from Gora requires you take the Hakone Tozan Cablecar, another super crowded form of transportation, and then the Hakone Ropeway.  I think we totally underestimated how many people would be there.  It was a Sunday, but I guess a lot of people come just to do day trips.  Also, there were a ton of foreign tourists.  I probably heard more Chinese in certain touristy areas than Japanese.

That said, the Ropeway was pretty awesome.  Definitely the least congested mode of travel all day; also great views of the mountainside and the town below.  Most of the ride up to Owakudani is in the shade, but probably the best part of the ride was when we reached the top of a mountain, the sun suddenly shone through, Mt. Fuji came into full view, and everyone exclaimed, “見える!”  

Owakudani is a hot spring hotspot at one of the highest points of Hakone.  In fact you can see the rope way station from virtually anywhere in the surrounding area.  Funniest thing about Owakudani was that as soon as we got off the lift and stepped out of the station, V felt like everything felt vaguely familiar.  She has been to a lot of Japan as a child, so much so that she doesn't even remember some places apparently.  Owakudani is actually kind of out of the way but also home to one of the must-do's in Hakone: the black eggs.  

The black eggs don't look quite like that actually.  Rather, there's a very sulfurous pool atop the mountain where the eggs are dipped and boiled.  I'm not sure how it works, but when they come out the shells have turned black.  Who figured out that if you cook eggs in the hot spring they turn black?

The climb up to this pool is actually a bit long.  And at that altitude, any sort of physical activity is much more tiring that you would expect.  That little hut is a stand where they sell the eggs, but you can also buy them at the gift shops by the base station.  There's a special egg lift actually that sends baskets of raw eggs up to the hut and black cooked eggs down below.  We didn't get to see them cooking any, but we did buy a couple.

They only sell them in packs of five, so we didn't really have much of a choice.  Once you crack them open, it really looks just like a normal egg.  Also tastes pretty normal, although some of the sulfuriness comes through.  Supposedly, eating one adds seven years to your life; so over the course of two days, V added 21 years and I added 14.  Not bad. 

We had only planned three things for our itinerary on Sunday: lunch at Gora, Owakudani, and the Hakone Open Air Museum. But by the time we arrived at our last stop, it was already past 4:00 PM.  With only one hour left before closing, we weren't sure if it'd be worth checking out, but V's brilliant idea of getting the student rate made it too good to pass up.  

This is the one place I really wish we had more time for.  We'd heard it was a must see and it really was.  It is what it sounds like; the Hakone Open Air Museum is like a big park with artwork all over the place.  The landscaping was very well done and the featured work was mostly domestic modernistic stuff. 

V's favorite work was this one. Symphonic Sculpture is basically a big stained glass tower.  You climb all the way to the top and you get views of the whole museum.  Probably the most remarkable exhibit was the  Picasso Museum.  There's basically an entire two story building filled with Picasso work; it really is such a comprehensive collection that you wonder how they got it all.  V looked it up later and found out they basically just bought it all.  Pretty amazing.

There were a couple of other exhibits that I wanted to check out including the one above.  It's really too bad that some of the coolest looking pieces were basically just play places for children.  By far the most kid friendly museum I have ever been to.  In fact, I felt so left out that I went out of my way to play inside this big star maze thing. Kinda like Where's Waldo.

  

I really wish we had more time to spend that day.  The bad thing about an open air museum is that when the sun goes down, there really isn't anything to see anymore.  Close to the Picasso exhibit, they have a hot spring foot bath that we just totally avoided because we didn't have the time.  Really really zannen.  Still, I highly recommend the Hakone Open Air Museum (especially if you can get student rates).  It's pricy but a cool experience; just make sure you schedule it in properly.

Three stops (including lunch) took us from 11:30 AM until 5:00 PM, which in my opinion is really the hardest part of visiting Hakone.  It's a giant tourist trap and with so many people around it takes forever to get from A to B.  Fittingly, the train/bus combo that got us to our ryokan took us another hour.  There are so many different yet necessary methods of transportation that ticket prices can really rack up.  The Hakone Free Pass is an Odakyu ticket that is basically a round trip between Shinjuku and Hakone-Yumamoto plus free rides for almost all the different lifts.  You really can't go to Hakone without it.

We went out of our way to book a traditional ryokan for our stay in Hakone.  We chose Hoeiso (豊栄荘) because it got pretty decent ratings on Rakuten and offered private baths.  We also wanted some place with traditional meals.

From the reviews and pictures of the dinner spread we had found online, I was really looking forward to our meal.  Above is our first course for dinner.  I really don't know what we were eating and the food was really more mysterious than delicious.  Not bad, but pretty far from amazing.  The nabe was probably the best part of our meal.  The whole thing looks really pretty though, right?  I think that's what influenced us.  What wasn't a big influence was the most famous part of our meal below.

Hoeiso is known for its kiji - green pheasant.  We called it 小 chicken.  小 chicken isn't exactly endangered or anything, but on the watch list for environmental protection, so our meal was starting to enter immoral territory.  Actually this is the second time I've had raw poultry and the second time I've enjoyed it.  I haven't died yet.  I've had pheasant and pigeon before and 小 chicken is a little bit less gamey, but definitely a bit more wild tasting than regular chicken.

The second course was a yaki course along with a soup and some other mystery items.  Again, good not great.

The best part of Hoeiso is that their rotenburo's, outdoor baths, go from public split sex baths to private baths after 8:00 PM.  So, all you have to do is reserve a time and you can have the bath all to yourself for half an hour for free.  We went in at 9:00 without much preparation and spent the half hour trying to balance the heat of the bath and the coldness of the environment.  Taking a bath in the cold at night is a little hard to handle but enjoyable all the same.

Shortly after our bath, we were thinking about signing up for another time, but totally passed out.  When we got up it was 3:00 AM and the rotenburo had closed, but the indoor baths were open all night.  So we split up and went into each respective bath all alone.  Hoeiso only has twelve rooms or so and most of the guests are old, so there was no doubt we could have privacy at 3:00 AM.

Both the indoor and outdoor baths were really nice.  I would have given our stay at Hoeiso a good review except that the temperature in the room was really difficult to manage.  We spent most of the night too hot or too cold.  Actually, for some reason V was just cold the whole time.  The real deal breaker were the god awful pillows.  What is with us and hotel pillows?  These things were really high and felt like they were filled with beads; not little beads like beanbag chairs but giant rock hard lima beans...ugh.

I was woken up the next morning when they began serving us breakfast.  Probably my least favorite meal of the stay.  Lots of weirdness on the table and I just can't handle mentaiko.  In the pot on the left was this really really light tofu that tasted like it wasn't quite tofu yet.  Tasted kinda like congealed soymilk; I enjoyed it, V didn't.

So we started Day 2 in Hakone on a super awkward sleep schedule.  V slept in a little more while I went to hit up the hot spring one last time.  I had hoped to get into the rotenburo while it was light out, but found that it was being cleaned so spent a few minutes in the indoor bath.  Of course after my dip in the onsen, we had to scramble to check out. 

Monday was bus day, and we were really at the mercy of bus schedules.  Hakone dies down a lot on a week day, and a lot of things either stop running or run much less.  We waited for about half an hour to get a bus to Motohakone, one of the harbors around Ashinoko (Lake Ashi). 

Hakone is really about two things I think: hot springs and views.  It is certainly a pretty place, and although I totally passed out on the bus to Motohakone, V tells me that it was the prettiest ride all weekend.  We actually had a lot more time on Monday, but we ended up with much less to do.  Ashinoko has three major ports and our objective was to hit up all of them via kaizoku-sen (pirate ship) and see what there is to do in the vicinity.

First up was the Hakone Shrine.  I've seen a whole bunch of shrines now and Hakone Shrine still managed to stand out.  The temple part is not that much different, but it is nestled into a mountainside.  You can actually see the waterside gate above.  The path leading up to it is pretty as well with cedar trees lining each side.

Same drill as usually: went and prayed hard.  We spent some time walking around looking for the lakeside gate and finally found it just by looking for it randomly through the trees.  Shades of Itsukushima here and a pretty amazing view of the lake.

Finally it was time to take the famous pirate ship.  This glorified ferry connects Motohakone to Togendai to Hakonemachi.  Not sure exactly what to say about it.  It's somewhat entertaining that you get to ride on a pirate ship, but the views are really the show stealer. 

We took the pirate ship to Togendai to check out what there is to do there.  Turns out that Togendai is really just a hub to get to other things.  There was nothing there, but buses to various sites as well as another ropeway to Owakudani.  We didn't need to go to Owakudani again, but we had some time so we took it to a midway stop, Ubako.  There was nothing at Ubako either...

Taking the ropeway is kinda fun although V gets freaked out.  There was only one last thing I wanted to check out, which is the cedar walkway between Hakonemachi and Motohakone.  We enjoyed a nice walk back and got there just in time to catch the 4:00 PM bus to the train station.  Our tickets were for something like 6:20, so we switched them up to around 5:40 to do some window shopping in the area and grab something to eat.

There are a bunch of omiyage shops in the area, and we scoped them all out.  There were a bunch of cured fish and fishcakes available leading us to believe that this might be the famous food in the area.  We just played it safe and went for some manju.  Manjuya Nanohara was giving out free samples and we totally got sucked into them.  

So much so that we went up to their second floor to try out their cafe.  V ordered the red bean soup + mochi thing.  It has a name, but I don't remember what it's called.  A bit sweet but really good still.

I got the chestnut "pie" and some matcha.  That chestnut thing was seriously sooo delicious.

We only bought a box of eight manjus, but in retrospect we totally could've gotten more.  I want thems.

We planned Hakone to be a relaxing getaway and instead we ended up with this arduous footrace.  We literally planned two to three things a day and just getting around catching buses and whatnot wore us out.  I was totally exhausted with a whole lot of work to do when I got back home on Monday night.  This post has me exhausted too!  Gotta find a way to really take some easy going trips.

Hakone is a bit expensive since it's such a hotspot.  We'll totally find another ryokan to visit on the cheap and seriously take it easy next time.