Well, as most people might know, I didn’t end up getting to go snowboarding on Sunday. Instead, I decided to travel to Nikko with a couple of friends. Nikko is considered a World Heritage Site because of some of the temples and shrines there, so some of the train lines offer special passes for foreigners to go visit. The pass pays for a trip there and back, transit on one of the buses, and admission to three of the major sites.
When I got up on Sunday, I checked the weather, and it was terrible. It was gusting wind, and Nikko was supposed to be in the low 20s. The icon also showed snow. I was a little dubious, but we’d agreed to meet at the station at 7:40 AM, so I basically just sucked it up and got on the train. One of the ladies I was traveling with, Erin, got onto my train, so we ended up riding there most of the way together, and we met Becky shortly after as we were exiting the station.
I told them what the weather was looking like, and we were all a little nervous. We almost scrapped it, but then decided to go on ahead with our plans. We managed to get spots on the 8:15 train with some cocoa (or coffee) in our hands and some sandwiches from a local coffee shop. The train was pretty slow and rickety, but it seemed fine. As we wound our way north, the ground began to have little patches of snow on it, and the wind gusted now and again, blowing around snow and blowing through the trees. At one point, the train came to stop, and it just kind of sat there for a while. We started to get nervous, because we couldn’t understand what the conductor was saying, and he was talking a lot. Finally, Becky leaned over and asked the lady next to us what they were saying. I could see that she had been translating for her boyfriend, who was a foreigner.
She explained that the wind had knocked another train that was before us off the track, and that it was delaying our train. We were all pretty freaked out to hear that and again doubted the intelligence of heading out to Nikko on this particular day. Eventually, another train pulled up next to ours, and they transferred us to that train, and we continued on, reaching Nikko with little other issues. In Nikko, it was bitterly cold and windy, so we decided to pop in for some ramen before getting on the bus to the temple sites.
I will pick up the story again later, with some photos and possibly some video at that time…
In the meantime, here’s an article about the terrible winds we were dealing with: Japan Times.
We weren’t on a bullet train, but we were on a train in Tochigi Prefecture: “All bullet trains on the line were suspended at around 7:55 a.m. when winds of more than 108 kph were recorded between Utsunomiya Station in Tochigi Prefecture and Shinshirakawa Station in Fukushima Prefecture, East Japan Railway Co. said. Services were resumed around noon.”
Anyway, I will post the rest later… ja, mata!
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