So, Hakone was a lot of fun. The group managed to cram a whole lot of experiences into two short days. I ended up with over 200 photos uploaded to Flickr! I’m not going to post all of them here, because… that would probably bore you. I think I will try to do one highlight from each experience.
You can check out my food gallery for all the food we ate on the trip, since I decided to start photographing my food. The gallery is here. I did get to try a lot of interesting new foods, including baked miso on a spoon, cold soba, whole fried fish, sweet tofu, plum wine, and other stuff. I highly recommend the plum wine! Yummy!
Our first stop (after the rest stop that had really good takoyaki) was the hotel. We had a soba lunch and meandered around for a bit before setting off to the Hakone Open Air Museum. We only got an hour at this museum, but it was really cool. It sculptures up on the mountain side, and the view was stunning. My favorite thing there was this stained glass tower, although I didn’t get a lot of great photos of it. Here is a photo of me on the roof of the tower.
View from the tower
I really wish we could have spent more time there. It was really pleasant, and a lot of the sculptures were interactive (although designed for kids mostly). Mixed in with weird, modern sculpture were pieces from famous sculptors such as Rodin. I kind of wish they had a Claes Oldenburg, but I guess it would have overpowered a lot of the other sculptures.
After we left the museum, we took a cable car ride up to Owakudani on the Hakone Ropeway. The view was pretty spectacular, and I even got some shots of Fuji-san out the window.
Out the window of the cable car
Fuji-san
This one above is the only shot from the cable car that didn’t have reflections on the glass. I have some wider shots from the top of Owakudani.
Once we arrived there, we had another hour or so to wander around. I spent so much time looking at fuji, that by the time I had gotten up to the spring area where the black eggs are sold, they had sold out up there! Not realizing that there were some at another station, Mani was nice enough to give a couple of us each one of his black eggs.
Black egg of doooooooom
It was pretty tasty… the sulfur doesn’t really seep into the egg at all. It just tastes like a super fresh boiled egg. After the egg, I decided to try egg-flavored ice cream… they will flavor ice cream with pretty much anything here! It was okay. It tasted like custard. I bummed another egg off of Patrick when we got back to the bus as well!
The view of this entire mountain and the springs was fabulous, especially with the steam rising out of the cracks in the surface. I highly recommend checking out my Hakone Trip set on Flickr to just skim the shots.
I want to post a nicer photo of Fuji-san here though. It was so massive that it truly eclipsed all the surrounding areas. The scale was unreal, and I don’t think these photos completely capture it.
Fuji-san and rail car cables
In the one above, you can see the cables for the rail cars that we rode up on.
I left Owakudani with great sadness, because it was really amazing. Our sight seeing was done for the day, but we still had a nice evening of food and onsen ahead of us.
After checking into the hotel, Carrie, Carly, and I decided to head immediately to the onsen so that we could get nice and relaxed for our dinner. We got dressed up in our yukata and proceeded to the onsen. I was REALLY glad I’d gone the night before, because I was able to properly put on my yukata and knew the procedure for onsen. I think Carrie and Carly were glad too. :) The photo below is of all in yukata.
The girls take a bath!
You can’t really see the yukata, because we were wearing haori, but they are really comfy. I am definitely going to buy at least one while I’m here. I think I will buy a cheaper lounging one, and then a really nice one that would be appropriate for a festival.
After the onsen was dinner. You can also check out the album for photos of the hotel room. I didn’t really get any photos of the grounds, and of course, I got none of the onsen either.
Dinner!
The dinner shot includes a personal shabu shabu portion on the left – pot for boiling, meat and veggies, dipping bowl, as well as a serving of tofu. On the right there is grilled fish and sashimi and soy sauce. In the center is a glass for beverage and a tiny cup of plum wine. The plum wine was really, good, but that was all that they would give us. After this initial food, they also bought out a whole fried fish, a soup similar to the one David and I had at ShabuZen, rice, and a sweet tofu and fruit desert and tea. There might have been other stuff as well, but I honestly don’t remember. It was a lot of food! And there was also an all-you-can drink menu, so some people had a good time and sang a bunch of karaoke. :) I refrained from singing this weekend though!
After dinner, everyone wanted to go out, but Hakone isn’t really a party town. So, we spent the evening hanging out in one of the rooms and playing mafia (it was a game where you randomly choose two people to be assassins and one to be a detective, and the rest are just normal players – each round the assassins kill a player and the other players have to try to guess who the assassins are – that’s the short short version). It was pretty fun, but I was tired by midnight, so I headed to my room and chilled out and went to bed around 1:30 or 2.
The next morning we had a buffet breakfast at the hotel and then set out for Odawara Castle. The castle was really gorgeous, and the plum trees were blossoming, so I spent a lot of time wandering around and taking photos.
Odawara Castle
Plum Blossoms
From the trees at the base of the castle. They look like little alien plants! :)
After Odawara Castle, we traveled on to the Mt. Daiya-zan Saijo Temple complex, which was also really spectacular.
I have a lot of photos from this place as well, but I’m going to post a link to a video I shot of the priests chanting prayers and playing the taiko drums. You can check out the photos on flickr. Also, the was this guy with two cats on leashes. It was really adorable. I have photos of that as well. I will get video of the cat guy and the rest of the Hakone videos up when I get a chance.
After the temple, we got back on the bus and headed back to Tokyo. It was a fun weekend, but I’m totally exhausted from all the traipsing around. It made my cold reactivate a bit, so I’m trying to take it fairly easy today, although I have a lot to accomplish before Amey gets here on Friday! So excited for her to be here and our trip to Kyoto/Nara/Osaka/Himej!
Anyway, ja mata!