Japanese Travel Journal: Hakone

I read somewhere that traveling in Japan will remind you of why you wanted to travel in the first place. This is 100% true. I could not have asked for a better vacation.

As always, I enjoy train rides. It's a pleasant way to travel. Also, it's better than riding a bus - I had to take a bus from Odawara station to the hostel in Sengokuhara, and that was a longish trip up a windy mountain road. I'm impressed that I was able to make the trip with only the slightest hint of queasiness.

I arrived in Sengokuhara around dinner time, so after checking in at the hostel, I went in search of food. Found a nice Chinese restaurant that served decent ramen and excellent gyoza. Upon returning to the hostel, I met my roommates for the evening, Tomoko-san and Kim. This is one of the reasons I like staying in hostels - you have the chance to meet really awesome people! We stayed up talking until about 1am, and then we finally went to bed. Kim was leaving for Hiroshima in the morning, and Tomoko-san and I agreed to go to Lake Ashi together the next day. Which is exactly what we did!

On Lake Ashi, you can ride these really colorful and mildly hilarious boats to Hakone from the ropeway station. Here, Tomoko-san and I pretend to be pirates. Well, Tomoko-san is; I just look really, really cold. Because it was really cold and really windy.

Before getting to Lake Ashi, we went to Owakudani first. Owakudani is famous for its sulfur onsen, and the steam rises from vents in the valley. It's kinda creepy-looking (one of the Australians sharing our ropeway car commented that it looked like "a vision of hell"). The other thing that Owakudani is famous for are black eggs:

When eggs are boiled in the sulfurous water of the onsen, the shell turns black. On the inside, however, they remain otherwise normal. They taste just like regular eggs, they just need a little bit of salt. Supposedly, eating one of these eggs will add seven years to your life. Tomoko-san and I shared a bag of five of them (you could only buy them in multiples of five); she won janken for the fifth egg, so I only got fourteen years to her twenty-one. Still, they were a tasty treat, and it was nice to share them with a friend.

We went on to Lake Ashi, mainly to see the Hakone shrine. One of the most notable things about the shrine is the torii in the water. It's clearly visible while sailing on the lake, and once at the shrine, you can walk down to the torii. Also, the shrine is surrounded by a beautiful and amazing cedar forest; the grand trees grow up within and around the shrine like an army of silent sentinels. Many of the trees are sacred themselves, including a safe travel tree and an easy childbirth tree.

We ate lunch a nice little soba restaurant, and then Tomoko-san went off to find an onsen (not a problem, they're all over the place in Hakone). Much to the disappointment of my students, I have found that I am not overly fond of onsen. After the head-bashing incident in my own bath, I'm wary of them. They're so hot, they don't just make me drowsy and dizzy, they also make me a little nauseous. Even the prospect of private onsen isn't enticing to me. I could probably get over the body issue thing and go to a public onsen, but I really would prefer not to feel ill.

Instead, I went to the Hakone Open Air Museum. There are museums all over Hakone, and unfortunately, I didn't have time to go to all of them. The Open Air Museum looked particularly interesting because of its extensive Picasso exhibit and many outdoor sculptures. Things would have been quite lovely if it hadn't started to rain when I got there. Even so, it was nice, especially around the Green Lawn, which had some beautiful flowering trees interspersed with the sculptures.

I stopped at a Lawson's for a combini dinner (mmm, ham-n-cheese sandwich and Pringles). As it happened, Tomoko-san had the same idea: she came in about 30 minutes after I did with a rice dish from the same Lawon's! We ate dinner in the common dining room, listening to the wind and rain slam against the windows. What had been a sedate but steady rain became a fervent rainstorm, complete with gusty winds. This continued through the night and even into the morning.

I had planned on going to the Little Prince Museum, but because most of it was outside, I was reluctant to go. Tomoko-san planned on going to the Pola Art Museum, and she invited me to go with her, so I did. The Pola is a beautiful and expansive museum, with both Western and Japanese art. I was especially interested in the Japanese artists, as I hadn't heard of some of the contemporary names, and what I saw was impressive. We spent a total of three hours in the museum, definitely worth the trip. The museum itself is very beautiful and modern, with lots of glass and metal, windows looking out into the surrounding mountain woods. Most of the galleries are underground, so that you wouldn't even know it lay tucked into the mountain by looking. The idea was to blend the structure into the landscape, and it works beautifully.

Upon leaving the Pola, Tomoko-san and I parted ways. We exchanged contact info and wished each other well. Because it had stopped raining, she went on her way to the Open Air Museum, and I decided to go to the Little Prince Museum.

The Little Prince was written by a Frenchman, and the only way I can explain the existence of this museum in Hakone is that the Japanese seem to like the story. I am not overly fond of it myself (I had to buy and read the book to discover this, because it's been over ten years since I last read it). But the museum is an amazing piece of work itself, including a remarkable replica of the childhood home of Saint-Exupery and the winding streets of an old French village. The amount of detail that goes into the setting blows the mind. The museum itself (detailing Saint-Exupery's life and the Little Prince's travels) didn't hold much interest for me partially because it lauded Saint-Exupery without looking at the more negative aspects of his life - but mainly because it was all in Japanese.

The restaurant made up for it. The Japanese menu had decent pictures, so I ended up with a delicious seafood pasta in a creamy sauce. Yummy.

And then I boarded the highway bus headed for Gotemba.