June 7 last day

We were checked out by 10, with candy stashed in our pockets, having traded another package of Timtams for some magnets (a ninja and a geisha, this time). D was arranging a business meeting later that day over the telephone, so we didn’t leave til 11, and then we went straight back to Jimbocho to find that best ramen place we had had on our first day in Tokyo. Amazingly, after about half an hour of wandering the mazelike alleys, we found it, and only waited in line another half hour.



This time we both ordered the ramen and the fried rice, slurped our bowls dry, and rolled out of there clutching our swollen stomachs. It was as amazing as it had been and the line of businessmen was even longer than before. The chainsmoking old cook was as blankfaced as ever, but his little wife remembered us and kept nodding and grinning at us appreciatively.

We continued on to Asakusa and walked up the famous souvenir street which leads to a big temple. I was finally able to buy all those last-minute trinkets I’d wanted, and D bought me a kukeshi, a Japanese wooden doll, painted with cranes. We also paid 100 Y each to shake a tube, pull a length of wood out with a little number on it, open a drawer with that number and pull out a little piece of paper that would tell our fortunes. Both of us got very good fortunes, advising us that now was a good time to travel, marry, move up in the workplace, find the things we had lost, and meet the people who would help us on our way. The good fortune really seems to cover all the bases.



We also saw Asakusa's famous giant turd.



Then we were off to meet D’s camera contact guy at Ikebukuro. Unfortunately we hadn’t gotten to see much of this busy suburb during our trip, so after D finished his business, we took half an hour just to walk around and look at all the Bic Cameras. I am infused with a fiery hatred for Bic Camera, one of the biggest electronics chains in Japan. This store’s peppy falsetto jingle, played over and over, has nearly made my head explode on numerous occasions—you can hear it from blocks away, and at that sound D’s head snaps up and he starts walking faster, because he knows I will just stand there drooling with the pain while he searches for all his electronic toys.



Back to the subway we went, picked up our bags from the ryokan, took a quick taxi then a one hour train to the airport, and we were off, back to Oz…goodbye Japan!

Monday Day 13

We were up at 0745, grabbed roll cake for me and obento for D at the station, and settled in for a 1.5 hour train ride into the mountains. We met my old friend Karen, from Virginia, and her husband Ron, from New Zealand, twenty minutes from the end of the ride. They live west of Tokyo. They guided us onto the bus and cable car to a temple on Miitake Mountain. We had ramen and udon (noodles) for lunch and had a great chat—they are super nice people, and Karen has been giving me career advice about how to get a position working in Japan. She did say, though, that she spends a lot more time traveling around the South Pacific islands than actually working in Japan, but still, it seems like a good job. Unfortunately she had to go in to work in the afternoon, so they took off right after lunch.



D and I decided that we would hike up the mountain in search of a waterfall on the map. Well, the waterfall looked a lot closer than it actually was—maybe because it was a tourist map with a drawing of a cartoon waterfall that took up a good deal more space than the actual one.



We saw some lovely boulders and moss and trees and butterflies in the next two and a half hours, and we were dusty and sweaty and aching when we finally crawled back onto the bus. We both fell asleep during the train ride back into Tokyo.






Still in our dirty clothes, we met Hiroko again, this time at a rather fancy Western place. We were a bit disappointed it was Western food, especially D, but couldn’t very well refuse. And I must admit I felt a little twinge of joy when I read “linguine in mushroom sauce” on the menu. There were plenty of Japanese things on there, too, and maybe it was the influence of the champagne (it was most definitely the influence of the champagne) but I decided to try a tiny tiny piece of sushi. Luckily, all I could taste was the cucumber and rice and seaweed the fish was wrapped in, and I chewed twice and gulped it all down in a ball. But I didn’t die, and now I can say I’ve had sushi in Japan.

We were joined by another of D’s former students, Machiko, and the dinner became really lively. Hiroko is always a hoot and Machiko seemed to have a cheeky streak, and all three of us ladies got quite tipsy from the champagne. I think D had to put up with a lot of teasing in multiple languages, but it was fun for everyone. We were in bed at midnight, having successfully managed to exhaust ourselves every single night in Japan.

Day 12 Sunday

We had a few pastries for breakfast in a smoke-filled bakery—why a customer needed to smoke a cigarette over his doughnut and coffee is beyond me—and walked around the crowds for a few hours. I really wanted to see Dougayusuji Street, which supplies food and cooking things for all the restaurants, but it turned out a bit of a disappointment; we couldn’t find any stores selling the famed plastic foods that many restaurants here display in their windows.

We headed for Den Den Town, the electronics district, to buy D some camera things. But we couldn’t find any professional shops and our most exciting moment came when we stepped into an elevator, the door closed, we hit the button for Level 5 and the elevator just sat there. We hit every other button and the elevator just sat there. Finally I hit the Open button and the doors opened. I nearly fell over myself trying to get out, but D wanted to try to get to his camera shop, so while I waited nervously on the platform, he hopped back into the elevator and this time I saw the numbers blinking up to the fifth floor. I waited about three minutes and then the numbers blinked back down and D stepped out, a bit shaken. The 5th floor, which was supposed to be a camera shop, was actually a hardcore porn shop.

On our way back to our hotel, we passed through an entire street lined with manga and anime stores. I was thrilled and managed to pick up some souvenirs from the comics I used to read in high school.




For lunch, we swung by last night’s restaurant, hoping to try a less-spicy version of the soup, but the line outside was three times as long. So we searched around a bit until we found the second ramen place Soli had recommended. We ordered from a vending machine outside, got our tickets, and then entered a long thin building and sat at a long counter with about fifty other people until a waiter rolled our food up on a trolley. The ramen was good, if not as good as last night’s place.



Now a bit sick of ramen, we went to yesterday’s hotel to pick up our bags—amazed there was no overnight storage fee—and continued to the subway, where we managed to catch a shinkansen one hour earlier than we had scheduled. It was a three hour trip back to Tokyo, and D dropped his sunglasses down the crack between the train and the platform.

Back in Tokyo, Takis took us out again. Maybe our palates were jaded, but we didn’t enjoy this restaurant as much as the last he had taken us to. We went happily to bed in our old ryokan.

But first I had to decide which gigolo was my favorite.

Day 11 Saturday June 5

We checked out, ditching our bags with the hotel, grabbed a Beard Papa cream puff




and a bento box each and hopped the train to Hiroshima. The first train only had seats left in the smoking car, and as it was an hour and a half ride, we decided against arriving with permanent headaches. So we didn’t get there til 1:30, in the heat of the day.

We walked Shukkien Garden first--

it was full of turtles!



--then took the street car to Peace Memorial Park and checked out the museum. Hiroshima was much like you’d expect. A little patch of green surrounded by ugly concrete boxes that make up the city, the memorial was sad and moving and less political than I’d expected. The English translations of history seemed pretty accurate, from what I could remember. Part of the motto of the memorial is “transcending hatred,” which I think pretty much says it all. The only place I noticed any contention was in the guestbook. Surrounded by messages of peace and love and sorrow, an Australian girl had signed, “How awful that anyone would wrongly attack such a beautiful country”, and below her entry a less-ignorant Brit had written a rather acerbic response.





We took the streetcar back and wondered if there was some sort of festival going on: the cars, and the streets, were full of girls in kimonos and boys in traditional dress robes. D surreptitiously snapped photos of them, holding his camera under his arm. It was another hour and a half back on the shinkansen. We were both grateful for the rest. With so much walking and having worn a pair of bad sandals a few days before, I was suffering from shin splints.

Back in Osaka, we searched for an hour for a place to store our luggage, since D’s huge camera bag wouldn’t fit in any of the station lockers or even the department store ones. We returned to the hotel of the day before almost desperate—considering paying $30 for a capsule hotel room simply to store the bag—but the Chisun was all too happy to keep them til tomorrow. So, lightly, clutching just our backpacks, we set off along the river.

On a Saturday night, the streets were packed, with cosplayers in black or garyu with long light brown curls and lacy Bo Peep dresses. We found the ramen place Soli had recommended without too much trouble: ichiramen, or number 1 ramen. We waited in a roped line for 20 minutes before being ushered inside, where we waited in chairs for another few minutes, ordered our food from a vending machine on the wall, took our dinner tickets and were placed in a row of individual cubicles. You could lean around the partitions to chat, but could see nothing in front but a wooden screen, with a hole at table level for hands to pass bowls through. I pushed my little buzzer to call the waiter and he appeared behind my screen, rattled off some words in Japanese, waited silently for a moment, then leaned down and peered sideways through the hole at me, grinning helplessly and asking “Nan des ka?” (What is it?)
“Ah—English menu!” he said reassuringly, and popped off, reappearing quickly with little laminated guides for both me and Darryl. We compared the Eego menu to the Japanese form, lining up the things we wanted and circling the kanji: level of spice (I selected Medium and boy, was I sorry), amount of green onions (regular), amount of garlic (1/2 clove), tenderness of noodles (I chose normal/firm), richness of soup (regular). When we were finished we rang our buzzer and pushed our tickets and form through the hole, and in a few minutes, he pushed a bowl of ramen back at us.



I had accidentally ordered a ticket from the vending machine of something that had looked like a glass of water, which turned out to be a little bowl of a tangy sort of soy sauce. I dumped the whole bowl into my broth and it was amazing. Luckily there was a tap at each cubicle, with free flowing water. Behind us, along the wall, boxes of tissues were within easy reach. Many other patrons were wiping sweaty foreheads and dabbing runny noses as well.



We visited Don Quixote next, a six-story shop selling costumes, rude t-shirts, and all sorts of toys. Then we headed to our love hotel for the night, Rose Lips. Love hotels are found in most of Japan’s big cities. They are discreet places for couples to go, not only for illicit or secret trysts, but also for regular couples who may not have much chance otherwise—the walls of a Japanese apartment are thin. Love hotels often have themed rooms, for playing out your fantasies—some rooms are designed to look like a train station, or the inside of an airplane, or a bar. Some are Wild West themed, some provide Sumo wrestling costumes. I was hoping for a Hello Kitty theme for ours.





It was only 9 p.m., but there were only 3 rooms still available and sadly, no Hello Kitty. We stood in the lobby, which was softly carpeted, and finally chose the nicest of the remaining rooms from the light-up panel in front of us, in a bit of a hurry, as two more couples had walked in the door. When we got up to the fifth floor, we were delighted by what we had—an enormous room, the size of a luxury Western hotel room. Gigantic roses were painted on the walls and looming over the dark scarlet bed. We had a red leather couch, a big screen TV, a huge bathroom with a steam machine and a spa bath and a separate toilet. We could use the free bath oils, bath salts, soaps, hairdryer, perfumes, lotions for him and her, razors, bathrobes, slippers, hair and toothbrushes, or hair gel. For a fee, we could access a special cupboard containing, umm, toys. Adult movies were free, albeit disturbing in a special Asian way, and you could also call for room service: noodles, hot dogs, and ice cream sundaes were available at all hours.

Worn out as per usual, we didn’t take full advantage of anything except the spa, which lit up with bright flashing strobe lights. The 11 a.m. checkout service was a positive luxury and the night had only cost as much as our first and smallest hotel in Tokyo.

Day 10 June 4 Friday

I think today we covered all the most important food groups: dairy, fruit, beef, veg, custard, curry, and mayonnaise.

custard: custard cream puffs for breakfast
Dairy: banana-flavored milk from a vending machine



Fruit: a crepe wrapped around a banana and ice cream, a banana and pineapple smoothie



Curry: for lunch



Beef: beef for dinner
Veg: garlic (on the beef)
Mayonnaise: a “gobo” salad, special pickled veg, swimming in sweet mayo sauce.

We were checked out by 0930 and walking north on the Philosophy Path, a temple walk just behind our hotel. First stop was the Silver Pavilion, so-called because its creator intended to cover it in silver. He never actually got around to it, so the temple was pretty ordinary. The best part was actually a tiny green frog that I spotted leaping through the waterfall, or maybe the toad sitting in a stump further along the path.




On our way out, some schoolteacher ran up to me shouting “Movie star! Movie star!” and ushered forward two teen boys, who slouched up to me for a very surly photo while I grinned embarrassed at the camera. I had a hard time finding D after that, but it turned out he had been waylaid too and was chatting away with another teacher while a swarm of shy schoolkids stared up at him and tried to ask questions about Australia.

We turned around and walked south, seeing more temples, joined on the path by the usual tired gaijin couples and huge groups of schoolkids...

I was getting a bit tired of temples myself.



...then we were off to Osaka. Bus, fifteen-minutes on the shinkansen, and subway culminated in another agonising walk/shuffle/drag with our bags through the blinding daylight to our hotel. We had now come full circle: this hotel was as tiny and as expensive as our first two nights in Tokyo. We showered and changed, bumping into each other every time we moved, and headed out into the nightlife--and boy, what nightlife!
We passed garish scrolling neon advertisements a whole city block long, huge video game arcades with pounding drum sets and air hockey tables and tinny bells and chimes and whistles and claw machines and endlessly shrieking music, pachinko parlors bellowing forth clouds of smoke and lined with intensely staring rows of gambling salarymen sitting oblivious in the crash and rattle and roll of ball bearings.



We met Darryl’s friend Soli for a late dinner, and enjoyed grilling beef on a hotplate at the table while still more smoke drifted in thick clouds below the ceiling, obscuring the lights. He told us about a cruel vending machine in the seedy district where the prize in the claw game was a declawed lobster, about the area called Amerika-muro where all the disaffected teens dress up in their best cosplay to shop at American stores, and about the giant crab figurine by the river—we had already glimpsed giant fish and crawfish down one of the bright wailing neon alleys.




We were in bed exhausted at 1230, waking up 4 or 5 times in the night as ambulances went by with sirens wailing and a mechanized voice chanting, I suppose, telling people to get out of the way.

Day 9 June 3 Thursday

This is how I now walk around Japan. The parasol really is a brilliant idea to keep yourself out of the sun.





Our ryokan, I decided, was the best one yet. It was more like a hotel than anything, with room conditioning and our own shower and toilet. It was cheap, the roomiest yet, and boasted two huge beds which were more like half-kings than twins. It also was floored with tatami mats and had a bath downstairs for ladies, which sadly I never had the chance to use. The only annoying thing about it was that our double room was right above one of the dormitory-style rooms, which one night was full of a rowdy bunch of girls who were up til midnight, their voices echoing through the floor. But I popped in my earplugs and passed out no problem.

First priority today was laundry, but for novelty, we got to hang it out to dry on the roof; from the street we could see our underwear flappin’ in the breeze high overhead. I picked up breakfast from the bakery, a bit of French bread with strawberry jam for me and a mysterious shiny roll for D that turned out to be a savory pork bun. Then we hopped the bus with our special 500Y bus pass, heading south toward the major temple district.

Bad fortunes. At all the temples you can pay for a slip of paper with your fortune. You keep good fortunes, but when you draw a bad fortune, you tie it around a tree and the tree diffuses the fortune for you. Poor tree!





The first temple we entered would be our favorite stop of the trip. Shoren-in was empty except for us and maybe twenty other visitors during the hour we were there. We took our time walking through the huge bamboo house, artistically arranged so that from each window or balcony, you could gaze straight through two or three other windows or doors that framed a perfectly pruned tree or the huge stones that made a bridge in the pond. The rooms, open to the air, were lined with painted panels and the tatami mats and wooden floors creaked and sloped. Darkened, cracking painted figures stared at us from five hundred year old eyes. The thunder that had been threatening us all morning was loud, and as the rain started to fall, we sat quietly and watched rain fall onto the pond, spattering the dust of the path into dark spots which lightened again almost instantly as the water soaked through.

Darryl doing what he does.



We sat quietly, and so did the rest of the Japanese visitors. Then a European family walked by on the verandah. Their little boy, maybe 4 years old, had been running back and forth without them. We had seen him in rooms by himself as we walked around. Now, we watched in horror as he ran up to a wood panel dating from the Heian period and snapped off an eight-inch slat. We stared as the mother, not knowing she was being observed, picked up the piece, tried to fit it back into place and, when it wouldn’t go, tossed it into the pond. They hurried away, their boy still running around aimlessly, scampering through rooms without them. D took a photo of the piece and the damage and we followed the long, mazelike walk back to the entrance. In D’s limited Japanese he managed to tell the lady at the desk that the “little noisy foreign child” did this. She gasped and gestured at us to wait. We heard her feet pattering as she literally ran from the room. A moment later she was back with a young monk with a shaved head. D went through his story again and the monk nodded gravely, thought hard, and then said to us, “This—very old.” It was heartbreaking but there was nothing else we could do. He thanked us, and as we left, we saw that he was trying to get the attention of a much older monk who seemed to be showing a distinguished guest through the gardens.



We climbed the steps of a few more shrines, but with the feeling that we had just capped our visit, until we reached the big pagoda that marked the edge of the district. Turning back, we ducked into a cafe just as the rain began again. D had a stack of green tea-flavored and soybean-flavored ice cream—may I say, yuck—and I had a bit of coffee rollcake and a hot chocolate that I would swear was made with nothing but cream and cocoa powder, as I had to add my own sugar.



When the rain stopped, we headed home, cleaned up, took in the laundry from the roof which was already hot in the sun, and managed to call and arrange for a hotel in Osaka with minimum drama. For dinner, we returned to Gion. This time we ended up at an okonomiyaki restaurant, cooking the okonomiyaki ourselves on a hot plate at our table—a sort of eggy pancake thing, very filling, if not the most satisfying.

Day 8 Wed June 2

I was up at 8 and at the post office ATM within minutes of its opening—success! We had cash again! It’s amazing how free I felt on the way home. I pretty much skipped down the street, smiling and nodding at old people who shot dark glances at my tank top which was, admittedly, not as modest as it could have been.

I woke D up with a nice cold coffee from the vending machine and we managed to procure two of our ryokan’s free bikes, one with three gears and one totally gearless, and rolled our rusty way down the streets, celebrating with a hard-earned apple. Just down the street was a bakery, Yamaga, with two loaves of bread taller than me on display, crossed over one shaped like a huge turtle. We bought an apple turnover and a sort of breakfast pizza with sliced egg on top and stopped in a little park to eat breakfast.



Darryl’s bike was curiously draggy and he was really suffering as we headed cross-country, stopping here and there at antique shops and lacquerware stores—Mom and Dad, you would have loved some of the cheap antique furniture we saw. We paused at Mosburger at eleven for D to eat a funny small burger with a sort of curry sauce on top, but when we continued on, D had to stop, flip his bike upside-down and take a look. His diagnosis revealed that the rear brake was broken and, essentially, had been on the entire time he had been riding. No wonder it was so hard!

By some miracle we had pulled over right next to a mechanic shop, so while I investigated a nearby temple, D managed to get the mechanic to fix the bike for free.



After some hard pedaling, we reached the Golden Pavilion, our major temple visit for the day. We picked up bento boxes from the grocery store for lunch—it was 1245—and paid $15 each to enter the temple in a mass of screeching kids in school uniforms, like Disneyland but a bit more regulated. Unfortunately, though, there was nowhere to eat. The pathways were absolutely packed and there were no turnoffs—you had to walk in your regulated line, and if you tried to turn and go against the flow of people, there were security guards standing by to stop you. We were hungry, though, and unwilling to leave, so we ended up sort of half-crouched in some rocks in the most secluded spot we could find, a very small turnoff where a pathway had been blocked by a rope slung across, still clearly visible from the middle of a ramp by everyone on their way up. We snuck bites and tried to chew secretively, but suddenly a man in a red uniform with a badge was coming toward us. “Excuse me,” he said, as D guiltily dropped his backpack in front of the little plates of food, and we stared up at him wide-eyed, “They want to practice English for their school.” Five little kids in yellow hats slunk out from behind him and stared at us, nervously offering their notebooks.

I smiled as sunnily as I could and tried to swallow the bite that was in my mouth without chewing. D’s phone chose that moment to ring, so I signed my name and home country (Louise, Australia) five times and then waited. The little boy in front seemed the boldest. He started to recite, and the others chimed in raggedly. “What is your name? Where are you from? Where have you been in Kyoto? How do you like it?” D got off the phone just in time to help me answer the last question. “Watashi wa atsui des!” he said, and we mimed fanning ourselves. It was very hot, our first sunny day this trip, and we both already had sunburnt noses.



The Pavilion itself was, well, golden. Covered in layers of gold foil, it shone brightly across a koi pond. It was impossible to take a photo without getting at least two schoolchildren in. The English pamphlet didn’t tell us much except that the temple had been re-gilt in the 1990s; Lonely Planet, however, informed us that the Pavilion had been burnt down in the 1950s by a mad obsessed monk. This wouldn’t be the first time that Lonely Planet would differ from the informational brochures.

From there we went to the next temple, where we crossed a nightingale floor in our socks to see the mid-15th century Zen garden. Nightingale floors were specially designed by paranoid nobles so they could tell when anyone was creeping up on them. At every step, the boards sigh or squeak or chirp like a bird. It was hard to hear, though, over the sound of masses of people stamping flatfooted across it. The Zen garden itself was rather dull.




Five sets of three stones were arranged in a significant pattern over a bed of smaller rocks—what pattern, no one is sure, because no one quite knows who the artist was, according to Lonely Planet. But the pamphlet we received at the temple entrance told us that the artist had actually intended you, the visitor, to use your imagination so the garden was whatever you wanted it to be. I couldn’t think of many things the little islands of rocks could represent, except maybe islands. I did like the walls around the garden, though, which were constructed from oil baked into clay. Over the years the oil had seeped out, forming strange patterns on the walls. Just around the corner from the Zen garden was a lovely, quiet, mossy lawn. As D commented, if the temple had been dedicated to the Moss Garden instead of the Zen Garden, the masses of craning people would have been perched around that abandoned side of the building instead. Farther inside the grounds, we admired a much quieter pond full of pink waterlilies.

It was almost seven when we made it home, exhausted and with aching backs and knees, and by 8 we were cleaned up and on the bus into Gion, the nightlife district. Searching for a restaurant, we got lucky, finding an upstairs one. These are easy to miss, as a gaijin (foreigner) since we are not trained to look up, and the signs advertising the restaurant are often on the second or third or fourth level of the building. Also, since you probably can’t read the sign, you are quite likely to end up in a massage parlor, knocking on someone’s apartment door or, as would happen to D a few days later, stepping out of the elevator into a hardcore porn shop.



Our restaurant had a special sale tonight and we paid less than three dollars apiece for six tapas-sized dishes, although our waitress managed to sneak past us a 300 Y cover charge and a 630 Y per person charge for the tiny salads she brought us at the beginning of the meal, unasked, much like if Olive Garden served you breadsticks and then charged you $8 per basket. After food, we managed a bus home without too much drama.

Day 7 Tuesday June 1

We were up at 6, just lying on our soft mats and listening to the bird song. We checked out at ten, discovering to our delight that the hotel would send our bags on ahead to the bus station. We were free to explore. We took the tiny, slow railcar up the mountain first, then hopped aboard the Ropeway, soaring over the treest toward Odikuwara in a gondola. Odi was just a pile of scree on the side of the volcano, where the earth was red and raw. The workers had built winding steps out of logs in the dirt. At every juncture a pipe jutted from the earth, issuing forth white steam. The smell was more powerful than in the onsen last night, and piles of powdery yellow sulphur lay here and there. The pipes, we learned, harnass the hot spring water and divert it to spas all over the region.


We climbed past lots of little shops and washed our hands at the shrine, now experts at this ritual of purification. The water pours from the mouth of a dragon or a crocodile or a lizard or a lion, and runs over the edge of a stone trough. You take the dipper in your right hand and wash your left, then use your left to wash the right. Women often take a little water in their mouths, then spit it out over the stones surrounding the fountain. Sometimes you pour some water from the dipper over a statue nearby, in this case, a seated stone Buddha.




Now we were on a windy mountain trail, the sulphur smell getting stronger. Rivulets of steaming water rushed by us on all sides. At the top a sign in English reminded us that we were now perched on a cone volcano. As we watched, a man wearing gloves and tall boots stepped into a pool of boiling water and drew out, one after the other, three big crates full of black eggs. By the side of the pool, a skinny cat sat meowing. People were lining up at the single wooden stand to buy 5 eggs for 500 yen, in a little brown paper packet. Boiled black in the waters of the mountain, each egg is supposed to add five years to your life. We cracked our eggs on the tables provided, beside dozens of other tourists doing the same thing, and ate. The peeled eggs had a slight yellowy tinge, but they tasted exactly like boiled eggs. We even had a little packet of salt. The ground and paths were all littered with eggshells, some black, others washed yellow by rain. I wondered if the cat survives on black eggs. It could be thousands of years old.



We headed back to the gondolas and continued on to Lake Ashto, arriving just in time to board the pirate ship, a colorful ferry made out to look like a square rigger. The lake was a lovely silver under the green trees, and dotted here and there by a bright red Torii gate. We disembarked at Hakone-machi and bought lunch from a vendor, a few sticks of chicken teriyaki for me and an entire squid on a stick for D.




We wandered to the north along the coast. Most of the signs were in Japanese, but we were pretty convinced we were going the right way once we entered a narrow gravel avenue lined with cedars. This lane was the original Hakone highway, dating back to 1618. Of the original cedar trees, 412 remained. The Shogun had built the highway as a military post in case his feudal lords rebelled.

The pirate ferry!



We walked around the lake as far as the Peace Torii, climbed about three hundred steps to the Shrine out of a sense of why-not, and finally returned to the bus stop.

The peace torii.



From here, it was a blurring series of bus, train, and then the 2 hour shinkansen express to Kyoto. I bought us each a soft cream on the platform, which turned out to be lucky, because our next quest for food would be a long one. We arrived in Kyoto in the dark, with a few drops of rain falling. We took the bus to our ryokan and approached the building with relief. It was only 7:30 and we were ready for a quick dinner followed by bed.

Alas, it was not to be. A map on the door of the ryokan informed us that this was just the sleeping building—to check in, we had to walk another 400 metres up the street to a different building, and we had to get there before 9, when concierge closed. D set off, leaving me with the bags. After a minute of standing there I noticed another sign, which directed us to call when we arrived in order to be let in. I picked up the telephone and called, and the man at concierge let me in. I left our bags in the lobby, shoved a copy of the map into my pocket and hurried up the street after D.

Luckily I found him about three blocks away—not three straight blocks, mind you, three windy turns away. Out little neighborhood was a maze of dark streets and D was just asking directions from a lady who was delighted to chat, but obviously had no idea where to go. I gave D the map and we continued up the street. Thankfully it was a warm night, but we were steaming with sweat and tension by the time, about forty minutes later, we found the second building back in a narrow alley near one of Kyoto’s thousands of temples. Our host was very nice, sitting us down and explaining the house rules. Then he informed us that the ryokan only accepted cash, so we handed over all of our money except for 700 Y—less than ten dollars.

We still needed dinner. All the banks, of course, closed at 9 and it was now after 8. For the next hour, we walked up and down the streets searching for an ATM that served international cards, hurrying from bank to convenience store to pachinko parlor, our cards rejected again and again. We gave up at last, knowing we had to save 440 Y for a bus to the train station in the morning, where we would certainly find an ATM. Then, we got lucky—the second restaurant we passed, Daichiri, which had a big picture of a chicken out front, accepted credit cards—with the added bonuses of an English menu and a charming waitress. We ate pork and chicken and relaxed with a beer for D and an apple cider vinegar for me. Finally, penniless and filthy, we stumbled back to our ryokan and bed.

Thank God for money and food!

Day 6: Monday May 31

We rolled out of bed at 0830 and I headed downstairs for emergency hotel searching. Some nice French ladies were using the computer next to me, and after some conversation, they gave me the name and number of the ryokan they had stayed at in Kyoto--and a good thing they did, because we called four others, and everywhere was booked--we finally managed to procure three nights at their ryokan, Roku Roku. We also managed to book a ryokan that was actually in Hakone this time. When we checked out--having reserved this ryokan for next week when we come back to Tokyo--the hostess gave us a samurai magnet. We left her some Timtams. Maybe she'll give us a room upgrade. We also raided the candy jar on our way out.

Sucking on our lollies, we hopped on the train, but not the express one--so what should have been a 30 minute ride turned into an hour and a half. We passed cemeteries perched on hillsides, with a brief fleeting view of dark ocean, little houses, factories, trees carefully shaped into perfect forms, a river, rice fields standing in water, all framed by the distant mountains, shrouded in dark gray mist.

Obento for lunch on the train.



A long bus ride from the train station saw us to our ryokan at 3. We were up in the mountains now, and everything was windy and full of hairpin turns and spaced very far from everything else, so it was too late in the day to see the sights. Instead, we dropped our bags and walked up the road in a light sprinkling of rain. Our little town seemed to consist of a single T intersection, and our ryokan was surrounded by a few other hotels, a German pub, and the Museum of the Little Prince, featuring a big bronze statue of the prince himself standing on his planet, with some volcanos and his Flower.



Nonplussed, and unwilling to pay ten bucks to enter, we turned left, walked down an alley through a Torii gate, and found ourselves in a temple devoid of the usual flocks of tourists and pilgrims. In fact, it was absolutely silent and empty, somewhat overgrown, and beyond serene.

We washed our hands first under the mouth of a stone dragon, continued past the koi pond—where a few Buddha status balanced on one toe in the water. Some very steep stairs took us up through a bamboo grove to a little shrine. On all sides there were paths, and lining the paths were about a hundred little stone statues of various gods, covered in moss, crumbling, and each with a different position and expression--happy ones, sad ones, angry ones, ones clenching fists, ones gazing up at trees, ones balancing on one foot on top of a stone pillar that went ten feet over our heads. Behind the shrine was a cemetery. In the fading light, it was the most peaceful place I have ever visited.

Me and my favorite statue.



Now quite cold, we walked back up the road and ducked into a café which turned out to be a Western style jazz bar. A row of men at the bar sat with their backs to us but kept turning around to look, and we felt a bit uncomfortable, especially when one of the waitresses kept gesturing to the couch we were perched on and muttering things to the other. Hopefully she was just saying “don’t forget to tell them we’re out of Oolong” but I still felt very self-conscious. We awkwardly drank our cups of coffee and hot chocolate—D had a bowl of sweet bean soup—and left. D surmised that the men, some of whom were dressed quite nicely, could have been yakuza—J mafia. D accidentally overpaid by a few yen and as we headed down the street afterward, our waitress chased us, shouting and waving the coins.

And let's not forget the domestic sausage shop.


We returned to our ryokan. We had reserved the onsen (hot spring baths) for 7 p.m. and at 6:55 were inside. The ritual with the hot spring bath is very particular. First, you sit in a cubicle on a little plastic stool which fills with water, and wash yourself from a tap or showerhead—completely, making sure all the soap is off. Then you put on your yukata, a stripey bathrobe, with an obi, belt, and sandals and walk to the onsen, where you disrobe and slowly lower yourself into the water chanting “Atsui, atsui…” Hot, hot! The water is whitish with minerals and a bit slimy. Some onsen are just a tiny wooden house built over a pool in the spring; some are big, single-sex public baths where the water is channeled in. Luckily ours were private. The water was pleasant at first, and you could just about float on top of it. After twenty minutes, though, I could feel myself sweating into the water, climbed out, washed again in my cubicle and met D at the exit. Now thoroughly relaxed, and smelling strongly of sulphur, we were asleep before 9.

A quick comment on the ryokans here. In a ryokan, or Japanese style hotel, the bed is a roll-up mat that sits on the floor. The floor is tatami, or reed, mat, some of the walls are wood and some, like the one leading to the bathroom, are paper. You take off your shoes and leave them at the entrance to the ryokan, the equivalent of the “lobby” or concierge, so as not to walk on the tatami in outside shoes. When I first heard that the floor was made of reeds, I was thinking ancient Rome—a few rushes spread across a dirt floor. Definitely not. The mats are extremely thick and look and feel almost like plastic, with woven bits of cloth to attach them at the corners that Japanese mothers tell their children not to walk on, lest the samurai under the house thrust his sword between the cracks to try to get your feet—a clever ploy which probably originally was intended to stop people walking on the more delicate cloth parts of the floor. You can’t make out the individual reeds, but you can smell them—a sweet, dry smell that permeates your clothes after a while. Most of the toilets are squat toilets, but if you want a Western one, you can usually find it. The ryokan room also usually comes with extra blankets for your futons, yukatas for each person, and pair of bathroom sandals to be worn only in the bathroom. It has an alcove along one wall which is reserved for the gods and usually has a decoration, a little statue of a god, or a hanging tapestry.

The Food Interlude (somewhere between Days 4 and 5)

A quick note here about Japanese food. At this point we've been eating Japanese for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and I am thoroughly sick of it already. Some of you may remember that the first time I had a full Japanese meal was in Hong Kong last year, and it may not have been a direct consequence, but I threw up that meal along with everything else I tried to eat for the rest of that weekend. I hadn't had Japanese food after that until this year, when D started getting me used to it by taking me to J restaurants and feeding me bits here and there. So I thought I was ready to go on the trip, but it started out badly on the plane when I ordered the Japanese meal from Qantas (pork on rice) and about four hours later, for the first time in my life had to use the airplane sick bag. I recovered by the time we arrived, but here we are four days later and I believe Japanese for every meal is getting to me.

We've been having yakitori almost every day for lunch or dinner because we don't know what else to order--and that's just lumps of meat grilled on skewers, usually extremely fatty, or some fried chicken on rice, or fried pork with curry sauce. And since that first day, we haven't found a decent noodle shop, so for almost every lunch we slurp down a bowl of sub-par salty soup with a few tasteless noodles and a bit of pork floating in it. As for vegetables, I have never liked tempura anyway, which is one of the only ways you get vegetables here--battered and fried. They say it's a "light" oil but I am not sure what that means, it still feels greasy to me, and I make a lot of people stare by peeling the fried bits off the veg.

Now, I'm not saying that a lot of this isn't our fault--we don't know which local restaurants are good, and we can't read the menus a lot of the time so our selection is limited. Also, sushi is supposed to be pretty good for you--fresh vegetables and fish--but I don't eat it, which is my own problem, and is causing D great pain. But, my worst problem is with breakfast. I knew I was in for it on the first day when the hotel fed us fried chicken bits for breakfast, and the second day, when we didn't get out the door til after 10 and D suggested we go to a restaurant for a Japanese breakfast consisting of noodles and--you guessed it--fried chicken. At home, I eat muesli with fruit and yoghurt for breakfast every single day, with oatmeal some days to mix things up. And I have an apple a day around 10:30, which here, is Not An Option. A tray of cherries we bought--maybe half a pint--set us back twelve dollars US. An apple I paid three bucks for was obviously imported--most of their fruit is--and turned out acidic and mushy. So with fried chicken and noodles for lunch and fried pork for dinner every single day, my system was Not Happy.

Around Day 3 we got in the habit of going to a bakery every day. The bakery offered a bit of familiar food, usually something with fruit in it--strawberry jam in a roll, or an apple tart--different, and filling enough to keep me going through the next salty, greasy fried meal.

Also a note on the bakeries--bakeries seem to be to Japan what diners are to the US and cafes are to Australia. There are thousands. You can buy custard puffs at Beard Papa's (now officially my favorite bakery chain EVER), boxes and boxes of donuts at Krispy Kreme (there were lines out the doors of every KK store we saw--and young, fashionable women walking around swinging bags of them like Gucci purses), crepes filled with ice cream and fake cream from roadside stands in all the shopping districts--sometimes one per block, roadside stands specialising in freshly made Belgian waffles covered in chocolate sauce, and croissants, savory buns, sweet lemon tarts, and roll cakes just about everywhere. The traditional red bean paste dessert is still popular as well, but now it comes not only in mochi (pounded glutinous rice, NOT my favorite) but also between pancakes, in what are most likely increasing sizes, and frequently accompanied by green tea-flavoured "soft cream" (soft serve ice cream).

D is convinced, for some reason, that the food here is super healthy. But he also keeps commenting on how many more chubby Japanese there are now than there were when he used to live here. Not fat, but chubby in the way a naturally skinny person who eats poorly puts on weight in strange places. It's also obvious why. Pastries are all the rage in Japan. And then there are the dozens of hamburger chains. I would have thought hamburgers would be hard to find, or at least unpopular in Japan...wrong. Aside from the ubiquitous McDonald's, there were Lotteria burgers (including the infamous 7-patty burger!!!), Mos burger, something called Freshness Burger, and ads for Wagyu Beef burgers just about everywhere.



Anyway, the point is, you take some skinny people who just eat rice, meat, and veg, and introduce Krispy Kreme--no wonder they're getting taller, and wider as well. And no wonder my system is unhappy. By the end of the trip I would be ordering potato wedges and Western style salads whenever I could find them on the menu, just for some familiarity, and some greens. Luckily for Darryl, who has to share a bathroom with me, he lets me.

Day 5: Sunday May 30

Sunday was another rainy day, and our last in Tokyo for a week. I was up at 0745 and plugging away on the Internet downstairs to find ryokans in Kyoto and Hakone, our next stops. We didn't reach Harajuku, our destination for the day, until noon. Harajuku was probably the Japan destination I had most been looking forward to. Every Sunday, all the kids, businessmen, and other people who are too busy studying or working during the week, get dressed up in drag or as their favorite anime characters or as blond Western girls or in other extravagant costumes, and parade around the square, apparently to let off their tension.

The sky was a threatening dark gray tinged with yellow. We walked around the park and bridges, but didn’t see the anticipated costumes, and then we overheard a woman explaining to another disappointed Gaijin (foreigner) that there was another cosplay event today--probably most people were there.

Luckily, we did see this sign, which we enjoyed.




Still, disappointed, we wandered the narrow shopping aisles, which were still packed with people, bought bento boxes from a 7/11 for lunch and ate them perched on a railing in an alley full of Western style shops.



We hopped the subway to nearby Shibuya, bought a few more things at Tokyu Hands and continued the days-old fruitless search for a warm fleece for D. Back at Harajuku later in the afternoon, hoping there were a few more people around, we headed to the park. Darryl bought takoyaki, or balls of fried octopus, from row of little stands like hotdog stands. There were indeed a few more people around, girls in long jackets with bandages on their faces, a Rockabilly collection of men with Elvis hair and leather jackets and women in poodle skirts, girls dressed like schoolgirls posing for cameras. One very tall costumed person was obviously a man, dressed all in pink, with a tail and a Noh mask covering his face. We were too creeped out to take a photo of him.








We reenergized with chocolate banana croissants at a place called Choc Cro, rested our aching feet and walked to the next subway stop, Omotesando. Here, in front of a fancy facade called Diamond Hall, we met D’s old friend and former English student, Hiroko. A lovely, smiley woman, she bought us a rather expensive dinner. The best part was my fresh lemon squash, which was totally unsweetened but came with a little silver teapot of sugar syrup so you could pour in as much as you liked.



We thanked Hiroko and made plans to meet again the next week, then D and I headed for Akihabara again, in search of more camera gear for him. Then we realised we were completely out of cash. We wasted a good forty minutes in a fruitless search for an ATM that took international cards. At home by 2030, we settled down to figure out how to get to the ryokan in Hakone I had booked for the next day. After some confused searching, we realised that the ryokan--which was a dreamy, enormous resort deep in the mountains--was, in fact, located on the southern island of Japan. Needless to say, we could have reached it only by about six hours on the train. Thankfully they hadn't taken a credit card deposit, but we were still up til midnight searching for another.

Just for fun, check out how beautiful this ryokan is that I had booked for us: HYPERLINK "http://www.japaneseguesthouses.com/db/kurokawa/sanga.htm" \t "_blank" http://www.japaneseguesthouses.com/db/kurokawa/sanga.htm