I woke up fairly early this morning (okay, after Kaoru and her parents but it’s pretty hard to beat them!). I got dressed, finalised packing and wend downstairs for a quick breakfast, and we were out the door by 7.40. Kaoru had decided that we would have trouble getting on crowded trains with our backpacks, and that we would be better off getting a taxi to Tokyo station; so we started walking to Nishikasai station, and found a taxi pretty quickly.
It cost just over 3,000 yen, and we had a good run – very little traffic. Which was surprising. We got to the station with 7 minutes to spare. We found our tour director (not Kaoru this time!!!) and found we were the youngest in the group. This is something getting rarer and rarer for me these days, so it’s quite nice for a change! At 8.30 we walked in our group to a quiet area, and were given a briefing, before catching a 9.04 Shinkansen. While waiting for our train to arrive, we saw a double decker Shinkansen, which I had never seen before.
We got off the train about 10:45, where we changed for a bus. It was still quite warm, which was a surprise, as we were definately getting up in the hills. A lot of the trip here was through tunnels. The bus took about 2 hours, and the last hour we had a beautiful view of snow capped mountains, and there was snow on the side of the road. Eventually we reached the end of the line.
About 15 minutes later we caught an electric (trolley) bus to our next stop, where we got a cable car, ropeway, and another trolley bus, and *finally* made it to Tateyama Hotel about 3.00. We had about 15 – 30 minutes at each stop to look around – this included crossing a dam, and several observation towers.
After a briefing (which I didn’t catch a word of), we were given our room key and finally took a load off. But time-was-a-passing….so we went outside for a bit of a walk around the area in the snow and took some photos. At 5.00 we met up with everybody else from the hotel, as the ‘day trippers’ had all left, and were able to walk through the snow wall by ourselves. This was amazing! It was ~19 foot high in places – vertical. The sun was out and I was in a T-shirt, with lots of warm gear in my backpack just in case.
We had about a 45 minute round trip through the snow wall. Then it was time for dinner. We were taken in to the restaurant and enjoyed a fine meal of….well, you know Japanese food! Lots of tasty things! The newest for me was the Firefly Squid – whole. Very interesting taste.
After dinner we had a bath to warm up, and then decided to go outside and check out the stars – there was a group viewing but we decided to go by ourselves as I wouldn’t have understood them anyway! The snow covered mountains lite up by the half full moon were beautiful, but it was very bright – we even had shadows as we walked! So the stars weren’t as impressive as we were hoping, but the view made up for it. This was also a test of whether we had brought enough warm clothes. Tomorrow morning would be even colder so we needed to find out how we were going. I think we’ll be OK.
A drink up on the 5th floor lounge wrapped up the evening. We were both very tired – while we hadn’t done a lot (other than sitting and changing modes of transportation), it had been a long day.