10. Takayama to the end of the trip

The snowy Japanese Alps from Takayama

Hida Kokubunji Temple,
Takayama

We were headed for Takayama for reasons which I can’t remember now but would doubtless have been to do with old houses and temples.   Heather had managed to get us a town centre hotel with parking, for some way under our target budget figure.  So, top marks there.  After the snow of yesterday which fell as rain lower down, we awoke the following morning to a brilliant crisp day with now, snow-capped mountains all around.   Takayama turned out to be an attractive town in that it wasn’t all high rise.  It had a museum of reconstructed houses and other buildings a mile or so from the city centre which we decided had to be visited.  Despite having a car we walked to the museum and as we climbed the hill to it, the whole vista of snowy mountains opened up behind us.   This town is also noted for a neighbourhood of old private houses which we visited along with a couple of million other tourists.  I don’t think I’ve mentioned that everywhere In Japan that there’s a pool of water, there are ornamental carp, Koi in Japanese.  They’re usually big, between a foot and two feet long, sometimes bigger and here in Takayama they swim freely in the river, looking for all the world like giant goldfish. 

The Great Bell in the Folk Village

Money, credit cards and documents tend not to be passed from hand to hand in Japan but via a small tray.  You put your money etc. in the tray, the other person takes it and returns change etc. in the same tray.  The tray, and money if it is passed directly is with both hands.  Oh, and drink vending machines are everywhere, and I mean everywhere.  The places you would expect like outside shops or in stations of course but here standing in the street or even the countryside outside houses.  They have hot and cold drinks and are lit up 24 hours a day.  The Japanese are not big on environmental issues despite the odd mention in hotels and multiple plastic bags are used at every opportunity

With another attractive old town a few miles away we decided to extend our stay to three nights and drove off to Hida, a town almost totally destroyed in a fire in the early twentieth century.  Hida has a pleasantly calm atmosphere and was well worth going to.   It had what they called a canal running through the town but it was really a fast flowing walled stream only about six feet wide.  However, there were big Koi everywhere in it.  According to the notices, a thousand of them which are all removed in the winter and spend until the following spring in ponds.  This is a town which has one of the annual parades which Japan is famous for with extravagantly decorated floats.  These floats have a base about 8 feet wide and twice that in depth and they stand about twenty feet high.  Each has puppets controlled by puppet-masters (as they call them) and from the film we saw it would be really something to see the parade actually taking place.  In the museum displaying three of the floats (temperature and humidity controlled environments for the floats).  One of the floats had been destroyed in a fire in the late nineteenth century and a temporary one labelled ‘leave of absence’ appears in its place each year.  They play the long-game here.

the special Coffee Shop

Hida was where we had one of those unforgettable experiences 
that crop up from time to time.  Fancying a coffee and seeing a place marked on our map, we ducked under the standard half curtain over the door with a Trip Advisor sign on it and realised that it was not a coffee shop but a private house.  Before we could run for it, the owner appeared and it was indeed a place for coffee.  It was a really lovely traditional Japanese House with Tatami mats, delicate wood and paper screens, antique lacquerware and a small courtyard garden.  Having taken off our boots we were ushered to a small table next to a window by the garden and while we ordered, our hostess sat on her heels at our feet.  When it arrived it was served, again from a kneeling position with great ceremony, the cake forks for the cheesecake (delicious) were carefully placed at the right angle on the plate before being put in front of us.  The coffee (also delicious) and the pot were similarly carefully placed.  I think the kneeling is something to do with keeping your head below that of guests to show respect.  She explained that the cups and saucers were 150 years old and the plates were 200 years old.  So no worries there then.  It turned out that the place doubled as a

Silver !

sort of museum and the coffee and cake was the most expensive I’d ever had – but worth it.  As we were leaving and being carefully shown out, Heather noticed a certificate on a stand.   Our host had, for the first time, entered some marmalade in the International Marmalade Awards in Cumbria in 2017 and got a Silver.

On the day we’re due to leave Takayama, it’s cold and wet and rather than just drive to Nagoya and get to our hotel earlier, we decide to go the highly praised Glass Museum.  They advertise that they have their own London Bus to ferry visitors from the station.  Well, it is a Red Bus but it certainly was never a London Bus.  The museum itself is a wonderfully designed modern building of concrete and glass with large shallow pools of water on a bed of potato sized pebbles under only a couple of inches of water.  The pools run right up to the walls of the building.  Inside there were some fabulous pieces of work.  A lot by Lalique and Tiffany, one by Chihuly and lots of other great pieces by glassmakers I’d not heard of.  They also had a whole Charles Rennie Macintosh dining room set up and I have to say the whole thing was set in a most unexpected location for what seemed to be a world class collection.  Oh, and on this cold, wet day we were the only visitors.

Takayama

We’re turning for home really and drive south from the Alps towards Nagoya on this wet and gloomy day.  It turned out to be a very atmospheric ride through the very hilly and autumnal coloured forested countryside with mist oozing from the woods high above us.  Very muted colours in thus weather but impressive nonetheless.  I’ve written about the speed of the trains here and that is just highlighted by how slow driving is.  On the equivalent of Motorways or Interstate Highways the speed limit is 80.  But that’s kilometres not miles per hour, so 50 mph on the fastest roads.  Occasionally on others the limit is 40 mph but almost everywhere even in completely empty countryside the limit is 30 mph so the average journey time turns out to be about 20 mph.  In quite a few towns the limit drops to 25 mph and sometimes as low as 18 mph.  It can get very tedious and it is difficult to keep the speed down.  For our time in the Alps we had a Hybrid Honda, running on petrol but pushing power from the engine and braking into a battery system for efficiency.  We got over 68 mpg with quite a lot of mountain driving so I think that is pretty efficient.

There are only a couple of days left when Heather realises that we’re leaving from a different Tokyo airport than the one we arrived at.  Very fortunate too, we would never have had time to get from one to the other in time if we had gone to the wrong one.  It really has been a great trip, a very different and fascinating culture, city centres to wonder at and really lovely people.   We just wonder how many Japanese tourists are on their way home thinking "I could just murder a nice bit of raw fish and some seaweed".

So we drop the car and leave Nagoya for Tokyo on our last Shinkansen ride, this time we’ve paid directly for the tickets because our Rail Passes ran out a week ago and we’re on the Nozomi.  This is the same rolling stock as the others but the fastest ride with fewer stops.  Before we came to Japan we thought that the bullet trains would be reasonably uncommon but they certainly are not.  While we’re waiting for our Shinkansen ‘Nozomi’ to arrive we just check the board and find that there are twelve an hour going just from Nagoya to Tokyo.  The bullet trains have either eight or sixteen carriages, each of which carries a hundred sitting passengers.  They still have the same voices doing the messages though, with one woman sounding exactly like a breathless Marilyn Monroe impersonator.  You half expect an announcement to end “bo bo di bo”.  With two stops included, our Nozomi averaged a bit over 122 mph.  We’re in our left hand side booked seats and as we power out of a tunnel at 125 mph or so, there, there on our left is the iconic snow-capped cone of Mount Fuji !  Looking much closer than we expected and with a cloud free summit it really is very impressive.  As we speed past, the clouds drift in and obscure the entire mountain so if the train had been one minute later we would never have known it was there. 

Bunce luck holds again !

Mount Fuji hiding behind a bridge

STOP PRESS !

As we sit in Munich airport with a delay announced for our connecting flight we check the news on the BBC to find a story about the good ol’ bullet train.   Management of one train company (there are a number running different services) have apologised “for any inconvenience caused” because a Tokyo to Tsukuba Shinkansen train left at 09.44.20 instead of 09.44.40.  Twenty seconds early !  No passengers had complained.