9. Heading for the hills, well The Alps

Autumnal Acer, Ginkgo and a Japanese sky

As we headed north out of Nagoya we were aiming for a traditional Japanese Hotel for a couple of nights.  Navigating is difficult with many signs only in Japanese but we had been told when we got our first car in what seems like an age ago on Hokkaido, that if we put in the phone number of our destination in the satnav, we would get directions.  An English sat nav by the way means that directions are spoken in English, places on the screen are still in Japanese script.  Anyway the phone number solved it for us and when we had no real destination we’d just key in the number of the Tourist Office which worked just fine.  We’d still back this up with the best map we could find which was often somewhat useless. 

Anyway, thanks to phone number and satnav we arrived at a remote location with a big curved fronted hotel lobby and a reception that was the usual warm one by a receptionist who didn’t have one word of English.  Even I know three Japanese words.  A couple of younger Japanese women did

Our room at Iwasuso Hotel

speak enough English for us and all the staff were wonderfully friendly.  When we arrived we were offered refreshment, tea (hot or cold), a couple of different coffees, a soft drink or a whisky.  When we left we were offered the same while our bill was prepared.   The traditional room is minimalist to the point of being bare.  There’s a small lobby where shoes are changed for slippers, a lavatory with lavatory slippers and a washing area.  The living room/bedroom had a built in cupboard, a wide window sill which could be sat on, a couple of cushions and a three foot square table about fifteen inches high.  The floor was covered in tatami which are half inch thick woven rush mats.   That’s it.  The cupboard contained all the bedding, which while I was off leaving dinner mysteriously arranged itself as a bed on the floor.  In the morning, the staff pack it all away again which is an awful lot of work.  The appeal wasn’t just to stay in a traditional hotel (and I found it as uncomfortable as it sounds) but the various onsens available.  There were two public ones, men’s and women’s, a private indoor one and a partly outdoor one which had to be booked.  It was so hot, I swear you could have boiled an egg in the partly outdoor onsen and had I had an egg, I would have, I was starving.   Our stay was all rather delightful, apart from the food and being so uncomfortable but that’s our fault, this was a traditional Japanese hotel and I’m a westerner unused to it.

Not enjoying dinner
as much as I seem to be 

Well, I can’t take Japanese food but I can leave it and I do try to avoid it if I can.  I have given some of it a good try and even Heather says she’s been impressed at times but no, not for me.  A lot of the vegetable bits I find just don’t really taste of much and the fishy bits for every meal of the day don’t appeal any more than noodles slopping about in a meat or fish stock.  What has got me through are the occasional Italian or even Indian Restaurants although they take after the Japanese style of having a few bits in a soup so that a curry is mainly sauce.   The best meals have been some of the hotel restaurant buffets which usually offer a mix of Japanese and western food and are very good value especially at lunchtime when prices are invariably lower.  I confess to packing away a few currant buns, well quite a few actually, from the odd bakery we’ve come across.  What is noticeably lacking here are dairy products and on the very rare occasions when we’ve seen cheese in the shops it is astoundingly expensive.  In fact in our journey around Japan, which if you’ve read the previous blogs you’ll know has been extensive, we’ve seen very few farm animals at all.  Some horses, a few goats and cows but no pigs, sheep or poultry.  I include horses here because we have seen horsemeat on menus, sometimes raw !   So I expect to come home a little lighter but not much.  In the traditional Japanese hotel I mentioned above we met a delightful lady called Judy who lives on Vancouver Island and visits Japan regularly.  She has an Englishman friend who has lived and worked in Japan for 35 years and who still has an aversion for (in his words) “all that slippery, slimy stuff”.  A perfect summary if you ask me.

part of the paved Post Route

The biggest attraction in the area is walking part of one of the old post roads, much of which are now National Highways but in this area some sections still exist as stone topped track.  We started at Magome and at Judy’s suggestion walked in the less favoured direction away from the village.  One of the joys of travelling as we do is, for us that we can meet someone, learn something and change our plans.  Just before we left our car after arriving at Magome, four coachloads of people were heading  the ‘normal’ way into the narrow street.  Our route was almost deserted and ran through a lightly farmed area and then onto paved path through woodland.  It was the first proper walk we’d had and it was lovely.  Back at Magome, the crowds were still around this old narrow village when we got back.  The path through was pedestrian only and it was inevitably aimed at tourists but it was pretty discreetly done.  It was a very attractive place with views of the distant mountains shrouded in light mist while we ambled about in the sunshine.

Magome

In an idle moment I checked the various latitudes we were at against other parts of the world (well, doesn’t everyone do that ?) so I could put Japan into positional context as it were.  So for your information, at Sapporo which is almost as far north as we went, we were on the same latitude as Nice and Montpelier, Vermont.  In Kagoshima, almost our southernmost point we on the same latitude as Marrakech and El Paso, New Mexico.   It gets so cold here in the winter because of the NW winds from Siberia and the mass of ice flowing out of the Russian rivers.  It never ceases to amaze me that despite being so far north, how warm we are in the UK because of the North Atlantic Drift of warm water.

along the Post Route

I’ve previously mentioned how small many of the hotel rooms are and it means that our experiences of motorhoming come in very handy.  Our mantra is “a tidy van is a happy van” and the same goes for the hotel rooms.  As it happens I rarely unpack more than the absolute minimum anyway on the basis that if you don’t unpack it you can’t leave it behind.  I don’t need hangers or cupboard space, just enough room to lay my bag on the floor.  Heather does unpack more than me but really not that much more although hangers are usually utilised.

As a nation the Japanese seem to be a quiet people, voices are kept low, I doubt I heard anyone shout in our whole six weeks and a car horn is used very rarely.  People talk quietly on mobile phones and in trains they will leave their seats and stand between coaches in the corridor to make or take a call.  To counter this though is the general noise level.  There’s the usual bing-bong we’re used to when a lift arrives and so on but everywhere we go there are jingles being played, even sometimes when we’re walking round a garden they will be speakers playing something.   In the Glover garden in Nagasaki it was what sounded like an Irish Pub band fiddling away.  At pedestrian crossings too, music is often played when it’s time to cross.  In one town it was “coming through the rye” !   Early on we heard birds in many stations and then realised it was a recording playing all the time.   Now in mid-November, it was Christmassy songs on an endless loop playing in the streets.

Incidentally, the Glover Garden mentioned above is on a hill and a series of travellators took you to the top so that you could gently walk down.

Well, we’re in the Japanese Alps and want to see some snow and mountains and fortunately there are some in the way of where we want to go next.  The cable car we’re headed for closes in mid-November so we don’t know if it is still running.  As we drive upwards we do start to leave autumn behind and we have seen some fantastic colour at various times all over Japan.  Climbing further we start to be convinced that the cable car has finished because the road looks less used and we don’t see any other traffic.  Well, hey ho, let’s carry on anyway.  We see mist rolling in from one viewpoint and then just as we reach the yes, closed cable car it starts to snow.  It wasn’t mist after all.  Coming down a different way the Satnav wasn’t as clear as you might wish in such circumstances but eventually we got to where we wanted to be.  At one point we realised that we hadn’t seen another vehicle for an hour and a half.

part of the garden at Iwasuso Hotel