Fuji and Hakone

I’ve got a 2.5 hour train ride from Tokyo to Kyoto, so I’m going to see if I can’t knock out the blog posts for my daytrips on the way (after the fact editing: NOPE. Got one long and one short post written, then the little writing monkey in my brain decided to take a nap, so I read my guidebook a bit).

First up was a day trip Sunday to Mt. Fuji, followed by a trip to the nearby town of Hakone. I actually did a guided tour for this one, and made this tour through japanican.com. Honestly, it was really disappointing, though not really because of the company. I’ll get to that later.

I got up and hauled myself back to Roppongi to the pickup point at the ANA Interncontinental Hotel (a much much swankier place than anywhere I’m staying), which was just a few blocks from my first hotel. I milled about the lobby a bit before getting picked up and put on a shuttle bus that made a few more stops to pick up everyone else before dropping us off at the tour bus center.

This part was frustrating, as it took me two over hours of travel from when I left my hotel to when we got on the bus that was actually taking us to Fuji. The bus terminal we departed from was also just a mess. There were huge crowds milling about looking for their tour without a whole lot of info on where to go. I’m mildly anal about knowing where I’m going in foreign countries, so I pinned our herder down as soon as we were off the bus, and managed to get in the correct line fairly quickly, but I saw lots of folks looking lost.

Once we were on our bus, we met our guide Marie, who was actually one of the highlights of the trip. Marie is from Osaka, and where Tokyoites have a reputation for formality and being business-like, Osakans are known as friendly and kinda in your face—in a good way. After a week of black suits and stoic faces on the subway, Marie—with her floppy hat and rubber ducky on a stick—was like a double-barrel blast of cheerful straight to the face. She cracked jokes, spent most of the trip laughing at one thing or another, and was incredibly helpful and friendly. I found out later that she used to work at IBM, but got tired of the rat race there and wanted to do something where she interacted with people more.

Once on the bus we were told that on the weekends, the advertised 1.5 hour ride to Fuji didn’t apply. It can be anywhere from 2-4 hours one-way, depending on traffic, and, depending on when we got there, they’d cut things from the trip that we didn’t have time for. It was particularly annoying, as we weren’t sure what we’d be able to do until we were pretty much at Fuji. As it turns out, our trip was only 2.5 hours, so they only had to cut the Fuji visitor center (which I wasn’t particularly chuffed about). Still, it was really frustrating not knowing what we’d actually be doing that day (at times it sound like we could possibly just get there, see the mountain, eat, and come back).

What Fuji looked like from Station 1.

On top of the uncertainty was the fact that the spring weather is really unpredictable and, despite the fact Tokyo was bright and sunny, the area around the mountain was really hazy. We could sorta see the mountain once we got near enough to it, but photos just flat out weren’t turning out. Even at the first station on the climb up the mountain (which was as much of a mess as the bus terminal we left from), we could just barely see the mountain against a bright white backdrop. I actually got a better view while on the train from Tokyo to Kyoto.

Once we left the mountain, we went to a nearby hotel for a bento box lunch, which was actually quite tasty. I

With some post-processing you can at least see
 the mountain here.

was annoyed, though, with the way they seated us. Families got tables all to themselves, which makes total sense, but so did people on their own (like me). This meant a healthy portion of the group was sitting at tables on their own, eating in silence, which was frustrating. I finished lighting fast because of this, and went meandering through the gift shop. The area around Mt. Fuji is the ONLY area in Japan that makes wine, and it only started in the past decade or so, so I grabbed a bottle to help support them. Also got a Fuji-shaped box of candy for the kitsch factor.

After that, we shipped off to Hakone, a small town on the shore of Lake Ashi in the dormant crater of Mt. Hakone. We took a cable car up the ridge, where we got a fairly nice view of the area, though the haze—again—kept us from seeing too well. It was frigid cold on the ridge and the air was surprisingly thin (I felt fine, if a little light headed, but a couple of folks actually

Traditional boat on Lake Ashi from the Hakone rim. We didn't ride on this
boat. We rode on an exceedingly ordinary one.

started getting chest pains and went back down immediately), so I went down after grabbing a couple of panoramas. I shopped around the village a bit and bought a couple souvenirs, then everyone met up to go on a spectacularly boring cruise across Lake Ashi. The interesting points were obscured either by the haze or the treeline, so I just chatted with folks on the boat (particularly Stephanie, a French-by-way-of-Australia accountant who was on a vacation around east Asia before moving back to France to try to become an airline stewardess).

At the end of the cruise, Marie was again the highlight of the ride as she somehow talked the boat captain into letting her use the microphone. After the captain’s rehearsed, mumbled announcement in Japanese about arriving, we heard Marie pipe in in English, “And if you want to use the bathroom, this is last chance before Tokyo!” After disembarking, Marie went running through a gift shop to the candy section and excitedly pointed out that the store sold wasabi-flavored kit kats and to hurry and get some because we only had a few minutes to catch the train but this was the only town in the world you could buy them and she’d tell the driver to wait on us but hurry! I’m sure the store owner was confused when he sold 20-30 boxes of kit kats over the course of five minutes. They weren’t bad actually!

Anyway, back on the bus, if only for a few minutes. We caught our bullet train (my first time on one) back to Tokyo Station, and Marie explained how the train system worked (which was nice for me; I was taking trains for the rest of my day trips and wasn’t sure how the tickets worked). I grabbed the metro home, grabbed some curry at the Indian place near my hotel (I was craving something spicy), and went to bed.

All in all I don’t really regret going on the trip (I’d have felt bad if I didn’t at least ATTEMPT to see Mt. Fuji), but it just didn’t feel like a good use of a day. We didn’t see anything particularly exciting, and all in all, we were on buses and transit in the middle of nowhere for something like 8 hours of the day (counting metros to and from the pickup/drop off there). It might’ve been worth it had we been able to see Fuji, but as it was, I really can’t recommend anything about it other than Marie. If I’d taken the trip in the summer on a weekday, maybe, but I pretty much just chalked the day up as a loss.