Hakone Trip Part One

I haven’t been out of Gunma since I went to the Snow Festival in Hokkaido in February. I haven’t been out of the greater Takasaki area since then, either, except for the one afternoon I went to Isesaki a few weeks ago. So when school let out on March 25 and I had one long glorious week of nothingness ahead of me, I was anxious to get out and go somewhere like everyone else was.

Of course, going requires planning, and going requires money, and going requires taking vacation time from work, and my stores were fairly low in all of those departments. So I called up my friend M from Chiba (whom I haven’t seen in five months) and asked him if he had any plans that didn’t require too much. Luckily, he loves to plan, and in less than a week’s time had made all the arrangements to spend a three-day weekend in Hakone, Kanagawa Prefecture. Now I knew about as much about Hakone as I do about quantum physics, but I heard mountains, view of Mount Fuji, and Free Travel Pass and immediately was interested. I made it through the week at school and the B.O.E., and began my travels on Friday morning. 

FRIDAY

I remember a newspaper article my dad wrote years ago called  Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (or some variation on that title), about the time he went to St. Louis, MO using different transportation systems. I kept thinking about that article throughout the day, as I walked the quarter mile to the bus stop, took the bus to Takasaki Station, a train to Tokyo, a train to Odawara, and a bus to the youth hostel we were staying it. The road is neverending and takes you anywhere you want to go!

I didn’t do all of these routes altogether, though; the trip was broken up into parts. I met M outside of Shinjuku Station around noon. After a quick stop at the travel agency, we had lunch at a Mexican Restaurant called El Torito in Shinjuku. The place was decked out with tile walls, the huge mural of a woman making tortillas that is in every Mexican restaurant north of the border, a Mexican flag, and Corona advertisements. For just a second I was back in the U.S., despite the fact that M and I were the only two non-Japanese there.

But oh, Mexican food, how I love thee! I had vegetable soup, Mexican rice, a hard taco, a burrito, and a quesadilla! It was the first time I had had real Mexican—“real Mexican”/Tex-Mex—since coming to Japan. (Yes, there is Tio Tia in Takasaki, but they don’t use cheese in any of their dishes.) I savored every bite I took. 

After that delicious lunch, we walked across the way and into the open doors of Krispy Kreme, where we bought five doughnuts for the two of us. I had a plain glazed, a chocolate glazed, and a crème-filled chocolate glazed which I ate together with a cup of Krispy Kreme coffee. I thought, perched outside on a low wall soaking in the sun and eating this dessert, that perhaps this is what heaven is like: Mexican food, Krispy Kreme, and a soft warm April day.

M and I finished our food and headed back to Shinjuku to catch the Odakyu train to Odawara, a city about 80 kilometers southwest of Tokyo. We asked at Shinjuku Station about the fabled “free pass”—you pay about 5,000 yen  (~$50) for the pass and all your travel for the weekend is free. However, the Shinjuku man told us they didn’t have it, so we asked again once we arrived in Odawara. The helpful English-speaking woman there told us the same thing. Because of the earthquake and less travel/demand, sales of the free pass were being suspended. “Usually you pay 5,000 yen for travel around the area,” she explained. “But since you don’t have the free pass, you’ll pay about 6,500 or 7,000 yen.” Oh. Thanks for telling me how much money I’m losing. We might even have spent more than that—the weekend was full of train and bus rides all over the area—I don’t even want to know how much I spent on fares.

Shrugging it aside—because what else could we do—we left the station in search of Odawara Castle. 

 

Only a few minutes’ walk from the station, it gave off exactly the opposite impression that an English castle does. Now I’ve never been to England, but I’ve seen pictures of huge, imposing stone structures surrounded by a moat on a grassy knoll. This Japanese castle looked more like a work of architectural art more than a defense structure. All I could do was gape open-mouthed and say, “Wow, wow, wow.”

We couldn’t go in because it was already 4:45, so we went back to the station and got on a bus that would take us 30 minutes up into the mountains to where we’d be staying. The bus dropped us off just a few hundred feet from the youth hostel at around 7:00. It was a large wooden building with a low ceiling and minimal carpeting. Two hallways met in an L-shape, with plain brown wooden doors on either side. The big dining room had two long tables with wooden chairs around it, an electric piano, a bookcase of brochures in multiple languages, and a small collection of English-language books, including The Little Prince by St. Exupery. [The Little Prince Museum was just down the street, although we didn't go.] Our room was at the top of the L, away from the reception desk, and right across the hall from the men’s bathroom and a pair of sinks. The room was Japanese-style: tatami flooring, sliding paper screens over the window, and a closet full of amazingly comfortable futons and duvets. 

That night, we walked to a nearby Indian restaurant and feasted on mutton and chicken curry with a 2-foot long piece of nan, served by a an authentic Indian man who spoke English. (At least, I think he was Indian. He might have been Bangladeshi. I didn’t ask.) It was a relatively expensive meal (2500 yen about) but I discovered that most things in that area were. Hakone, far from being the hippie, hiker place I thought it was, was more a mountain resort town for wealthy Tokyo-ites: in three days, I saw two Porsches, a Lamborghini, two Ferraris, some nice Audis, and another famous car whose name I forget.

We made Friday an early night; Saturday was hiking day, and started at 6:00 a.m.