Mount Fuji & Hakone

So Jen Em and I went on a little two-day trip to Mount Fuji and Hakone. This trip was actually a guided tour, organized by JTB. The tours in this series are only for foreigners, and they are a really great deal. You can also use the tour to get the transport and hotel, but skip the guided part.

Anyway, we opted for the guide. We left Tokyo at 9am on Thursday and drove to Mount Fuji. It was actually clear and we saw the mountain! We even got to drive up as far as the road goes – it was very cold there!

After Mount Fuji and lunch, the tour headed for Hakone and Lake Ashi. We took a brief (and cold) boat ride and then a longer (and colder!) cable car ride to a mountain summit that overlooked the lake and had a beautiful shrine. If it had been clear, we would have been able to see Mt. Fuji, but it had clouded up in the afternoon.

The tour portion then ended when we were dropped at a hotel in Hakone. Hakone is a popular place for Japanese tourists; it is in the mountains, and it is a region especially known for hot springs. Our hotel was mostly filled with Japanese people, all of whom had known to make reservations for dinner at the hotel’s restaurant. Hakone is more a region than a town – the hotel stood alone nestled in the mountains, without very many nearby eating options (there was no strip with cheap food). So this was a little frustrating, since not only did we have to eat expensive hotel food, but at the first restaurant we went to we were told we would have to wait two hours before being allowed to do so. Eventually, at 6pm, several more hotel restaurants opened, and we found a buffet place where we could walk right in.

After digesting dinner, Jen Em and I hit the onsen. Onsen are hot pools that one soaks in naked – they are segregated by sex, and you bathe with soap before you enter. The onsen had both an indoor portion (which was too humid for us) and an outside portion (which was perfect and lovely, especially since we could see a few stars through the clouds). The overall mood was something like a feminized version of the stylized way that westerners know Turkish baths or maybe a mikveh without the religious baggage.

In the morning, Jen and I did something really pretty strange: we went to this very, very strange onsen water park. I am actually not sure that I can convey how weird the water park was, but I will try. This was essentially a water park marketed at adults, since all you really did was sit. You wore your bathing suit, and you were issued a tie-dyed orange cover-up and a white towel when you entered. Then, you basically went from theme bath soaking pool to theme bath soaking pool. Most of the baths were indoors, but not all. There were twenty pools and three waterslides in all, and we sat/slid in each one of them!

Our favorite soaking pools included:

Rose water (under the grape arbor, of course)

Undersea (complete with sand on the bottom)

“Greco-Roman-Turkish” (with mosaic walls and domed ceiling)

Dead Sea (with water imported from the Dead Sea)

Sake

Green Tea (a bit Alice in Wonderland-esque with the big teapot)

Coffee

And, Wine
This was not just any wine, but Beaujolais Nouveau. And, true to form, at 11am, the water park had a ceremony in which they poured wine into the hands of bathers in the wine pool. This was seriously weird. We didn’t really know what was happening, except that a tuxedoed wine steward showed up and then all the Japanese bathers [old ladies included] rushed to get in the wine pool. So, we followed. Then, we waited around for a little bit for it to become 11am. During this time, Jen Em and I had no idea what was going to happen. The wine was likely going to be opened, but we didn’t see any cups . . . and we weren’t sure that the “beverage baths” [as we started calling them] actually had the real beverage in them. But, then, lo and behold, the stewards opened the wine, and the bathers clamored to get it poured in their hands from the open bottles [much ran into the pool]. I tasted some, and let me tell you: it was bad, bad wine.

But you can’t beat the ambience!