Naked men

DAN

We set off from Kyoto after 4 night's stay. Like each of the places that we've visited along the way it felt like we left too soon. I looked at my list of to-dos from Kyoto and there are ancient castles, fan making courses, tea ceremonies, ancient samurai villages and a monkey mountain that we unfortunately didn't get time for. I hope that moaning about all the things we didn't get to do doesn't become too much of a running theme in this blog. I won't bring it up again. I'm just getting it out of my system, ok?

I expected the journey from Kyoto to Fuji to be pretty quick and easy. It's probably the same distance from London to Cardiff (I haven't checked that) so I thought it would take a couple of hours in the land of the bullet train. I was dead wrong. It's more like getting a train from Canterbury to some little village in mid-Wales, with three local, snails pace railways at the end of the trip. I think it took about 7 hours. The good part was that the last bit of the journey was through the Japanese Alps, so although the train to Kawaguchiko went at human running speed, the views of the lush mountain valleys were beautiful.

The view from the train carriage

We arrived at the Ryokan a bit late due to the long journey, so we were hurried through to the dining room where a dinner with about 20 plates of food was sitting waiting for us. It was a bit odd as we were the only people in a massive dining hall, but apparently dinner is served strictly at 6.30 every day and we were well over an hour late. The dinner was really nice, but was a bit overwhelming. It felt like the kind of thing you'd want to eat for a special occasion, not every day.

The Ryokan we were staying at felt like something from another era that hasn't needed to change with the times because it's in high demand. It was quite a tourist sort of place in the worst way possible. It was obviously constructed to cram in as many customers as they could and made you feel a bit like you were going through the "traditional Japan experience" factory. There were a lot of Chinese tourists staying there and it felt like we'd been dumped in the "bloody foreigners" section a bit. I could understand why though as our fellow residents seemed to have developed a game where they sent their kids round to each door in the hallway to knock on it and run away screaming.

The Ryokan was a good experience though, because it felt like another side of Japanese culture that we got to see on our travels. The thing that struck me at first on going through the doors was that it was like the ward from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Everyone is dressed in Yukata and slippers and with the slightly wipe clean touristy nature of everything it gives you the feeling that you are in a hospital ward.

They also had an onsen communal baths in the Ryokan. This is a "hot spring" bath separated by gender. It's a completely nude bath too. I must admit that I've never been in situation where I'm naked with lots of other men in a big bath before, so it felt a bit strange. I had read that Japanese people sometimes consider westerners to be pretty filthy and will vacate the baths when one comes in, so I was ready for some major rejection, but thankfully it didn't happen. One thing that was even stranger was that there were children in there too. It felt kind of wrong, having come from a society where you would never be left alone, naked, in a bath with someone else's children, but it seemed perfectly natural to everyone else.

It was pretty odd to walk around naked and just take everything in. I was surprised that quite a few people were covering themselves with towels whilst walking around, because I thought that they must be used to the nudity. It actually felt quite liberating after a while. Also, the amount of soaps, hair and skin tonics they had in there was amazing. They even had acid that peels off a layer of your skin, I've never seen that before. I tried all of them out. The hair tonic was the best because it smelled like mints.

Every area of Japan that we've been to has started with some confusion as to where to visit first, because no matter how many attractions you read about or maps you look at, you can only really get an idea of where you want to go when you start walking around. From the offset the Fuji region felt like the most tourist place we'd been to yet. So it felt like we should probably just go with the flow.

Confusion - What does it mean?

We decided to get a tour bus of the area. It's kind of like a normal bus in that you can get off at loads of places along the way. The tour bus went to Aokigahara Forest, which is also called the "Sea of Trees". I've read about it loads for the last few years and I really wanted to visit, so I dragged Flo and Emma along.

Scary paths 

The Sea of Trees is famous for being a place that's haunted by a lot of spirits, as in the old days people used to abandon their elderly relatives in the forest if they couldn't afford to feed them. Recently it's become the place of choice for people in the surrounding regions who want to commit suicide. It's a forest that is dense with very small trees and gnarled roots, because of this it is hard to walk through it and there is almost no sound at all. It's so odd to stand in such a silent and sad place just after being in a hotel and bus that are crowded with tourists. It feels like the place is incidental and even ignored even though it surrounds all these tourist attractions which makes it even more special.

"Lava cave", which turned out to be the "wind cave", which had ice in it.

The forest also has a network of caves that run underneath it. It's odd because on some maps they are called the ice caves and on others they are called the lava caves. Well, it turns out both are true. They were formed by lava pushing to the surface from nearby Mt.Fuji, but for some reason they now keep their ice from the winter months and there are huge ice crystals down in the depths. It's certainly refreshing to visit on a boiling summer day. There is a famous "Ice Cave" there that we didn't get to go in because of the ridiculous queue. Apparently the queue was about 2 hours long, so we skipped it.

The lava cave 

A bat cave

Walking back from the cave down the forest road was pretty amazing. There was a row of cars queueing back about at least a kilometre, waiting to go and visit a cave filled with ice. I bet it was hell being stuck in that. The cars even stretched off round the corner and onto the main road, but we didn't go that way, so I was unable to see how far the queue went. It was like that scene out of the Simpsons where they leave for a summer holiday and instantly get stuck in a huge jam of cars the minute they get out of the driveway. That should give you an idea of just how crowded some tourist spots in Japan get.

A grave in the forest

On the way back we were going to actually try and climb some of Fuji, but the ridiculously early time limit on the Ryokan dinner and the general fatigue from travelling around Japan non-stop for two weeks got the better of us. Probably the only thing we missed out that was properly worth doing in Fuji was actually going up the mountain.

In the evening we sat by lake Kawaguchi and watched an eagle circle overhead while the sun made amazing patterns on the valley as it set. Nature definitely won over man-made attractions on this bit of the trip.

Tomorrow I'll write about the Fuji-Q theme park and the worlds largest (Guinness World Record) ghost house!