Despite a lot of cloud cover hanging over Mt Fuji, we did manage to catch glimpses of it throughout the day as we wandered around the town. The town itself is very old and as it’s not climbing season, very quiet which is a nice change of pace.
However there are several bits and pieces of interest in the town, which we visited while walking around. Including climbing up 400 steps up a hillside to reach a viewing area, which offers the best views of the town and Mt Fuji.
Evening rolled around and we asked our hostel manager to suggest a place for dinner, which she did and it was fantastic. It was a very old traditional Japanese restaurant, run by a mother and son, there’s all of 8 seats, or rather floor cushions as you sit on the floor, a few chairs at a small bar and the fun part, no menu 😄
So with our 20 or so words of Japanese between us and the son who had a little more English, we managed to order our meal. The way it works is simple, you ask what you would like to eat, pork, fish, sushi, whatever you would like, they cook it up and it’s served with a load of trimmings, pickled veg, rice – of course, miso soup and several strange items we’d no idea what they were 🤔. The son, who’s name I won’t even attempt to spell, would check in with us every so often and have a chat, a slow conversation mind you but we would usually find a connection, for example when we told him we were Irish, he related it to whiskey!
The next day it was time to leave, we grabbed breakfast and checked out of the hostel and went to the station. After three trains and just over three hours of travelling, we arrived into the capital – Tokyo baby! Not just a metropolis, a mega metropolis.
After we checked in to our hotel (yes we’ve moved up in the world 😉) – we had a lite snack from a fantastic little bakery right next door to our hotel, just to hold us over until dinner. We spent the evening walking around – checking out the area and went for a drink in one of the many, many sky lounges that abound, although this was actually a “craft beer” lounge, high above the Tokyo skyline.
The next challenge of course was to decide where and what to eat for dinner and with over 80,000 places to choose from, it was going to be difficult 😋.
C&J
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