bad luck strikes
today was supposed to be an all day tour that went to several sightseeing spots to look at mt. fuji. but it seems my bad fortune at senso-ji the other night bore consequences, because the weather kami decided i did not get to see it.
it was set to rain all day. and mt. fuji is only visible from the locations we were visiting on a clear day. so i knew pretty much right away that i would probably not get to see fuji-san today. i didn’t know what the tour would have in store given that the entire point of it was kinda ruined, but i went anyway because the ticket was non-refundable :).
when buying the ticket, they are aggressively clear that if you are late, they will leave without you and that you must be on-time. the meetup location was an hour away by train, in shinjuku, at 7:15 am. i decided to get an expensive ($40) cab just to make sure i got there on time, as i didn’t want my entire day wasted because i messed up the trains or because of a trillion people using the trains to get to work in the morning or something. i arrived 30 minutes early, at 6:45. i walked around the area and got a couple pictures of shinjuku. pictures were hard to get, because it was raining and extremely windy. umbrella in one hand and camera in the other, i did what i could.
as the time for the meetup approached, i met up with the tour guides, and found that there were actually 3 buses for today’s tour. they were separated by language, so everyone on my bus spoke english.
remember how i said the ticket buying process was aggressively clear that they would leave early if you were not on-time? turns out that wasn’t true at all, because we waited for 45 minutes for an australian couple that was late. there is no contact info when you book the tickets, so it’s not like they called in and said “hey we are running late,” or anything. the tour guide just… waited. and they did eventually show up. but we left 45 minutes after the other two buses.
because it was raining, the originally planned stop at fuji station 5 was cancelled. they decided instead to take us to a small village called oshino hakkai. it was about a 2 hour bus ride there.
but because of the 45 minutes late jerks, we only got to be there for 30 minutes and then had to leave. that would have been fine, but the place the bus parked was about an 8 minute walk away from the actual village. so in reality, we got about 15 minutes in this place. it was really beautiful and i wish we could have stayed longer. i got a couple photos in the incredibly brief time we were here, though.
after that, it was back onto the bus for our next stop. we also got lunch on the bus:
the next stop was originally planned, and was not an improvisation due to the weather, which makes it even crazier to me, but the next stop was a 2 hour visit to an outlet mall called gotemba. i think this is a really weird thing to add to the trip, because it came from tokyo. if anyone on the bus wanted to do any shopping, there is a nearly infinite amount of it 5 minutes away from where the tour started from. i would have greatly preferred more time in oshino hakkai. this was literally just a regular mall. it was an outdoor mall though, so umbrella-san was really earning his keep today. i only got a couple pictures at this mall, because… its just a mall…
hee hee i found ur mom’s store
must…not…buy…
next it was back onto the bus for a trip to hakone. the plan was to take the hakone ropeway up to a volcano area called owakudani. fortunately, the ropeway was not closed due to bad weather. unfortunately, the view was nearly nonexistent due to bad weather.
the glass sides of the ropeway car were all fogged up, but i did manage to get a few photos during the ascent.
once we got up there, i was quite shocked. this spot is right next to a volcano. if it wasn’t so foggy, the pictures of it would do it more justice. but because it was right next to a volcano, the smell of sulfur was overwhelming. there are sulfuric vents in the ground all over near the stop, and it was almost hard to breathe at first due to how overpowering it was. i imagine on a clear day this would have made for some absolutely amazing photos, but the combination of steam coming from the ground and fog coming from the sky made most of the pictures kind of vague.
another element that complicated things was that the wind up here was crazy. it was easily the most intense wind i have ever felt. people were falling over. as this place is pretty high up, there isn’t much to block the wind up here. this was when it rained the hardest as well, so i mostly stayed in the nice heated gift shop.
just in case anyone forgets they are in japan, you can buy wakizashi, shuriken, and kunai up here for some reason.
…does the right to bear arms include mall ninja shit?
me when i buy ninja stars at a gift shop… oh wait nevermind this is just a real photo of elon musk.
these are a specialty up here, black eggs. supposedly, eating one increases your lifespan by 7 years. i wonder if there are any 500 year old egg enthusiasts around. i wanted to try one, but the line was quite long and i didn’t have time to get through it before it was time to meet back up with the tour bus.
our last stop for the day was back at the ropeway station, but going a different way to ride on a ship across lake ashi.
the ship was probably the best part of the day, but only because weather kinda ruined every other part of it. i still had fun, but if i were in charge of the tour, i would remove the mall from it entirely and maybe cancel the tour on rainy days.
with the last stop complete, it was time for the bus home. it took about 2 hours to get back to shinjuku. this was the route i traveled today:
