Days 4 and 5: Mount Fuji and trip to Kyoto

Jetlag caught up with us today… we were mostly knackered all day and were walking around like zombies. I think we over did it the last few days, seems like we’ve walked for miles and miles.

Got up pretty early and headed out to Mount Fuji on the JR train. The whole journey took about 3 hours of which we both lost count the number of times our heads bopped forwards and back as we kept nodding off. There were some good-ish views of Fuji on the train, but I thought I’d wait till we got there before we took any photos. As it happened those were the best views of it we’d get all day, as soon as we got there it clouded over . The mountain is actually insanely massive, and looks like something from a sci-fi movie. I can’t really do it justice talking about it here, you kind of have to see it. Oh well. We arrived tired and hungry at Kawaguchi-ko station and took a walk down to the lake. Took a few pics and had a sit down, then went to look for food. We eventually stopped at this Japanese restaurant that had the most miserable waitress ever. I had ‘beef and rice’ and Kate had mushroom noodle soup. Mine was lovely, but I think Kate didn’t really like hers. I tried looking through our phrase book for how to compliment the waitress on the food, to try and crack a smile on her ‘oh god I really hate being here’ face, but alas I could only find phrases about complaining! Settled up and moved on back to the station where we caught a bus to the nearby Lake Sai, which is supposed to be far less commercialised and offers ‘great views of Mt. Fuji’. Yeah, right. We got off the bus at a village that was totally deserted except for one woman who was gardening at the side of the road. The place was eerily quiet it was so strange – like something out of the Twilight Zone. We went for a walk and found a track that took us down to the lake where we took a photo or two and even got the video camera out. Unfortunately Mt. Fuji was nowhere to be seen… either we were looking in the wrong direction, or it was covered up in cloud. Headed back on the bus to Kawaguchi-ko station, then headed back to Tokyo on the train… sleeping most of the way.

When we got back to Tokyo we were starving so headed out to the Shinjuku district, which is a bit like the Picadilly/Leicester Sq. equivalent of Tokyo. All the restaurants out here seem to be on the top floors of department stores… seems a pretty weird setup, but I suppose once you know that its not really a problem. Had my 3rd burger of the holiday here (Japan does GREAT burgers btw), which came on a big plate with about 6 chips on it. Before heading back to the hotel, in the corner of my eye I spotted ‘Taito Game World’… lol… so we spent a little time in there, obviously, before we left. The Japanese are absolutely NUTS about videogames. They have entire plazas full of them, with like 8 floors packed full of different kinds of games. They all seem to follow a similar pattern: Pachinko (a kind of gambling game with ball bearings) and those crane-operating ‘grab a prize’ machines on the first couple of floors, then a ‘driving games’ floor, then a ‘fighting games’ floor with games like Street Fighter, Virtua Fighter etc, then there’s a ‘Print’ floor with games for girls, then a ‘multiplayer-gaming’ floor with games like Counterstrike, RTS games and some others. Totally insane. Even when you go on the metro you see most of the commuters playing games on their phones (they all have flip phones with big screens for playing games – I don’t think I’ve seen one non-flip phone since we’ve been here). After that, we stopped for a Coffee in Starbucks then headed back to the hotel and slept like a log for about 12 hours.

Got up at 10am, had to checkout by 11 so we got packed up pretty quick and headed out to the station, stopping on the way for a coffee and the worlds best ever chocolate croissant. Got our tickets for the Shinkansen (bullet train) to Kyoto and soon we were on our way. The Shinkansen trains are very cool – big and spacious, loads of legroom, air-conditioned… about 10 times better than the 1st class seats on british trains. It goes damn fast too, and it tilts as it goes round corners, which was very darts. I read a bit more of my ‘Shogun’ novel during the 3 hr trip, and ironically enough we actually got the best views on Mount Fuji out the window… better than we actually saw all day yesterday.

Arrived at Kyoto just before 3pm, and found our way to the hotel. Kyoto is cool. We went for a short walk and found a great shopping district with loads of weird and wonderful shops. One shop was particularly cool as it sold miniature action figures from all sorts of manga cartoons and video games. They had some good Final Fantasy figures and some Nintendo characters (both in small keyring sizes and mini-cuddly toys). I’ll go back there before we leave here and get some as prezzies. We actually saw quite a few westerners here too which was a surprise. In Tokyo I could count the number of westerners we saw on one hand, but here they seem more plentiful… maybe its because of all the temples, I don’t know. I certainly expected to see more westerners in Tokyo.

Anyway, we’re back at the hotel now, and going to plan what we’re doing tomorrow. Probably seeing some temples. I’ve uploaded a few more photos (not many tho) and a few videos. More to follow… probably lots of temple ones. Ciao for now!