Jan 5, 2018
Osaka, Kyoto, and Hida
We caught the bullet train to Osaka. We knew, from 10 years ago, that we’d get a good view of Mt Fuji from the right-hand side of the train, and Lucy snapped this amazing photo through the train window.
The trains in Japan are amazing. They are frequent, on schedule, clean and comfortable. Plus you can get prepaid cards from multiple different companies that all work on all the metro trains and other public transport, as well as some shops and vending machines. It’s wonderful! I miss it.
Osaka
We only had a few nights in Osaka but we crammed in a lot of sights. Lucy had found through Instagram a great handmade furniture and design store that also ran a cafe next door. So we headed out to the suburbs to Bird Coffee and had a great dinner, finished with a delicious doughnut that is whatever passes for hipster in Japan:
Bird doughnuts are specially crafted with:
Carefully-selected wheat from Hokkaido
Sugar from Okinawa-Awami sugarcane
Salt made from a traditional Okinawan method
Eggs from chickens raised on lush green farms and homemade organic feed in Hiroshima
The unscented sesame oil that the ingredients are fried in is very resistant to oxidation, which means that even over time, our doughnuts retain their moist and fluffy texture.
Lucy found the best okonomiyaki place tucked away in part of town we would not otherwise have visited. We arrived a few minutes before they opened and a local couple was waiting as well — a good sign! They had heard good things but it was their first time visiting. The four of us sat along the hotplate and chatted, and the two staff worked away in front of us adding lot of ingredients to the frying piles. Behind us the rest of the tiny restaurant filled up with English-speaking tourists. So the place was well-known to locals and tourists alike.
When we got our meals, the lady gestured for my phone and took a photo of us with our hot food and okonomiyaki-eating shovels. Judging from the similar photos up on the walls I suspect it is not the first time she has taken such a photo.
The trains were reliable and frequent so it was easy to get around and, combined with walking, helped us see a lot of Osaka in a couple of days.
While we were in Japan why not visit that famous attraction Hogwartsu Castle? Universal Studios Japan was expensive, crowded (on a Monday night!) and amazing. We made straight for the Wizarding World of Harry Potter and I was astounded at the level of detail they had put into everything. One enters Potterworld by walking along a very English (or maybe Scottish?) pathway, lined with pine trees and lampposts, and the movie soundtrack plays you down the path and eventually swells into the grand theme as you enter the gates of Hogsmeade and see the Hogwarts Express. There is smoke and fire, characters directing people or being photographed with, and lights and doorlocks on which to practise spellcasting. We got our first good look at Hogwarts Castle at dusk and a couple of microbats were flying around our heads.
“Were they real?” Lucy asked.
I was sure they were, if only because I couldn’t see how they could have faked them.
Oh, but either the Butterbeer was not authentic or the Potterverse kids use magic to stay thin. That stuff was loaded with sugar. We poured ours down the sink, and we weren’t the only ones.
We joined the line to visit Ollivanders wand shop and it ended up being the line to an interactive “let the wand choose you” ceremony. Of the whole group of about 20 of us, mostly Japanese kids and parents, the wizard chose Lucy to try out the wands. He was amazing, giving his performance in character and in both English and Japanese. (Lucy was great, too, but it was a non-speaking role.)
On the train to Universal Studios there were a lot of young people wearing shirts and hats and whatnot with a Pathfinder logo on them. We speculated that it was a band of some sort playing at Universal Studios. We had our portable wifi with us so did some quick searching online.
“Pathfinder logo” brought up no useful results.
“Pathfinder Osaka” brought up results that answered one question but raised so many more.
“What?” I asked. I looked at the Pathfinder-clad people opposite us. “What is a Bump of Chicken?” I said this only to Lucy. She didn’t know, either, so we were both lost.
As it turns out, Bump of Chicken is the name of the band. Pathfinder must be the name of the album.
So now you know what a bump of chicken is, even if you don’t know what it means.
Kyoto
In Kyoto we stayed in Gion, the ‘old town’ with cobbled streets and old houses and shrines and Japanese people dressed in traditional clothing taking photos. Touristy but beautiful, and we stayed in an amazing old house.
One day while we were walking along the main street there were two girls in traditional clothing, one taking photos of the other. The girl with the camera asked Lucy to take a photo of them both, and of course Lucy said yes. The girl handed the camera to Lucy, stood next to her friend, and then they proceeded through a series of poses like they were choreographed. Pose, pause, change, pose, pause, change. Very impressive. I suspect it is not the first time they have posed for such a series of photos.
There were two places we really wanted to go, both extremely touristic and extremely picturesque — after all, Lucy discovered them on Instagram.
Place to see #1: the mountain pathway with all the red tori gates on it, Fushimi Inari Taisha.
We wanted to be there super early before all the tourists arrived. (Yes, I’m aware that I am a tourist and also a snob.) A young lady with a camera had followed us from the train station, and when we stopped at the temple to look at the map she overtook us. I hurried us up the steps to the first set of tori so she wouldn’t be in our shots.
I needn’t have bothered. There are thousands of steps (we overtook her again fairly soon anyway), hundreds of gates, and the path goes up and around the mountain for about 2km.
From a photography perspective it was a bit disappointing. The light wasn’t great, so the photos were a bit dull. The gates were hard to frame, being so tall and so densely packed, and the surroundings weren’t that nice for a photo. We kept climbing and winding our way through the gates and I started playing with different camera settings to see what I could create. We hit a downhill section and I saw a shadow of my head in a patch of light ahead of me. I turned and got a glimpse of the sun, and took my favourite photo of the day.
As we climbed higher we saw more sun and a nice (if smoggy) view of the city. We also saw more cats — the place was full of cats and kittens. And vending machines.
Place to see #2: the bamboo forest. This was in Arashiyama, a bit of a trek away on multiple trains. It was nice but the Instagram photos are really misleading. This stretch is pretty much all there is to it, and even when the path is clear there are groups of people at either end taking photos. And the sound of chainsaws as workers harvest bamboo nearby.
However, while we were walking to the forest we saw that there was a monkey park in the area as well. We didn’t know what to expect but paid a tiny fee of something like $5 and started the steep walk up the mountain to the enclosure. We kept our eyes on the trees on the way up and spotted one monkey running along a branch.
Then at the top we were met with about 60 monkeys running free, playing and chasing each other and occasionally fighting. I had been worried that seeing monkeys in an enclosure would be depressing but the fences were just a chain to stop humans from falling down the hill.
At 11am the workers gathered the monkeys and humans for feeding time. Then they put on circus music and threw nuts out on the ground. The monkeys scrambled to collect some food and find a place to eat without being bothered. It was hilarious.
The workers went out of their way to greet us when we arrived and to say thankyou and goodbye as we left. The little gestures, which seemed natural and genuine, really made us feel welcome.
We knew from last time that sweets aren’t a big thing in Japan, or at least that sugary desserts are not traditional. The aisles of the convenience stores are full of chocolates and sweets of all kinds but that’s not for after dinner. We really got into adzuki (red bean) paste this time around. Mochi (sticky rice flour dough) with red beans and chestnuts were a favourite and go especially well with green tea. Lucy’s favourite was taiyaki, a fish-shaped crisp dough filled with red bean paste, still hot from the iron press.
Nara
We took a quick day trip to Nara to see the deer in Nara Park. I tried to do some research beforehand to find out where we could see them, because the park looked pretty big on the map. I didn’t find any good information, but that’s because they are everywhere. A few blocks before we got to the park there were deer standing on the footpath. We had brought our lunch and ended up hiding away in a pagoda in the middle of a lake to make sure they wouldn’t come and steal our rice balls from us.
Hida
One of the things we learned about ourselves while travelling is that our standards changed over the 6 months. While we were okay with “nice enough” at the beginning of the trip, we wanted to finish the trip in style. That meant accommodation that made us feel happy and pampered.
So we finished the trip in beautiful ryokans in gorgeous natural surrounds with 10 course meals and hot springs, all in a fresh mountain setting.
The ryokans served seasonal food. One of the things in season were “river fish”. These were usually served on a skewer, all bones and teeth and eyes. We were served them a lot, often at both breakfast and dinner. At first it was a bit hard to face them down, and at the first few meals we politely chewed at the flesh until we hit bone and then we gave up. We gradually grew more adventurous, depending on our moods, and Lucy finally an entire river fish — bones, eyes, teeth and all. The lady serving us was very impressed, as was I.
While in Japan we watched a movie called “Your Name” about which I had read great things. One of the locations is gradually revealed to be somewhere around Takayama in the Hida area. At the time it was a bit exciting because we would be staying in Takayama.
When we arrived at Hida-Furukawa, our second stop in the area, we discovered that the station and the surrounding area had been used in the movie. (It’s an animated movie so they were local references rather than filming locations.) While taking a photo of the train station from the same vantage point as the movie we saw someone else waiting for the same shot.
While we were in the mountains it snowed and the colour scheme changed. We had booked a tour to Shirakawa-go, an old village that still keeps the gassho house style from hundreds of years ago, and the snow arrived the night before and continued in full force the day of the tour. It was an incredible experience, and completely different to what we would have seen the day before. This is the sort of weather for which the houses — with their steep roofs — were designed.
We were freezing. We wanted to find a cafe to sit somewhere out of the wind and have a hot drink, but many things were closed, and with the cloth banners over the doors it was hard to see what types of shops the open ones were. We took shelter in one of the old family houses — we were told they served tea there. Instead they served “grass tea” which was warm and tasted like hay.
We went upstairs to explore the architecture and were greeted by a smiling old lady who I assume was the grandmother of the family. She gestured “camera” and “window” and I took a photo out the window. She shook her head and gestured “camera” and herself and “you stand there”. I gave her my phone. She positioned me by the window, Lucy next to me, and pointed to a spot on the window frame for us to look. Then she removed Lucy’s glasses and finally took a photo. She handed back my phone with a photo of us looking regal with a snowy gassho house framed in the window beside us. Judging from the interaction, I suspect it is not the first time she has taken such a photo.
