Japan - Hakone

We've had too much of the Japanese city life, and its time for us to head on over to Hakone! We take a bullet train for the majority of the way there, we pass Mt Fuji, but unfortunately, as its not a clear day we can only see the base of it. (So no beautiful photos of that I'm afraid)!
Anyhoos we arrive in Hakone (which seems like a quaint little town) and drop our bags off at the traditional ryokan we're spending the night at.

The rest of our day is spent taking various modes of transportation, we get a bus over many hills (which wasn't so good for the more hungover members of our group - they went to karaoke the night before!), a kick ass boat over a lake and then a cable car to get to Ōwakudani, which is a volcanic valley peppered with hot springs and lots of smelly sulphur vents!

(The last poor guy here appeared to be cleaning the vent or something, I didn't envy him as it must be a pretty stinky job!)

This rather confusing sign was there to greet us once we arrived...


And I also ate this weird chocolate and strawberry sandwich that I think you were meant to toast...



So the reason we hiked our way up here was to try one of the famous hot spring-boiled eggs! So take a look at this bad boy...















Crazy, huh? Apparentely its something to do with the sulphur in the hot springs that reacts with the egg and turns its shell black! It was tasty anyways, and has supposedly added 7 years to my life, which is nice.

So we ended our sulphur egg pilgrimage by making the long journey back to the ryokan.
I saw these cool adverts on the train...

I do love watery illustrations...

We had a little free time before dinner, so I got a couple of photos of the room we were staying in, I particularly liked our fire escape!


For dinner, we had to dress in some yukata provided for us (they were very comfortable and roomy)! They sort of looked like these ones...

(Although we wore leather slippers with ours!)

And then it was time for the banquet! Woo mama there was a lot of traditional Japanese delicacies to sample! I didn't think I would like much of it but I was left pleasantly surprised, eating pretty much everything I was given (and they gave us A LOT). So here we go, photo time...

So yes, for mains we had raw fish, weird little ginger parcels, sticky fried rice in a honey-like soup, an eggy oyster, eel, fish dumplings in a broth, a fish-egg potato salad type thing, and some strange cold tofu in something that may have been soy sauce. Then for dessert it was a tofu pudding with some fruit.
Needless to say that I was pretty full afterwards!

Here was the snazzy long table we were seated at:


So that was Hakone, it would have been nice to stay a bit longer, as we didn't really get to explore the town we were staying in, but hey, it gives me a reason to go back!

Only two more blog posts to go before I stop my Japan wafflings! Next blog post we finally get to Tokyo! We check out Shinjuku, Harajuku, Akhibara (electronic town) and Shibuya - where we go to an 'All you can Drink' restaurant, I'll leave you to wonder what happened there!