Day 4 was dedicated to nature, it was a very warm day so we decided to move south-west to enjoy the Fuji-San from Hakone, a peaceful part of Japan's countryside, rich for its lakes, active sulphur vents and hot springs. Japanese also go to Hakone to relax or go to the many health resorts and onsen they have in the city/region. I went there with my girl to enjoy the Fuji, the volcano is the most massive thing I've seen in my life, so impressive that you can't stop looking at it; no wonder it's Japan's first symbol.
We left early in the morning to Shinjuku station (it's 3 million travellers a day passing through this station, can you believe that?) and took a "Odakyu" train there to Hakone-Yumoto. Funny thing is probably the automatic switch for the seats in the train so you will always sit in the right direction, and you can also switch them yourselves. The fucked up thing is that they told us the Hakone Free Pass is only available if you stay 2 days in Hakone, well that's absolutely not true, but we knew it a bit too late unfortunately, anyway...
It takes more than 30 minutes to get outside of Tokyo but then nature comes in and there's some parts we saw that definitely could look like Brazilian favelas or as my girl would say, a bit like Guinea because of many different colored rooftops in the hills and lots of cables and antennas. After a while I could see the massive Fuji at the horizon, like it's overlooking other mountains... and then dissapeared again.
Arrived at the station we took a small bus to Hakone-Machi, that's the place, a big lake in the mountains, ropeways and boats, that's the main attraction but there's more. We walked a bit in this beautiful and quiet nature, had the chance to witness a couple of eagles flying in circles and of course the Fuji in the back.
Then we took the boat to the other side of the lake to take the ropeway to the active sulphur vents they have up in the mountain. You could definitely smell we were getting closer since sulphur smells like rotten eggs, really, it's disgusting and it gets worse the closer you get... Impressive, there's people taking baths in there, well, I'm not, it's about 80°C and smells very bad so I don't feel like it haha. After a quick taste of what a green tea based candy tastes like we took the 2nd part of the ropeway to a cablecar that would take us back down the valley, back to the real world. 
Talking about Mount Fuji, the homeboys of Jazzy Sport climb the volcano (with their skis on their back) every now and then, taking more than 5 hours to go up (3800 meters up) and then 60 minutes to ski down the Fuji, make sure to check their pictures out taken by Rai. Incredible and definitely worth a trip next time.
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greyone
28/05/2009 at 05:59
cool