After waking up and getting breakfast I packed and headed to the train station for Hakone. I’m actually staying in Odawara, which is about an hour by bus from Hakone proper, but it was a lot cheaper and easy access to the trains. Plus, it’s only an hour, no biggie…right? Well, maybe not so much.
After dropping off my bags I went to ask about the bus, except there was some big traffic jam on the bus route so it was faster to take a train then transfer to the bus. Okay, no problem. Except it took 1.75 hours to get there, so it was nearly 3pm by the time I got to the lake. I made my way to Hakone shrine, and waited patiently to take a photo with the floating tori gate. A new thing they started doing here was renting out these stupid plastic swan paddle boats and people will paddle out to the gate and try to photobomb pictures. It’s super annoying, selfish, and dickish behavior, and the people doing it know they’re ruining people’s photos and do it anyway. So when it was my turn and these two Japanese girls in a swan boat wouldn’t get out of the photo I non-discretely pointed at them and gestured for them to kindly get the fuck out of the way. The other tourists were all too polite to speak up, but I’m an obnoxious American so they can gtfo. The two girls in the paddle boat laughed of course, but started moving away and when I turned around the couple that were up to take their photo next waved and thanked me for that. No one in line was happy the paddle boats were there, cheap ass ugly looking pieces of garbage…
Anyway, after getting my picture I walked down this cobblestone pathway along the lake and finally found my momiji! There weren’t many but there were indeed yellows and oranges and reds, finally! I got some nice photos, but the path didn’t actually lead anywhere interesting, so I power walked back to the pier and skipped the actual shrine so I could get to my boat tour around the lake. The views from the boat are spectacular, especially at sunset, and even with some clouds you could still see Mt. Fuji. Plus I met some very friendly people on board who were just as happy to be there as I was so we chatted the whole time. I figured since it took so long to get here it would probably take just as long to get back, so I walked to the bus stop early and met some lovely ladies from Australia and, coincidentally enough, Tinley Park in Chicago. So we yapped for a while and hopped on the bus. Unfortunately there was a car accident shortly after we got on the bus that brought traffic to a standstill, and since it’s a two lane winding mountain road there is literally no other path to take. So the trip home ending up taking well over 2 hours.
I was planning on going back tomorrow to ride the cable car up the smaller mountain, but man I wasn’t expecting the travel time to be like this. Tomorrow is a weekday though, not a weekend, so maybe it won’t be so bad? I need to watch the weather too, if it’s raining there’s no point in going all the way out there anyway in which case I’ll hang in Odawara and check out their castle and waterfalls and stuff. There’s no shortage of things to do around here! Once I got back in town I went to a place kind of off the main trail to get some yummy orange chicken, and the restaurant happened to be in the same building as an arcade so I stopped and played a round of Taiko Drum Master. It took me a minute to remember what all the symbols meant but that game is still super fun. Tomorrow is a flexible day, so maybe I’ll go back and check out the rest of the arcade.
