RoadTrip

I have to say I'm really getting use to all these public holidays which keep popping up all over the show. The weekend just past was yet another 3 day weekend with Monday being a celebration of health and sport in Japan (On this day in 1966 the opening ceremony of the Tokyo Olympics took place- or at least that's what the text book I've been teaching my students from claims).

Anyway, I was invited by some friends to join them on a road trip to Hakone.

Hakone is about a two hour drive from Tokyo and is well known for its Onsens (hot springs) and health spas. I assume it's where all the stressed out Salarymen from Tokyo escape to when they're not working excessively long hours.

I am unsure why they had ride-on Pandas...

The trip was organised by Nobu and he did an awesome job at finding an Onsen that was a little different. We took a very unstable looking cable car down to the base of this cliff...



Only to find a couple of private Onsens awaiting us.

(Please note this is not the actual Onsen, for some reason they wouldn't let me take my camera in, something about naked people and privacy. Go figure. ha)

The deal with Onsens for those of you who don't know is that it's a fully nude thing so there is always separate baths for males and females.

After soaking in the extremely hot (40-50 degree) baths for a few hours we were all pretty shattered but Hitomi insisted we check out the thermal activity park. It reminded me of Rotorua, maybe it was the fact I was tired or perhaps the smell, but I got over it real fast.


We slowly made our way back to Tokyo in the heavy traffic. The two hour trip took four hours even with the help of our nifity Japanese speaking navigation system.

We even saw Mount Fuji on the way back. This is honestly the closest I think I'm going to get to seeing it. Stupid pollution