Japan 2016 Day 5: Nebukawa and the Hakone Disaster
I'm pretty sure we made the record for the largest amount of things that could go wrong on one trip!
Japan 2016 ~Spring~
Day 0 & 1: THURSDAY
Day 2: Ueno Park, Skytree and Super Robot Spirits 2016
Japan 2016 Day 3, Yokohama: Chinatown, Waterfront & Cosmo World
Day 4: Tokyo Disneysea
Day 5: Nebukawa and the Hakone Disaster
Day 6: Shin-Yokohama Ramen Museum & Pacifico Yokohama
Day 7: Odaiba & Tokyo Tower
Day 8: Osaka
Day 9 & 10: Universal Studios Japan & Hometime
We started off the morning at Shin-Yokohama station to wait for our trip on the Shinkansen, this was my first time ever being near one of these trains so I was really excited! I mean it was just one stop for this trip, but it was free, so yeah! great :D
Click to viewIt's so long!
Our train was packed with tourists from Tokyo so we had to stand up for the whole journey which was pretty awkward, but I'm glad we didn't have any luggage or anything. 15 minutes and we arrived 60km away! cool!
We arrived in Odawara and picked up our Hakone Free Pass tickets for later on, these let us travel unlimited on all the trains, buses and cable cars there.
Our first stop was Nebukawa as Tutu's favourite idol, Sae Miyazawa had filmed a TV program here so Tutu wanted to have a look at the town herself while we were nearby.
THEN THINGS WENT WRONG D:
There was a huge delay on the Tokaido Main Line and all the warning signs were in Kanji so we had no idea what was happening, and no trains appeared for a really long time, so we didn't know what to do.
I had time to admire the cool watch I got the day before in Disneysea though!
A train finally appeared for the train line we needed to take so we got on board. Unfortunately the doors on the other side of the train opened after we got on it, which is the sign that the train is about to switch to the other platform and go back in the opposite direction. I was positive that we would go in the right direction because that was what my phone was telling me, and Tutu pointed out the door thing, but I chose to believe my phone.
I should have listened to Tutu XD (sorry again!!)
We started going back the way we came and ended up in Kamonomiya Station, waiting for another train that would hopefully take us to Nebukawa. It was a long wait and I was seriously pissed off with myself for doing that to us, plus I was really mad at Odawara station's confusing layout, there were 4 to 6 platforms for this train line, and the one train that doesn't return to Tokyo seemed to move around them all. It sucked because the further you go outside Tokyo the less things are in English Letters so we had to rely on Google maps to direct us. Eventually we got on the right one and we were on our way!
It's an unmanned station, with not much around it! The sign that Sae was standing at was the place you wait for the shuttle service to hotels, so everyone who was on the train with us stood there waiting so Tutu couldn't really get a picture taken in the same place :(
They went to a beach in the show so we walked along the road to see if we could find it.
Apparently in this area at one time they had these hand driven train cabs that people rode on from Odawara, and further up the road there were more signs of this.. but there was no sidewalk so we walked down the hill lol
Both the Tokaido Main Line and Shinkansen tracks run straight through this town, so there are 2 huge bridges and a lot of pylons and things everywhere, but it was a nice little town! I didn't know anything about this place before coming here but apparently a lot of it was destroyed in an earthquake and the tunnel for the Tokaido line completely collapsed, crushing a train.
We eventually got down to where the coast was and crossed the road to get to it!
Yeah, this wasn't the beach they had visited in the TV program, this one was all stones and there wasn't really anything to do here. Tutu checked later and managed to find the real place further down the coast, but we were already really late so we headed back up to get on the train.
We bumped into this guy :D
As this was an unmanned station, we had no-one to show our JR passes to, and everyone was using this suica IC pass reader to get in... so er... we just waved our passes around at the CCTV camera and ran for the train back to Odawara.
but.... er... WE GOT ON THE GREEN CAR AHHHHHHH XDDDD we just hoped no conductor would find us and we just kind of left quickly when we got back to the station.
We went on the Hakonetozan line until we arrived at Hakone-Yumoto station, where we would have to change trains to get further up... but! there was an important pit stop to go to first, the Evangelion store!
The reason this is here, is because Evangelion is set in the Hakone area, and this station in particular is where Shinji waits for a train when he wants to leave in one of the episodes. It looks familiar-ish because it was remodelled in 2009, so it's not exactly the same.
The shop had some awesome stuff though!! I got everything in the picture, my fav items were the 500 Type EVA camera strap and the Rei washcloth I'll never ever use lol. The ice cream machine for the EVA-01 ice cream machine was broken so I didn't get one, plus the shop seems to have a special eki-stamp for a stamp rally? Some kind of obnoxious otaku was using it and being loud so I didn't get one ^^;
You can see the Hakone comparisons to Evangelion better at this link, there are more things in this town I didn't even know about and we were kind of rushed and more things went wrong so, please read this instead XD
We rode the small red train up to Gora, which was seriously full of people and we had to stand for the whole way again, but the sights were really nice, lots of palm trees for some reason, and cold tunnels going through the mountain. It kind of zig zagged it's way up and had to switch tracks over and over to get up the steep hill. Interesting, but really slow lol.
Gora was a nice place! quite small but we went shopping here for a few things, I got 3 commemorative coke bottles with a Japanese design, I was so paranoid they would pop open in my luggage but they didn't after all. Tutu cleaned out the gift shop of all their sake Kit Kat bottles XD The station itself is kind of Swiss lodge like, there's a lot of this up there, I think the train to Gora is Swiss built so this is the reason, that and the cable cars.
We sat here in this car park to eat something since there wasn't really anywhere else to sit, and we ran out of stuff to look at in Gora because it's not very big lol. Also the second picture is of the volcanic gas covering the top of the mountain, I thought it was cool at the time.. but... :D
Despite some confusing warnings, we headed up on the ropeway. This is when we found out part of the cable car route wasn't running because of the volcanic gas, but we could catch a bus and get around that part, then ride the rest of the way to where the lake was! So we went up on this train! This was pretty cool, everything was at a severe angle, all the stations on the way up too! somehow the track manages to bend and allows another train to go past at one point, without us falling back down to our deaths, awesome!
We arrived at Sounzan Station(750m) at the top of the ropeway train to see this car park, and get to the bus that took us past the gas, there was nothing else here apart from the start of the cable car, so we got on board. Things started getting really dark all of a sudden, it was cool.. but unsettling XD volcanic ash was flying everywhere, roads were shut..... it was getting so dark so fast the further we drove. but! we got to Owakudani ropeway station (1044m)....
...
Well apart from being unsettling as hell it was also FUCKING CLOSED AHHHHHHHHHHH >:| apparently, despite being open at this point of the mountain, it shuts at 3:30pm because of the gas/weather ... we got there around 5pm .. :(
The lady who was managing the shuttle buses told us we had a choice of where to go, we could go back down to Gora, or go to Togendai where you can catch the boat to ride around the lake, then take a bus back down, which was our original plan after the cable car ride we couldn't take, so we chose to go to see the boat!
Everyone else stuck at the top went on the Gora bus, but we couldn't believe our luck to get a bus to ourselves to Togendai, as you can see by my face! :D
NO WONDER WE WERE ALONE, THE LAST CRUISE WAS AT 5PM :(((( AUUGHHHHH
So we missed the cool pirate looking boat... I mean I could kind of see a bit of it... sitting there.
Well, now it was dark, we were hungry and all we could really do is catch a bus... so we caught the first one that came and sat down..
We had a nice journey at first, we hadn't seen a lot of the scenery in the area, and now we got a chance to do so in the bus ride.
Unfortunately we hit traffic really quickly, because of the closures and the gas there were 100's of cars snaking up the roads and we were going nowhere fast... it was nice to experience the twisting mountain roads as they were featured in one of the seasons of Initial D, but they were driving a lot faster XD I think the driver was saying something about train stations but both me and Tutu don't have good Japanese understanding so we just stayed on the bus for an hour. Speaking of, the driver had to announce every time he started moving.... he must have said this 500 times at least.
Eventually we got off at Tonosawa to catch the train and escape the nightmare traffic...
...oh dear...
It turns out Tonosawa train station is really far and hard to find from the bus stop, so we kind of...wandered around in the pitch black trying to find the station using the torch on my phone, following these signs leading us in weird directions and walking past all these spooky Onsens and Ryokans...
...then this started happening...
....D:
NO! IT'S A HAUNTED VENDING MACHINE
Then we got to this spooky station and we waited for the train, phew :D
It was really far up the hill from the town, so that's why it was so confusing, plus we found it after following some women going the other way lol.
Luckily Tutu and I were laughing through most of this, it really felt like a crazy adventure. I'm glad we went together!!!
Oh and I bought these cool chips on the way back \o/
Carbonara Pizza?! or something... it smelled a lot and actually had cheese melted on it lol.
Next entry is the Ramen Museum!