Libertarian musings from just inside the M25.

Well, I’ve expended more effort and energy today than I have in several years – possibly since my heroic walks around Toronto two years ago… I had a very enjoyable but utterly exhausting day out in Hakone, part of the Fuji-Hakone-Izu National Park, with some of the people I’ve met during my stay in Tokyo – Lena H, Laura H and Laura L – of which by far the most significant event was the climb over Mt Kami up to a maximum height of 1483m above sea-level. And yes, it was most definitely a climb – not really hiking in my book, more mountaineering. But I will get to that later… First, we’d arranged to meet at Yoyogi-Uehara station, which was actually pretty awkward for me to get to from Shibuya, at the unholy hour of 08:30. So I set my alarm for 06:30, and actually managed to wake up then as well. Only problem was that I then dropped off back to sleep until 07:10, by which point I was already pushed for time. I dived around my room showering, eating and getting dressed in a general mélange of preparation, but still only left the apartment at 08:00. Then, of course, it was just my luck that the Sunday timetable produced interminable waits for each of the 3 connections I had to take (home to Shibuya, Shibuya to Meiji-jingumae on the Fukutoshin line, then from there to Yoyogi-Uehara on the Chiyoda line), as well as more inexplicable long waits while the trains just stood uselessly at their platforms. The end result was that I hared out of the Chiyoda line train at Yoyogi-Uehara at 08:39, convinced the others had already left without me. They hadn’t, and I was relieved to discover that the train we were supposed to take wasn’t set to leave till 08:46. The rest of the journey to Odawara was then pathetically uneventful by comparison, and the switch to the local service to Hakone-Yumoto was crowded but generally fine – a 2-hour trip all told, getting us into Hakone proper at about 11:00.

The plan for the day was to travel part of the way up the mountain by train, cable-car and the Hakone Ropeway, then go wandering around and across Mt Kami and the surrounding lower peaks before taking the Komagatake Ropeway down on the other side to Lake Ashi, on which there were several pirate-ship replicas (and more normal boats) that did tours of the lake and its stunning surrounding scenery. As with all the best-laid plans of mice and men, a lot of things ganged a-glae. The Tozan mountain railroad that we had to take from Hakone-Yumoto to Gora was packed full and completely devoid of air conditioning – though thankfully the weather never hit more than 30°C, and since we were at ever-increasing altitude, there was a pleasant cool breeze to take the edge off the discomfort. My main complaint stemmed from a young couple who barged their way onto the train in Odawara literally seconds before the doors closed, who proceeded to take up what little personal space I’d had left before they got on, and then physically forced me back and away from my 3 friends so that they could spend the next few stops’ worth of travel schmoozing in a very un-Japanese way. I treated them to several of my wide range of cold stares, until they realised from a few words I managed to exchange over their heads with my friends that we were one group, and resentfully allowed me back into my original place. Hardly had they done so than Problem no. 2 materialised, in the form of a pair of young children who clearly didn’t appreciate the oppressively thick air and heat, and struck up a preces et responses of bawling that encompassed every note of the human hearing range, and several more besides. Their harassed-looking parents were utterly incapable of getting them to shut up, and drew some frustrated glances from even the most chilled-out Japanese fellow-passengers – my friends got into a major rant about the quality of Japanese parenting, to which I decided not to contribute my male two-cents. What I did notice was that both children were wearing clothes that were far too thick for the weather conditions, but more significantly that both children’s faces alternated between expressions of extreme discomfort and bafflement at regular intervals. The smaller of the two even got to the stage where it was staring in blank disinterest at the surrounding carriage and still emitting regular bawls as though vaguely aware that there was a good reason for doing so, which had temporarily slipped its mind, but should be upheld on a matter of principle. Needless to say, I was very glad when the family finally got off…

From Gora we took the stylishly-designed Hakone Tozan Cable-Car up to Sounzan, and from there the Hakone Ropeway up to Owakudani, which means “Great Boiling Valley”. As we reached the terminus, the unmistakeable rotten-egg stench of sulphur began to pervade the air. Owakudani is a volcanic valley, which emits dull subterranean thuds every so often, and plays host to one of the largest collections of sulphur vents and hot springs in Japan. If I were of a more Doctor-Who/Tolkienesque disposition, I would say that I “looked on the sulphur springs of Owakudani” – more accurately, I covered my mouth and nose with my handkerchief, eyed the springs of hot sulphuric acid with a mixture of concern and scepticism, and treated myself to two of the Kuro-tamago, eggs hard-boiled in the hot acid, which smell slightly of sulphur and have shells burned black, and which are claimed to increase longevity by seven years per egg up to and including two-and-a-half eggs, giving a maximum increased life expectancy of 17-and-a-half years. Fair enough, I thought, it’s only eggs, it’s not like they’re asking me to swim in the acid or anything…

From Owakudani, a rickety little path led into the dense undergrowth that covers Mt Kami, and after a short debate over the meaning of some kanji on a signpost – which essentially involved one of my friends contradicting what I knew to be the correct reading and refusing to accept I was right even when it was demonstrably proved quite how right I was – we headed up. At first, by which I mean ‘for the first 10 metres’, the climb was fairly gentle, but then suddenly the angle of the slope reared up in front of us, and we were confronted with the rock equivalent of what looked like the Khumbu Icefall. Now, I’ve generally avoided doing any kind of energetic climbing in the past for the sole reason that I don’t want to imagine what might happen if I accidentally slipped and broke something important, and for the entire ascent there was a significant portion of my brain that was screaming at me to stop and go back, regardless of what anyone else might say. On the other hand, there was a larger portion of my brain that was angry at how unexpectedly difficult the course had turned out to be, and was therefore determined to see the whole thing through from top to bottom effectively just to prove I could. That part won out, and even though I spent most of the trek drenched in sweat, with my heart going at about twice its normal rate, my thighs in constant danger of giving out, my glasses steaming up, my balance starting to suffer from the loss of energy and gain in altitude, and the sulphurous fumes giving me a major headache for the first 100 or so vertical metres of the climb, I made it all the way from 1040m at Owakudani to the 1483m point at the summit of Mt Kami. And you know what? I actually really enjoyed the descent. I had no idea I’d be any good at this kind of hiking, but I unearthed something of a knack for using a slightly chimpanzee-like approach to getting down. Trees, roots, branches, big rocks – everything got used as a prop to help me get down (and up, as we approached Mt Komagatake). I probably looked very weird, since my arms performed all manner of unconscious tai-chi balancing movements that weren’t really all that necessary, while I frequently stopped to analyse my route down in a slightly twitchy meerkat-like way, and occasionally congratulated particularly helpful branches as I passed them on the way down. All the same, I was pathetically grateful when I got to the Ropeway station and could gaze out over Lake Ashi with the mountain air whipping around me – nothing like a bit of human civilisation to mitigate the extremes of Mother Nature. Still, in the unlikely event that I ever have to do something like that again in the near future, I now know what to do.

It was 16:50 by this point, and here things started really going wrong. First, Lena lost her Hakone Free Pass, which at 5000 yen, about £40 now, was a fairly heavy dent to take. Then, since we’d taken longer than the 2 hours claimed by the others’ Lonely Planet guides to traverse the hiking trail, we didn’t get to the shores of Lake Ashi before 17:00. Everything, as we soon realised, was shut. There was almost no-one to be seen about, and our repeated enquiries from information centre staff elicited the alarming conclusion that the buses and boats from where we were had already stopped well before we even got down from Komagatake. This was particularly annoying, since it ruled out our being able to travel in one of the pirate ships, and put in question our ability to even get back to Tokyo any time soon – but even worse, the expensive pass we’d bought proved to be totally useless for several of the forms of transport we could have taken. As I’d quietly suspected all day, the cost of the few journeys (cable car, Ropeway) that didn’t take PASMO almost certainly didn’t add up to more than whatever 5000 minus the cost of the trains from Tokyo to Gora would have been. Leergeld, “empty money”, as I call it. The atmosphere in the group was pretty tense, since all of us felt we’d been short-changed by the tail-end of our trip, but eventually we unwound as we found a PASMO-compatible bus to take us back to Sounzan, from where we essentially retraced our steps of the morning, and got into Tokyo around 22:30, completely exhausted. Tomorrow I’m being treated to an architectural tour of Tokyo, courtesy of Lena and Laura L (both architects / interior design students) – if there’s so much as a single stair during the route today, I’m taking the elevator or demanding to be carried…