Today we took a trip out beyond Tokyo to Hakone. A bit of an early start had us catching one of the commuter trains outs to Odawara just after 8 in the morning. For anyone else thinking of travelling at this time of day during the week I would recommending to upgrading to the Romancecar as we were forced to stand for over half our nearly two hour journey due to the sheer volume of commuters on the train. Fortunately the train onwards from Odawara we were able to get seats straight away.

It surprised me how far we needed to travel before we escaped the urban environment of Tokyo. I had been expecting to find that after the flats of Tokyo had given way completely to houses that the I would start to see bigger houses or houses with gardens. Too my surprise what I saw instead was that the extra space giving way to car parks and padi fields. On our way I spotted Mount Fuji in the background with the Fujifilm factory before it. This was the best sight I got of it all day.

First stop for us was the Hakone-Yumoto Station where we took a tour of the Begonia Gardens and dried flower centre for the benefit of my mother. Very pretty flowers but not exactly my cup of tea. We also took lunch there before catching another train and heading up to Chokokunomori to see the Hakone Open Air Museum.

The Open Air Museum was the best part of the day. Lots of art in the open air to contemplate and even a hot water foot bath with stones embeded in the bottom to massage tired feet. My sister and I had great fun climbing up inside one of the sculputures. Unfortunately there wasn’t the time to see everything as the day was pressing on.

Catching the train onwards to Gora we then took the funcular up the hill before taking cable cars over the top of a sulphur mine along with associated bad egg smell before heading down towards the shores of Lake Ashi. Unfortunatley the weather had begun to change and the promised glimpses of Mount Fuji were lost to us amongst the clouds and we had to make do with a the picture from the magazine.

Across Lake Ashi we took a ferry in the shape of a mock pirate ship complete with lookout and telescope. Rather too windy up on deck I stayed in the warm down below apart from a single trip up to take some photos of this crater lake. The shores of Lake Ashi were covered in trees and apart from the odd large resort building are completely at odds to Tokyo. In some ways it is like the difference between Hong Kong Island and Lantau Island. Hong Kong island is very much the urban environment and Lantau as a whole is a million miles away and very rural.

Now at Hakonemachi we had planned to visit the ancient Cedar Avenue but with goose pimples on my arm I decided to pass this one up and instead boarded the bus to take us back to Hakone-Yumoto and being our train ride to Shinjuku. Somewhere on this bus ride I managed to lose my ticket. Just my luck.