Japan #3: Mountains

So Takayama was the second destination on my trip around Japan. A hour and a half on the Shinkansen bullet train took me to Nagoya, where I changed onto the express service to Takayama. 'Express' is stretching it a bit - it took two and a half further hours from Nagoya, and as the train wound its way higher and higher into the mountains, we slowed to a fairly sedate pace. The views along the journey were pretty incredible though, the route skirting round mountains, over rivers and through tunnels. Snow started to appear on the ground and it was about this point that I realised that I wasn't really kitted out for sub-zero mountainous weather...

Downtown Takayama

I spent the rest of the first day scoping out Takayama itself, which is totally different to Tokyo where I'd come from. Small narrow streets with original low rise buildings, it's a pretty small but authentic old city. Stopping for some beef and ramen noodles (awesome steak in this part of Japan), I then headed up one of the mountains a bit to see one of the temples.

Takayama

Day two in Takayama and I hired a car and headed out on the road to see the surrounding area. The car had a sat nav but unfortunately most of the display and spoken instructions weren't in English. It turns out there are few things more off putting when travelling along unfamiliar roads than having an electronic Japanese voice shout unintelligible driving instructions at you. In the process of fighting to turn the voice off, I managed to remove all English text from the screen and buttons, thus rendering the thing next to useless. Still, after some time I managed to figure out the basics and the device successfully guided me north to a place called Tsunogawa.

The scenery en route was amazing: mountains, forests, tiny settlements nestled in between. What was slightly disconcerting was the further from Takayama I drove, the narrower the roads became and the more snow there was. Sure enough, after driving for half an hour or so along a particularly winding narrow road up the side of a mountain, my path was blocked as the rest of the road was deep under 5 feet of snow that hadn't yet been cleared.

Turning around and retracing my steps (the Japanese sat nav lady did not like this), I did eventually make it to a place called Ogimachi: world heritage site and village of ancient wooden farmhouses in one of the valleys. An amazing place, it was a world away from the hi-tech streetscapes of Tokyo and the typical images that come to mind when thinking of Japan.

Ogimachi

I made it back to Takayama in one piece, and that evening found the city's bar district.  However, there seemed to be absolutely no one around at all, the place was eerily quiet. It seems few tourists make it to Takayama, which I guess only adds to it's charm. After much deliberation I picked a bar at random and made my way inside, only to find it empty other than the barman, who was watching one of those bizarre Takeshi's Castle style Japanese TV programmes that they seem to love so much. Unfortunately for me, his food menu was entirely in Japanese, without pictures this time, and his English wasn't up to much.  My Japanese skills hadn't progressed beyond hello, goodbye and thank you, however I did manage to get across the notion of 'beer' and 'noodles' to him so all was good.