It’s 11:30 pm on Monday the 3rd of January at the moment. I mention that just because I have no idea when I’m going to get to publish this onto the net! Damn free wifi is still eluding me!
Naoko and I set off in the car with a plan for some sightseeing and shopping in Kamakura which is only a 30 minute drive away from the house. By the time we got home, I’d been driving for about 5 hours!
Today is the last day of New Years holidays here in Japan, and also the second day of a relay marathon from Hakone to Tokyo. Yesterday they ran from Tokyo to Hakone. All in all it was not in hindsight the best day for a drive.
When we got closer to Kamakura the navigation system decided to tell us the roads into the city had been closed in some places. In fact all the roads into town were closed from about 1km away from the main temple. Only buses were getting through. The security at the closure waved us off and we took the first of many detours for the day.
Realising that Kamakura was not a place we were going to get to go, and that the knife shop would have to wait for another day, we decided to set the navigation system for Yokohama and the book shop. By this stage the marathon runners had passed Fujisawa and were almost at Yokohama. We figured by the time we got there they’d be all the way into Tokyo and well out of our way. We got back on the main road and headed in the right direction, after having only gone a couple of kms down the road the radio kindly informed us that there was a 10 km traffic jam into Yokohama that was going to take several hours to clear, needless to say sitting in a traffic jam didn’t sound like any fun. We wondered for a moment about heading west instead to a small town with a castle that I’ve been to a few times, a place called Odawara. The next thing the radio mentioned was that there was a 19 km traffic jam in that direction because of the race and because there had been an accident.
South was a no go, east was a traffic jam, and so was the west. This left us with two choices… Go home or go north. The answer may seem easy but the problem is there isn’t much IN the near North from where we were.
We stopped off at a convenience store off to the side of the main road, our second visit to the same shop in one day, having just gone in to get some snacks and rice balls for lunch on our way to Kamakura during our original journey plan. We spent a little while checking on the navigation system for any places of interest on the map. Naoko tried to call a sake brewery not too far away, but they seem to still be closed for oshougatsu (new years holiday).
After a few locations were scratched for being either too far away, or too boring, I eventually found what appeared to be a small lake on the map that was only an hour and a half away or so depending on traffic. With the location locked in we headed off in the direction of the distant hills.
As I drove along it gradually became less and less populated, country side by Japanese standards. In saying that mind you I don’t think there would have been more than a 5 minute gap between outcroppings of houses, just enough space between development plots for a few fields, or a hill that didn’t have any houses on the top of it, not really what we would call country at all, about as rural as the edges of the hutt valley!
The further from the main cities we got though the closer the mountains came, and the colder it got. We didn’t actually see any snow up close yet but we could see it on the far away hills. The other big difference was that the roads got even narrower, and the speeds people were doing got even faster! I didn’t have any problem with the roads where there was a clear definition that there was space for two lanes, New Zealand roads have me plenty of practice in driving those at speeds, seeing as sometimes we even mark those kinds of roads as being 100 km per hour zones! The problem was the one lane roads with two way traffic, no space for a footpath, pedestrians, and cyclists all at the same time! I’m getting the hang of it though,a good policy seems to be to follow whatever the car in front of you is doing!
Somewhere between the last main road and the start of the hills Naoko fell asleep and I was left to try and keep track of the narrow roads and the japanese speaking navigation system all by myself! I must say I enjoy the fact that speed limits appear to be an optional advisory in this country. The narrowness of the road and the number of other occupants in one stretch of it, tends to be the indicator of what speed its okay to do!
The “beware of curving” signposted road into the hills was nothing compared to the Rimutaka hill road, and eventually I rounded a bend and just as I’d hoped we would find, a very picturesque lake appeared alongside the road! Several different kinds of bridges spanned various bays in the small lake that in NZ we would of just built the road to wind around, and there were even a couple of tunnels through inconvenient parts of the hillside.
I pulled over at a nice rest stop beside the lake and we had a bit of a wander around and a look at the view. The attached photos are from the rest stop. It was the perfect location for an otherwise random drive, and made us both feel that the day had certainly not been a waste even if the original plans had changed several times!
After a bit of a stretching of our legs we decided to go a bit further and then drive over a bridge to the other side of the lake and try driving back down the other side.
After crossing the bridge I took the first chance I could to turn and drive alongside the lake, in what I thought would be a route that lead us back to the start, from the other side. We drove a little ways down the road then set the navigation system for home. The navi promptly suggested we do a U-turn at the next available moment… A word of advice, if your navigation tells you to turn around, better do it sooner rather than later! Thinking there’s bound to be a spot to turn around just a but further up the road, we kept going and suddenly found ourselves on a piece of road with a barrier down the middle and no U-turn signs everywhere. This then turned into a stretch of road barely wide enough for one car, even though it was two way and on the map as some kind of main road!
This little winding road just kept going, deeper into the mountains, following a narrow arm of the lake that we hadn’t noticed on the navigation map. The blind corners all had large mirrors on them so it was never really a dangerous road, but there was certainly no stretch of road long enough to warrant a three point turn with clearance from corners in both directions! We saw signs on the maps for camping grounds up ahead and thought these would at least provide a car park where we could turn… Wrong again! In the middle of winter all camp grounds are closed and all driveways into them chained off at the road! Not even enough space to pull a three point turn! To top it off a couple of the camp grounds had clearly been abandoned for a few years and had rather derelict looking buildings from what we could see from the road way above… Very creepy, perfect setting for some kind of horror movie! Dusk slowly falling, a narrow road that was taking us god only knows where, and the only shelter around were run down ‘haunted’ looking cabins in the woods! If it wasn’t for an occasional car coming the other way I really would of thought this road was not actually going anywhere!
Just before we reached the point of true concern for how much time we had to get back, a small bend in the road provided enough visibility to do a quick reverse into the edge and swing around in a u-turn and head for home! Driving back along the road knowing we were once more headed in the right direction gave us a chance to actually appreciate the scenery on this side of the lake, and really notice how run down and haunted the ‘camp grounds’ truly seemed to be!
We were soon on the right side of the lake and headed back through the winding hills for home! It was an interesting adventure in what was otherwise looking like a day of frustrating traffic jams and road closures. After driving around for 5 hours, seeing half of a small lake (it might have just been a wide dam in the river) and stopping at convenience stores 3 times, we eventually made it home just before 5, perfect timing for dinner!
Another fabulous day in the freezing north! Tomorrow we are off to do some shopping at an outlet store near Mt Fuji. More stories of driving and adventurers with navigation systems to follow after tomorrow I’m sure!
For now I’m off to sleep before the day starts again in the all to close future!
Ps, just for good measure I’ve thrown in a shot of what one of those trays of sushi looks like. We ordered more for dinner tonight and I forgot to get a photo last time!