Turning Japanese

  3-4 April Nakatsugawa Today we travel across to Nakatsugawa to commence our walk in the footsteps of poets, emperors, samurai’s and merchants past along the ancient Nakasendo  Way trade route which connected Edo (Tokyo) in the east, with Kyoto in the west, via a direct inland route following the river valleys through the mountains. Again we are cheating. The Nakasendo way is about 200km long, but we only have four days of walking, so we have picked the eyes out of it, and will walk 4 discontinuous section, using public transport to get between sections. The sun is shining for our arrival in Nakatsugawa, so we choose, despite there being a steep climb involved, to walk the two kilometres to our ryokan, Nagataki Lodge, but about three quarters of the way there, the hotel bus drove past the other way, and upon spotting us, the driver took pity and stopped to pick us up, and he wouldn’t take no for an answer. Whilst we mumbled to ourselves that we were quite happy to walk, the...

  28 March – 31 March Kanazawa A big day today with 5 changes of trains and about 8 hours of travel to get to Kanazawa. No breakfast with our hotel booking in Nagasaki, so we have to go foraging for something before our train leaves at 9:30.  Problem is that Nagasaki seems to not rate breakfast. There are plenty of quite nice cafes, but none of them are open until after our train has well gone. Eventually we found something at the station providing our staples of coffee and bread, which was enough to keep us going for the day. As I have said, Beth has been really looking forward to Kanazawa, but Kanazawa, it seems, was not looking forward so much to having us. Or so the weather dished up to us suggested. It was quite cold and a bit rainy. Rather than try to come to grips with a bus system which wasn’t making sense to us, we decided to put up our umbrellas and drag our cases the kilometre and a half to our Airbnb style accommodation. Once we got there we were chilled to the b...