I tried to like our hotel a little better today. John took me up the to spa on the roof this morning. It hardly compared to the onsen in Matsumoto, but it was clean, relatively uncrowded, and there was a nice view from the outside tub. We had breakfast at the hotel’s restaurant. It was a buffet of some western and mostly Japanese food. Nothing was awful, but nothing was great, either.
We had a guided tour of the city this morning. Our guide was a charming young woman named Akiko. She spoke quite good English. It turned out that she had lived and studied in Halifax for a year. Her walking tour focused on the special foods of this region. It was a pleasant way to spend a morning. For much of the tour, we walked along the river.
There were dozens of stalls set up on the embankment. We stopped at many of them. We tasted different types of miso, looked at unusual vegetables, and sampled local specialties. One of the places I liked best was a coffee cart that sold espresso in cups made from cookie dough. They also did very cute designs on the top of the cappuccino foam.
We walked through the narrow streets of the old merchants’ quarter. While not quite as extensive as similar neighborhoods in Kyoto, there is a truly impressive amount of old houses and shops in Takayama. For some reason, though, I did not seem to take pictures here. I guess I was too busy eating….
We stopped at a very large shrine on a hillside.
There was some kind of event going on, and there were a large number of older people there wearing kimono. The men all had the emblem of the shrine on their gray and black kimono. I man was talking to them over a loud speaker and they seemed to be intently listening. Akiko did not give us much of a sense of what was going on, but I wondered if it was in some way political. Shinto practice in recent years has often been linked to quite conservative elements in Japanese society.
Instead, she took our picture.
Our last stop were at a place that sold grilled rice on a stick
and a little shop that sold pretty little tea sweets.
After four lovely hours together, we said goodbye to Akiko. John and I had some time here and decided to look at some of the local shops. After shopping for fifteen or twenty minutes, I realized that I did not have my camera. I was upset as I this would be the third camera I have somehow lost on a trip. But this being Japan, probably the most honest country in the world, it was exactly where I had left it on a post on the busiest street in Takayama.
We have been amazed in Japan to find everything left out without fear of theft. Good bicycles are left overnight in front of houses or stores. Antique shops leave stuff outside on tables. You never hear the sound, so ubiquitous in Los Angeles, of cars locking and unlocking.
There are many sophisticated museums in Takayama, but John wanted to go to one that was not, the Takayama Showa Kan. Showa refers to the regnal years of the Emperor Hirohito, 1926 - 1989. Kan simply means hall or big room. This private museum is devoted to the popular culture of Japan during that era.
John insisted on having me pose in the school room. I actually was a little upset about the angles in the triangle. You did not need a protractor to understand why this measurement was wrong.
Meanwhile, John was the epitome of post-war angst in a small luncheonette.
We headed back to the train station. On the way, we stopped at the largest Buddhist temple in Takayama. Most of it was closed up, but the architecture was lovely.
One of the most famous things at this temple is a massive tree that is supposed to be about 1200 years old. It is still early spring here, so it was not at its best.
We had bus tickets at 1:10 to go to Hirayu Onsen, the hot spring located high in the mountains. We had stopped here briefly on our way to Takayama. The bus ride, which lasted about an hour, was not unpleasant at all. I brought along my pocket wifi and did some work on this blog as we rode up. The hot springs area is mostly a ski resort, and it has looks a lot like many second or third tier North American ski resorts. It’s not Whistler. John wanted to get something to eat, and we fumbled around with an automated system for ordering your food. The staff tried to helpful, though nobody seemed to speak a word of English. The cafeteria was almost deserted. After we finished eating, we went up to the onsen on the third floor.
As Bette Davis famously said, “What a dump!” There were only two pools, one indoors and one out-of-doors. Both were starting to fall apart. There was genuine hot springs water here with a high calcium content and a trace of sulphur, but the nice water could not make up for the sorry state of the facilities. We were supposed to spend about two hours here, but after a few minutes we figured out the schedule for taking a bus back to Takayama sooner. I am pretty annoyed by this. One of the reasons for working with a travel agent is to avoid mistakes that waste an entire afternoon on a short trip, and this was definitely a wasted afternoon.
This evening we went to a restaurant Akiko had recommended called Kyoyo. It was a charcoal-barbecue-on-your-table joint located in what appeared to be an old nineteenth century house. The food was not bad at all, but the place was filled with Europeans, mostly Dutch. There were only a handful of Japanese customers.
We have a busy, busy day tomorrow.
