Japan, Day Five: Magome

On Friday we set out for our first adventure into the countryside. To get to Magome, you take a bullet train to Nagoya, transfer to a different train to Nakatsugawa, then get a bus into town. The total journey was about 3 hours. 

Japanese bullet trains are awesome. I don't know why neither of us took a picture of one. They run up to 200 mph on tracks devoted only to high speed rail, so they don't have to slow down for road crossings, et cetera. The first time we saw one we were waiting on the platform in Tokyo and one blew through the station at top speed, inches away! It was amazing. Lots of people were always taking photos and videos of them. 

Everything went smoothly and we ended up in Magome in the early afternoon. 

Magome is a small town in the Kiso Valley, a mountainous region between Tokyo and Kyoto. It was important historically as a post town, and is popular today because you can still walk the old post road between the mountain villages. It's built straight up a hillside, which we had to hike up with our luggage.

Lodging in the post towns is all traditional Japanese-style inns. We stayed at Magome Chaya the first night.

It had a strong hostel vibe. The owner spoke perfect American-style English; she must have either grown up or spent a lot of years here.

This was the first place we'd stayed where no shoes were allowed in the building. Like the others, they provided slippers, but the slippers were always too big for me and it felt hazardous to wear them around. I just went barefoot.

This was also the first place with a Japanese-style room. This means the room has tatami mats and mostly no furniture, and you sleep on futons that are set up at bedtime. I admit we were a bit underwhelmed when we first saw the room. It's literally just a room.

Our feet almost touched when we sat against opposite walls.

Most of these inns also have shared bathrooms. At Magome Chaya there were toilets down the hall and a shared shower/bath room downstairs. The shower room was an open room the size of my bedroom closet but had three shower heads - horrors! We showered at a weird time right after dinner and fortunately everyone in these places seems to be on the same page about not wanting to shower up close and personal with strangers, so no one else was in there at the same time.

The toilet room had special slippers. We saw this in many places. One restaurant had them, I think.

We spent the afternoon wandering around in Magome. There are some small museums but we didn't visit any.

It honestly doesn't even look real.

We walked up to the very top of the hill for lovely views of the mountains.

An old man was puttering around with his plants at this house. People really live in these places!

A bunch of people got off the bus with us at the bottom of the hill, but I don't know where they went because it was very quiet.

  
CAT!

There's another one down there.

A Japanese woman asked if we'd like her to take our picture - unsolicited, I swear - so we said yes. Her husband was clearly impatient with the whole proceeding.

Everything closes in Magome at 5pm. We went into the only grocery store to get some snacks to have on hand just in case. This was one item for sale.

They were harvesting rice below the town.

I've never seen rice growing before!

We walked down the road a bit toward the place we were staying on our second night in Magome, so we'd know what to expect when we had to do it with luggage the following day. We passed this shrine on the way, between some houses.

Our guest house serves dinner at 6:00 sharp - and you have to eat there, because there aren't any restaurants. Fortunately, this dinner was fantastic. Noodles, whole fried trout, rice, pickles, tempura shrimp and vegetables, a separate pot of steamed cabbage and meat (not pictured), custard with blackberries for dessert, and the Kiso Valley local specialty: horse sashimi. We ate it, and it was really good. I asked Ben afterward what we'd do if served cat sashimi and we agreed we would not eat it.

The guest house experience was a bit shocking upon arrival after spending 5 days in a four star hotel, but once our brains adjusted we were on board. The expertly prepared and cheerfully served dinner made it clear that they take hospitality seriously, and all the other guests we ran into were so respectful. Everyone is very aware that we're essentially sharing a space and we never had any issues with noise. Plus, it turns out a futon with a buckwheat pillow is my ideal scenario: I slept through the night for the first time since we arrived.