Magome Chaya also served us a traditional Japanese breakfast, which was stellar. You pile up little pieces of salmon & the omelet (top right) with some of those shredded vegetables on the rice, then cover it up with a little piece of seaweed and pick the whole thing up at once. Like a DIY deconstructed sushi roll.
Here's our room. You can see why our initial reaction was "oh."
After breakfast we set out to walk the Nakasendo (the old post road) to the next town, Tsumago. It takes about three hours. The tourist office in Magome will forward your luggage to Tsumago (and vice versa), but I wasn't sure how that all worked and I couldn't find a good place to stay in Tsumago anyway, so our plan was to walk there, look around at the town for a while, and then take the bus back.
Japanese scarecrow! This area is very rural. Lots of farms and small groups of houses we passed through, interspersed with the forest.
I've never seen legit bamboo forests like I saw in Japan. These are huge, as big as trees.
We saw some more cats. This guy jumped up here to escape an altercation with two others on the ground.
Here's one of the little village areas we passed through.
The route was mostly through forest, though, with some shrines here and there.
None of the guidebooks mentioned bears!!!
They had these bells every 1/2 mile or so that you were supposed to ring to deter the bears. It wasn't super reassuring.
This trail was mostly straight up for the first kilometer, but it wasn't too bad. We went hiking over Labor Day in Hanging Rock State Park in North Carolina and I felt like I was going to die the entire time and swore to myself that this Nakasendo day would be my last mountain hike ever. After this, though, I've changed my mind. I need to only avoid the strenuous routes, I think.
A small graveyard (I think?) in the middle of the forest.
The path was clearly marked, and this is an activity mentioned everywhere as a popular thing to do in Japan, but we only saw a handful of other people the entire time. We did set out early in the morning, around 8:30, which probably helped.
There are two large waterfalls along the trail. This one is maybe 20 feet high.
This one is bigger.
We sat here on a bench for a while looking at the view. Some older couples were just starting the walk up from the foot of the hill and we were like "ha ha, suckers."
Around lunchtime we arrived in Tsumago, which looks just like Magome except not on a hill. The town has worked hard to preserve its heritage, disallowing modern development and advertising and other things that would ruin the atmosphere. All the work to maintain the town is done by volunteer local townspeople.
The main street is lined with many shops selling authentic crafts and other locally made products.
We ate lunch at a soba place (sign outside: "Our shop is a soba shop") with tempura shrimp. There was a man next to us filming himself on his phone eating the noodles with commentary. Very quietly, but still. Nobody is going to watch you on YouTube talking about noodles, guy.
After this we got some ice cream and sat on a bench to eat it as it's considered quite rude in Japan to walk and eat at the same time. This small child approaching with his mom and grandma saw us and screamed something several times to his mom which made us all laugh, even more so when we looked it up to discover it meant, "NOW! NOW!" He wanted some ice cream!
There are a couple of small museums in Tsumago, so we went in the first one to learn about the history of the town. The woman who gave us the tour was an amazing character, one of our favorites from the trip.
Despite it being 80 humid degrees, she made Ben sit here inches from the fire because this is the place of honor where only the man of the house would get to sit.
This museum was a traditional house owned by someone important in the town. The emperor once visited! The owner built a special table and a special bathroom for him even though he was only there for a few minutes,
Beautiful garden, of course.
Behind the house is a museum that tells the history of Tsumago and the Kiso Valley as a whole.
We also went to another site across the street that used to be a guest house for visitors to Tsumago.
This was designed with an inner chamber for VIP visitors, surrounded on all sides by rooms to be occupied by his bodyguards. The exterior rooms were specifically designed to be wide enough so that potential attackers outside the house couldn't reach the inner room with spears.
After this we found the bus stop and rode 30 minutes back to Magome. By the time I started looking for hotels, lodging was very limited in town so we had to switch to a new guest house, Motomiya, for the second night. Our room was much bigger here - a sitting room with real furniture!
The owner, Keiko, was wonderful. She gave us tea and cookies when we arrived and sat down and asked us questions about our trip. Her English was spotty so this led to a lot of good-natured confusion. She cooked us a great dinner as well. The other guests were three French men, only one of whom spoke fluent English. We chatted with him a bit and then after dinner we all had tea while Keiko showed us how to make origami cranes. I started off a bit cocky about my origami skills but by the end had been humbled.
No comments:
Post a Comment