Where to start?
Well yesterday morning we got up at about 6am. It was not fun. We had a quick breakfast and headed into Shinjuka to catch a bus to Kawaguchi. Shinjuka is one of the newest and most modern areas of Tokyo. It was in fact part of the inspiration for Bladerunner. Photos to come. Getting there involved taking the subway during rush hour. Until now, I would have taken the subway here over London any day. Everything is clean and runs exactly on time. Well rush hour is a different story. There are people employed to stand on the platforms at the train doors and to push people in. We were quite lucky in that we got on an empty train not due to leave for another five minutes. Just before it did, it packed up and trust me you don’t know the meaning of the phrase packed up until you have seen this. And just when I thought no-one else could get on, the queue was pushed onto the train.
Kawaguchi is one of the ‘Fuji Five Lakes’ at the base of Fuji-san. W It took about 2.5 hours to get there by bus, not even Tokyo is exempt from road works. We drove through some absolutely stunning countryside. I have never Autumn look better than it does here. The trees are just stunning. We basically drove through the mountains for over an hour and it was all woods everywhere you looked.
Anyways we got there and after some trouble sorted out tickets for everything we wanted. Well that’s not true exactly. It is out of season and we were not able to get anywhere near to the mountain itself. Even the first few camps were closed. A disappointment but not entirely unexpected. So we had a boat trip around the lake and then took the Ropeway (cable car) to the top of a nearby mountain and took some photos.
After another bit of just wandering around we grabbed a bus back into Tokyo. This was a little more of a scenic route and it drove about half way around Fuji-san giving us some more views of it and of a couple of the other lakes.
We got back into our hotel shortly after 8. We were both completely and utterly shattered. We had been planning to go out with my sister and some of her friends. Nothing starts in Tokyo till well late. We had provisionally arranged to meet at midnight and take it from there. The earliest you can get home from a night out is around 5am when the trains kick off again. Well anyway we weren’t up for it.
There is of course a ‘however’ at this stage. I was lying on my bed just relaxing, glad to have a load off my feet and the line of thought was to never move again. The other line of thought was along the lines of ‘Fuck it. I am in Tokyo and it is a Friday night. I don’t care how tired I am. I am going out for the night’.
So I did. I rang my sister and arranged to meet up with her. We met in Shibuya. This is the going out district for the Japanese (and the gaijin in the know). We started off in the a bar called the Lime House. You order some food and get a drinks menu with it. You pay something like 1000 Yen (the Y is silent by the way, it is actually pronounced ‘en’ with not much of the ‘e’. ) This works out to be about £5 for a hour. Given that drinks include pitchers of beer and Jim Beam whiskey, this worked out well. This is also the spot for students to hang out, and the place was filled with mainly foreign students. Mairead knew quite a few of them and we ended up with a group of people.
Then we moved on, a club called Fai was doing a 70’s night and it was cheap in with some drinks included in the price. We arrived there and stayed till about 4am. It wasn’t bad at all. I did find it amusing to be in a night club in Tokyo on a Friday night dancing to Abba and Michael Jackson, but hey!
When we finished there, we hit a 24 hour restaurant kinda place for some quick food and coffee for me. I was pretty much asleep on my feet. I had sit down in the club at one stage, closed my eyes and I was asleep. Then just after 5 off to the train station and back to the hotel. I stood on the train and not once, but three times did I fall asleep. If I had not been holding on to a handle on the roof, I would have fallen over. It was not good. Anyways back to the hotel around 6am and slept for about 6 hours.
The photos have been resized hence the lower quality. Galleries with high quality to come when I get back to London.
