So, another early start - up at 6:30 to make sure we were at Tokyo station in time for our first ride on the Shinkansen (bullet train... We are already assimilating!)
This one took us to Nagano, North West of Tokyo, which is a decent sized city surrounded by mountains. We passed through lots of countryside and tiny towns clearly surviving on farming - lots of cabbages, apples and grapes being grown.
From Negano we got on a tiny local train to Yudanaka. It was a bit worrying when we stopped at a station for ages, but then a big train passed us going the other direction and we realised there was only 1 train track!
Yudanaka is an onsen town, built up around hot springs and we are staying in a super traditional ryokan with 4 different onsen baths. More on that to come...
Our reason for visiting was to go to Jigokudani Monkey Park, a national park that is full of wild Macaque monkeys. The owners of our ryokan were kind enough to drive us up to the entrance and from there its a 1.6km walk to the park.
We had been worried about the rains hitting and us getting soaked and the monkeys all hiding, however there was nothing of the sort. The weather has actually been fine almost all day.
And monkeywise, we really didn't need to worry. The moment you enter the park there was about 10 of them eating, playing and posing for photos. You keep walking a little further and you end up near a river with a little waterfall right in the mountains and more monkeys than you can shake a stick at, including some very young babies.
There was also a natural hot spring that they like to sit in! We spent ages just watching them monkey around... It was amazing how they didn't care at all about us, walking right next to us without a care! Really amazing place and very glad we made the trip!
We were also lucky enough to get a lift back to our accommodation - the owner was dropping some other people at the entrance and spotted us on his return journey so drove us back home with him.
Back to our guest house and we had to do some quick googleing... We were given yukata (light weight kimonos) and wanted to make sure we got all our etiquette right.
We also need to learn the rules of how to use an onsen. These hot baths are where Japanese go to relax and wallow, but there are lots of rules, mostly because everyone is in a giant naked bathtub together. Our ryokan has an outdoor one, and I think we were both very glad that we had it to ourselves. It was very relaxing, but super hot, so after about 20 minutes we were out!
There is very little in Yudanaka, so the evening has been spent reading as well as eating the dinner that the hosts prepared for us - there was 9 completely different dishes: beef cooked on a hot plate at the table, sashimi, tempura, dumplings, miso, baked salmon, a Porky miso thing, something unrecognisable and fried (and delicious!) and something that looked a lot like raw octopus that neither of us tried. Plus rice. And rounded off with some green tea.
Blimey.
We didn't get a photo of dinner, but breakfast was a similar affair
We are enjoying the peacefulness of the place, especially after Tokyo, and are looking forward to heading to Kyoto tomorrow!
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