Days 31-37: 1-7 May 2009

LOCATION: FUKUSHIMA, NIKKO, UTSUNOMIYA
MOOD: FESTIVE
LISTENING TO: EMINEM – WE MADE YOU

AND THEN THERE WERE THREE:

After spending a week watching movies and eating out with Henry, it was nice when Clement from Kyoto came up to stay with us for Golden Week. Golden Week is a period of four public holidays that starts on April 29 and ends on May 5, and is usually marked by huge numbers of people either returning home to their ancestral villages or going on short trips. Clement had the time off school, and given that Kyoto grinds to a halt under the weight of tourists during Golden Week he decided to flee the big cities and head for the countryside.

Apart from the road trip to Nikko and Utsunomiya on the 3rd my day to day schedule didn't really change much, but it was a pleasant change to have a third musketeer with us as we perused the cheap eats around Sukagawa and engaged in long movie marathons (clue: "I'll make him an offer he can't refuse"). Unfortunately there isn't really much else to write about, but luckily I did take photos of some of the more interesting things we got up to during the week.

Henry's Wii hasn't really been used for much apart from this taiko drum game. Not really the same as playing on a full size drum, but I don't think they play the Super Mario theme at most major festivals.

The convenience store down the road didn't have a softserve machine, but they did have the next best thing.

And hillarity ensues.
(Yes, that is a copy of An Inconvenient Truth.)

We went to this bread buffet in a nearby town which was surprisingly good value. Think of all-you-can-eat Breadtop, except the food is actually good.

500 yen gets you all this...and more!
(Well it is a buffet after all)

The Three Stooges ride again. I think the staff were afraid that we'd eat them out of house and home.

I think they weren't too far off the mark.

On the way back we passed a used car dealership which we thought was hillarious.

At the local discount store we found this CD for 100 yen. The title loosely translates to 'English for situations where you're in trouble". The deadpan renditions of an attempted mugging were particularly side-splitting.

Given that we either eat out or order take away most meals it's really easy to slip into a constant diet of fried food and sugar. I therefore decided to assuage my guilt by making sure I ate at least one vegetable-based dish a week. This entire plate is just vegetables.

The guys didn't think I could finish it, but who's laughing now? Cop that, vitamin C deficiency syndrome!

We found these rather interesting items at the local supermarket. Make of it what you will.

Liquor is insanely cheap compared with Australia. Japan has a huge drinking culture, and you can buy beer from every 7-Eleven and even from vending machines on the sreet.

These had the potential to be either extremely awesome or God-awful. They ended up being somewhere in between.

Curry-flavoured lemonade. I think the anticipation was better than the actual tasting.

Whale in a can. I'm still holding out for a whale meat restaurant where I can get the full experience.

This was so ridiculous that we just had to buy a can.

I know most of the photos are of food, but there really isn't much else that we got up to.

For some reason watermelons are insanely expensive in Japan. These ones were around 45 Australian dollars a pop.

After all that Japanese food I got the craving for meat so I ordered a steak one night. This paltry 300 gram patty was what I ended up with. It was actually cooked quite well though.

RIDING IN CARS WITH BOYS:

This was the first Golden Week for Clement and I but the second for Henry (he's been living here since mid-2007). Henry stayed at home last Golden Week, and given that Japanese people will usually use the break to travel we felt that we should at least make an effort to do something outside of Sukagawa. In the end we took up Henry's suggestion of a road trip to Nikko and Utsunomiya, respectively a sightseeing destination and a major city.

The first glimpses of Nikko. Sukagawa is fairly flat by comparison, so it the majestic mountains were a nice change of scenery.

We went to sleep early the night before, got up early in the morning, filled up on gas and set off. We had been advised to avoid the highways during the Golden Week period so we elected to take local roads instead. This was working fine until we actually got into Nikko, at which point we immediately found ourselves stuck in a jam. We saw police and ambulances rushing past the gridlock so we figured that there was some sort of accident on one of the main roads, but in reality it was probably a mixture of the accident and the glut of Golden Week traffic. Nikko is one of the most scenic places in Japan, and it was pretty much inevitable that there would be some sort of congestion problem.

Nothing kills the vibe of a roadtrip like gridlock. The Japanese have developed a number of games to help deal with the boredom, although most get old pretty fast. One involves seeing who can add up the numbers of number plates the quickest.

About halfway up the mountain. Clement was clearly much more excited to be there than I was.

After a couple of aborted attempts to circumvent the traffic (read: ragequits) we eventually managed to get on the road to the Nikko national park, which lies up in the mountains that surround the town of Nikko. The ride up the mountain was truly an experience to remember with a continuous series of sharp hairpin turns carved into the sheer mountain face. We did put on the Initial D soundtrack, but we decided to put off an attempt at drifting until we could afford Nissan GT-Rs. There was a bit of congestion on the way up as well, but it was well worth it as, upon reaching the summit, you're greeted by the sight of a huge lake perched elegantly hundred of meters above the town below.

It's hard to give an accurate sense of the scale of the lake with a photo, but that little blip on the right is a full-size ferry.

The scenery at Nikko really is spectacular. I thought it was well worth the drive, but then again I wasn't the one at the wheel.

A reverse angle shot. The waterfall feeds into the lake.

There's not much graffiti in Japan but you do see quite a bit of this sort of stuff around the touristy places. Most of it's pretty banal 'Jack loves Jane' type stuff.

Apart from the lake the national park is also famous for its waterfalls. One was within walking distance of the lake, the other required a bit more of a drive. Both were spectacular in their own respects, although I think we had more fun at the second one:

There was a footy in the back of Henry's car and for some reason I felt like bringing it with me to the waterfall. I'm glad I did.

Sans the AFL vibe.

There was this crazy dude fishing at the foot of the falls, and even the locals were wondering what he was thinking. Of course he got the last laugh (and a couple of gasps from the crowd) when he calmly walked up and scooped a fish out of the water.

By this point it was early afternoon so we had lunch at a restaurant overlooking the second waterfall. They had a surprisingly large selection of ice creams, and the tempura was delicious.

The view out the window behind me was spectacular, but unfortunately we didn't get the exposure settings right.

Baskin Robbins eat your heart out.

The other main sightseeing spot in Nikko is the temple complex that lies at the base of the mountain. We bought a pass that allowed us entrance to five of the main temples, but we unfortunately ran out of time before we could see the last one. We did however manage to get a look at quite of a lot of Buddhist artifacts, the tomb of Tokugawa Ieyasu (the founder of the Tokugawa military government that ruled Japan from 1600 until 1868) and a temple with the original 'see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil' carving.

A famous bridge that straddles a river fed from the lake at the peak.

The term 'tourist trap' doesn't even cut it.

The original 'see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil' shrine. The actual 'see no evil' carving is only a small part of the relief.

I can't believe there weren't more people doing this. The monkeys doing the pose are in the top left hand corner. As a lawyer I naturally ended up doing 'speak no evil'.

The Tokugawa mausoleum. The other two thought it was pretty gaudy, but in my experience military leaders are usually more interested in displays of conspicuous consumption than delicate matters of aesthetics.

The mountains of Nikko are well forested and make for a pretty pleasant break from statutes, shrines and dead military dictators.

With Nikko shutting down for the night around us we decided that it was time to move on, so we jumped in the car and drove 35 kilometers to the nearby city of Utsunomiya. Unfortunately the roads were horrendously congested at this point and the trip took us two hours, and this was made worse by the fact that we then got lost in Utsunomiya's winding streets. After about an hour of driving around and asking random strangers for help we eventually managed to get to our destination: an electronics shop where Henry had ordered some goods. There was also a bookstore in the same complex that was well stocked with a range of Japanese language textbooks so I decided to splash out while the exchange rate was good and save myself the trouble of looking for textbooks elsewhere.

Getting lost in Utsunomiya. Everything looks the same, particularly at night.

Having worked up a hearty appetite standing around and burning money, we then decided to look around for a bite to eat. Unfortunately all the eateries around that area were either outrageously priced or had queues spilling out onto the street, so given that none of us were in the mood to do any more waiting we grabbed a meal at the local McDonalds and started the long trip back. As it turns out, a high sugar, high salt meal may have been just what the doctor ordered as we were staring down the barrel of a 150km straight drive from Utsunomiya back to Sukagawa. Only the odd combination of sugar, caffeine and Fall Out Boy managed to get us home in one piece. Well, that and Henry's extraordinary stamina – by the end of the day he'd spent around 9 or so hours behind the wheel, much of it in heavily congested traffic. Perhaps what was most remarkable about the whole journey however was that we managed to do it on one tank of fuel – now that's fuel efficiency. Chrysler, GM? Take note.