Our second destination was Fuji Five Lakes. However, going from the flower park over to the Mt. Fuji area is not straight forward when you don’t have a car. All trains lead back to Tokyo so, since it was a Sunday, we visited the church Anna had attended throughout the semester. (It took about 2.5 hours to get back to Tokyo from the R9 hotel, consequently we had to go to the 3 PM service as we didn’t get up in time to make the 11 AM.) While waiting for church I explored around Shinjuku a little (Tokyo is like New York City, there’s lots of cities and “special wards” that make the up the metropolis, and Shinjuku is one of the largest). Shinjuku station is the busiest railway station in the world. It’s the major hub for railway and subway lines. (According to Wikipedia, of the 84 busiest railway stations in the world, Japan has 64, and of those 35 are in Tokyo. The US only has one on the list, Penn Station in NYC, and Shinjuku has ten times as many passengers.) To add to the confusion they added a not one, but four shopping malls on top of it (the tallest has 11 floors).
I went to an arcade next to Bic Camera (a MASSIVE technology store, not just cameras) but was surprised at all the ‘gotcha’ games (i.e. coin pushers, slot machines, horse racing games, etc.). There weren’t that many traditional arcade games and I didn’t end up playing anything.
After church we started out for the Mt. Fuji area only to find out that all the trains were booked. (The start of our trip happened to correspond with the start of Golden Week, which consists of 4 public holidays, April 29th, and May 3, 4, 5, though people often take the intervening days off as well. Our trip hopefully won’t be quite as impacted because the dates are a bit broken up this year.) A mad dash over to the bus terminal landed us two of the last tickets. We boarded within minutes and were on our way. Once we arrived in Kawaguchiko, had dinner, and went to the hotel. The next day was all about Mt. Fuji.
After touring around town a bit admiring Mt. Fuji and the cherry blossoms we went up to a Pagoda. It was a LONG climb, 400 stairs. Unfortunately by the time we got to the top it was just starting to rain so views of the mountain were obscured.
Once we left the Pagoda they had a winding road so you didn’t have to go back down the stairs of you don’t want to) we went back into town and wandered around for the remainder of the day. (We couldn’t just go back to the hotel because reservations for the bus are required and must be scheduled in advance).
[In Columbo’s voice] Oh, one more thing… Apparently going up to the Pagoda to see the sunrise with Mt Fuji is very popular.
