April 22: Travel to Toyama
Apr. 25th, 2012 06:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blatherskitePosting this several days late because we haven’t found Internet access, and there’s none at our current ryokan. (We’re currenty stealing wi-fi access in the lower lobby of the Tokyu Hotel in Matsumoto.) Posting should be more regular once we’re in Kyoto in a few days. More photos to follow tomorrow, if all goes well.
Our final Japanese breakfast at Sosuke, and every bit as yummy as the ones before. Today’s differences from previous brekkies were a fried egg, sunny-side up and with a solid orange yolk, fried tofu, and something that at first looked like potato salad, but turned out to be mashed soybeans with sweet red bell peppers, tiny chunks of either carrot or orange bell pepper (hard to tell, since they were boiled soft and tender), and what may have been a bit of mayonnaise to bind it all together. Very yummy, and I’m going to need to find out how to make it as an alternative to hummus.
The trip to Toyama took us through the last of the narrow part of the Hida River Valley and into the broad plain that lies between the two mountain ranges as they expand. It’s lovely scenery all the way. All was well until about half an hour out of Toyama, when the train pulled to a halt and we were told the train couldn’t continue because of high winds farther along the track. Some of the stretches of track are exposed and run along steep slopes, so I imagine that if the winds get bad enough, there’s a significant risk of the train being blown into the river far below. Japan Rail arranged for a bus, and we waited about 45 minutes in a tiny, cramped waiting room until the bus arrived to take us the rest of the way to Toyama. I went out for a brief walk, and the wind was fierce enough that I had to lean into it to make any progress, and that was in a sheltered area between buildings. So I imagine it was a good thing we didn’t continue by train. But later, when the bus took us across a narrow bridge spanning the river, I confess that it wasn’t clear to me how this was any safer.
Nonetheless, we made it safely into town and set about our next task, which was to find the ticket office for the private railway that would take us on our trip through the mountains on “the Alpine Route”. We’re of the philosophy that if you’re going somewhere you’ve never been, and need to get an early start the next morning, it’s not wise to try figuring out where you need to go at the last minute. Good call, since the directions we got from the locals at the Japan Rail station weren’t all that clear, the station was under massive reconstruction, and there was a maze of walkways around and under the station that routed around the construction. This led to much unproductive wandering hither and yon as we followed advice that was consistent in spirit, but contradictory in the details.
We would never have managed to figure out where to go without the help of a kind clerk at a gift shop beside the train station; unlike everyone else, she actually had simple instructions: “It’s over there, in the ESTA building.” My Japanese is stil painfully primitive, but I managed to get across the concept of “we would like to go to X, can you tell us how to get there” each time we asked someone. But although all of the Japanese we’ve met have been happy to try communicating when we make the effort to be polite and speak a little Japanese, their responses tend to be in Japanese that’s far beyond my vocabulary or in somewhat limited English.
The Comfort Hotel was conveniently located, basically across the street from the train station. That’s why we chose it: so we wouldn’t have to go for a long walk or take public transit the following day, when we wanted to get an early start. My experience in North America is that you get much better value from Comfort Inn and the like than from most more expensive hotels, and that was true here too. Nonetheless, the room was tiny and sized to the standards of Japanese visitors: I could barely fit on the toilet or squeeze past it to get into the shower, and the room’s front door cleared the wall of the bathroom beside it with millimetres to spare. But it was warm, comfortable, well appointed, quiet, and offered free wi-fi plus wired Internet. The staff were wonderfully welcoming and had good English, and told us everything we needed to know to arrange to have our baggage forwarded the following day. (The Alpine Route is very popular, so there’s no room to bring full luggage with you even during the off season, like in April, so you pay a courier service to transport your bags to a pickup point at the far end of the trip. Cost us about $30 for the two bags.)
They also helped us find an okonomi restaurant a couple blocks from the hotel. I’ve resolved to try one in each city, though not to be obsessive about it, and Shoshanna is amused and tolerant of my quest. The particular restaurant we were referred to was a tiny hole in the wall (about a dozen seats in total, including two tables and the rest wrapped around the griddle area) in the basement of a large office building or shopping mall, and seemed to be very popular with the locals. We sat next to the griddle and watched the cook and what may have been his mother orbiting around each other like a pair of dancers following complex choreography in a tight space to prepare a dozen or so pickup orders while also feeding everyone seated in the restaurant. It’s quite the production, and entertaining dinner theater. A second cook organizes all the ingredients in a small room behind the griddle, and passes them out to the griddle chef, who dumps them onto the griddle and gets everything frying. At one point, he had something like a dozen okonomis frying at the same time, and none of them burned.
Unlike other okonomis I’ve had, which are left round like pancakes after they spread out on the griddle, this cook squared the edges quickly and efficiently to create rectangles that fit perfectly into the takeout boxes—all by eye, with no measurement involved. Possibly the best okonomi I’ve had, though they put about half a cup of mayonnaise on the top instead of the usual dollop. No, I’m not kidding—half a cup. You could get very fat living on a diet of these things. Also unlike other okonomi restaurants, the chef cuts the okonomis into bite-sized pieces for you with swift motions of two very sharp spatulas. In between okonomis, there’s much vigorous scraping of the grill to remove surplus oil and any burned bits. This is significant muscle work, and both the chef and his mother (?) had forearms like Popeye the sailor.
We still had enough clothing to get by for another few days, but since there was a laundry room just down the hall from our hotel room, we decided to take the opportunity to do a wash. Quick and painless, and now we won’t have to do laundry again before we get to Kyoto.
Because it was a Sunday night, there wasn’t much pedestrian traffic around the station, so there didn’t seem to be many restaurants open. We eventually found a place in a mall basement that served yummy food (a Korean beef hot pot for me and a chicken-vegetable stirfry for Shoshanna, followed by gyoza = dumplings), but for some reason they added a table charge, and they did the trick of delivering a bowl of edomame (soybeans still in their pods) to eat while we waited and then charging us for them. We thought they were complimentary appetizers, which is sometimes the case back home. The waitress spoke rapid-fire Japanese and no English that we could tell, so possibly she had asked whether we wanted the edomame and didn’t pick up on the fact that we don’t speak Japanese well enough to understand her. Not a problem, but annoying because we’d thought the edomame were free.
Preparations for alpine route that night involved getting out our hiking armor, since it can be up to 20 degrees C colder atop the mountains, and you never know what kind of weather you’re going to get up there; weather changes rapidly in the mountains, and even if you know the patterns for a particular range, you still need to be prepared for surprises. I have some really good hiking gear: polypropylene longjohns, undershirt, and long-sleeve shirt, plus Goretex coat and pants. The Goretex keeps the rain out, and the polypropylene keeps the moisture inside the Goretex from accumulating to dangerous levels. It’s great stuff because it breathes well, wicks moisture away from your skin, and dries quickly. But it also keeps you nicely warm. That combination is important for me because I sweat so much and overheat when I exert myself, as is the case during a vigorous hike; a few years ago in the York moors, I almost ended up with hypothermia as a result of this problem, and I learned my lesson well. Shoshanna had her usual layers: thermal underwear, sweaters, and multiple layers of coats.
Early to bed because it was potentially a long day tomorrow, and so tired from our various exertions that I slept right through to 6ish and Shoshanna even longer.
Our final Japanese breakfast at Sosuke, and every bit as yummy as the ones before. Today’s differences from previous brekkies were a fried egg, sunny-side up and with a solid orange yolk, fried tofu, and something that at first looked like potato salad, but turned out to be mashed soybeans with sweet red bell peppers, tiny chunks of either carrot or orange bell pepper (hard to tell, since they were boiled soft and tender), and what may have been a bit of mayonnaise to bind it all together. Very yummy, and I’m going to need to find out how to make it as an alternative to hummus.
The trip to Toyama took us through the last of the narrow part of the Hida River Valley and into the broad plain that lies between the two mountain ranges as they expand. It’s lovely scenery all the way. All was well until about half an hour out of Toyama, when the train pulled to a halt and we were told the train couldn’t continue because of high winds farther along the track. Some of the stretches of track are exposed and run along steep slopes, so I imagine that if the winds get bad enough, there’s a significant risk of the train being blown into the river far below. Japan Rail arranged for a bus, and we waited about 45 minutes in a tiny, cramped waiting room until the bus arrived to take us the rest of the way to Toyama. I went out for a brief walk, and the wind was fierce enough that I had to lean into it to make any progress, and that was in a sheltered area between buildings. So I imagine it was a good thing we didn’t continue by train. But later, when the bus took us across a narrow bridge spanning the river, I confess that it wasn’t clear to me how this was any safer.
Nonetheless, we made it safely into town and set about our next task, which was to find the ticket office for the private railway that would take us on our trip through the mountains on “the Alpine Route”. We’re of the philosophy that if you’re going somewhere you’ve never been, and need to get an early start the next morning, it’s not wise to try figuring out where you need to go at the last minute. Good call, since the directions we got from the locals at the Japan Rail station weren’t all that clear, the station was under massive reconstruction, and there was a maze of walkways around and under the station that routed around the construction. This led to much unproductive wandering hither and yon as we followed advice that was consistent in spirit, but contradictory in the details.
We would never have managed to figure out where to go without the help of a kind clerk at a gift shop beside the train station; unlike everyone else, she actually had simple instructions: “It’s over there, in the ESTA building.” My Japanese is stil painfully primitive, but I managed to get across the concept of “we would like to go to X, can you tell us how to get there” each time we asked someone. But although all of the Japanese we’ve met have been happy to try communicating when we make the effort to be polite and speak a little Japanese, their responses tend to be in Japanese that’s far beyond my vocabulary or in somewhat limited English.
The Comfort Hotel was conveniently located, basically across the street from the train station. That’s why we chose it: so we wouldn’t have to go for a long walk or take public transit the following day, when we wanted to get an early start. My experience in North America is that you get much better value from Comfort Inn and the like than from most more expensive hotels, and that was true here too. Nonetheless, the room was tiny and sized to the standards of Japanese visitors: I could barely fit on the toilet or squeeze past it to get into the shower, and the room’s front door cleared the wall of the bathroom beside it with millimetres to spare. But it was warm, comfortable, well appointed, quiet, and offered free wi-fi plus wired Internet. The staff were wonderfully welcoming and had good English, and told us everything we needed to know to arrange to have our baggage forwarded the following day. (The Alpine Route is very popular, so there’s no room to bring full luggage with you even during the off season, like in April, so you pay a courier service to transport your bags to a pickup point at the far end of the trip. Cost us about $30 for the two bags.)
They also helped us find an okonomi restaurant a couple blocks from the hotel. I’ve resolved to try one in each city, though not to be obsessive about it, and Shoshanna is amused and tolerant of my quest. The particular restaurant we were referred to was a tiny hole in the wall (about a dozen seats in total, including two tables and the rest wrapped around the griddle area) in the basement of a large office building or shopping mall, and seemed to be very popular with the locals. We sat next to the griddle and watched the cook and what may have been his mother orbiting around each other like a pair of dancers following complex choreography in a tight space to prepare a dozen or so pickup orders while also feeding everyone seated in the restaurant. It’s quite the production, and entertaining dinner theater. A second cook organizes all the ingredients in a small room behind the griddle, and passes them out to the griddle chef, who dumps them onto the griddle and gets everything frying. At one point, he had something like a dozen okonomis frying at the same time, and none of them burned.
Unlike other okonomis I’ve had, which are left round like pancakes after they spread out on the griddle, this cook squared the edges quickly and efficiently to create rectangles that fit perfectly into the takeout boxes—all by eye, with no measurement involved. Possibly the best okonomi I’ve had, though they put about half a cup of mayonnaise on the top instead of the usual dollop. No, I’m not kidding—half a cup. You could get very fat living on a diet of these things. Also unlike other okonomi restaurants, the chef cuts the okonomis into bite-sized pieces for you with swift motions of two very sharp spatulas. In between okonomis, there’s much vigorous scraping of the grill to remove surplus oil and any burned bits. This is significant muscle work, and both the chef and his mother (?) had forearms like Popeye the sailor.
We still had enough clothing to get by for another few days, but since there was a laundry room just down the hall from our hotel room, we decided to take the opportunity to do a wash. Quick and painless, and now we won’t have to do laundry again before we get to Kyoto.
Because it was a Sunday night, there wasn’t much pedestrian traffic around the station, so there didn’t seem to be many restaurants open. We eventually found a place in a mall basement that served yummy food (a Korean beef hot pot for me and a chicken-vegetable stirfry for Shoshanna, followed by gyoza = dumplings), but for some reason they added a table charge, and they did the trick of delivering a bowl of edomame (soybeans still in their pods) to eat while we waited and then charging us for them. We thought they were complimentary appetizers, which is sometimes the case back home. The waitress spoke rapid-fire Japanese and no English that we could tell, so possibly she had asked whether we wanted the edomame and didn’t pick up on the fact that we don’t speak Japanese well enough to understand her. Not a problem, but annoying because we’d thought the edomame were free.
Preparations for alpine route that night involved getting out our hiking armor, since it can be up to 20 degrees C colder atop the mountains, and you never know what kind of weather you’re going to get up there; weather changes rapidly in the mountains, and even if you know the patterns for a particular range, you still need to be prepared for surprises. I have some really good hiking gear: polypropylene longjohns, undershirt, and long-sleeve shirt, plus Goretex coat and pants. The Goretex keeps the rain out, and the polypropylene keeps the moisture inside the Goretex from accumulating to dangerous levels. It’s great stuff because it breathes well, wicks moisture away from your skin, and dries quickly. But it also keeps you nicely warm. That combination is important for me because I sweat so much and overheat when I exert myself, as is the case during a vigorous hike; a few years ago in the York moors, I almost ended up with hypothermia as a result of this problem, and I learned my lesson well. Shoshanna had her usual layers: thermal underwear, sweaters, and multiple layers of coats.
Early to bed because it was potentially a long day tomorrow, and so tired from our various exertions that I slept right through to 6ish and Shoshanna even longer.