Hiatt has a car and offered to drive us out of the big city and out to see some of the beautiful Japanese countryside. It is apparently difficult to get out without a car and so it would be a rare chance for me to see small town Japan, so I took it gladly, I also liked Hiatt, his friendly relaxed style was very easy to get on with.
He had offered to meet us in the early morning at 10, and I got up and was ready with time to spare… certain other people however still hadn't emerged at 10, despite calls and texts asking if we were still going!
Eventually we all met up and drove out of the city into the mountains, and they were stunning. Tall mountains with pristine rivers and traditional styled houses making up tiny villages, they have managed to modernise without loosing that sense of old Japan, the roads have cars but still feel Japanese, it was really great to see.
We drove for about an hour before we had to stop for some food at a service station and it was, without a doubt, the best service station I have ever been to in my life. It was clean, so clean, friendly, the food was tasty, not overly priced, and it looked down a valley and was surrounded by trees, wonderful!
The food was ordered, as is traditional in japan, at a vending machine, you put in the money and buy a ticket (it knows if they are out of stock), and then you take the ticket to the counter where they cook it fresh and then call you back to pick up your food a few minutes later. I had a great curry for a great price and wished more English service stations were like that!
We got back in the car and drove another hour to a small village next to a great bay. It turns out there are 'three beautiful scenic spots' in Japan, and this was one of them. It is a sandbar that stretches across the side of a bar with a cable car at either end to allow you to climb the mountains and take it all in. It was also Hiatt's final one of the three, with the other two being a famous shrine near Hiroshima and another place way north of Tokyo. I stored the Shrine for later recall…
We walked around the village before walking up the beach a ways and then took the cable car up the mountain to get a view across. The cable car was just individual chairs with no seatbelts up the side of the steep hill which was fun and since we were a little late, in fact one of the last rides up in the late afternoon by that point, it meant the top was almost deserted, we took lots of pictures and walked along a metal highwalk for a view right across the bay.
We took lots of cool pictures and had a good time before getting the actual last ride back down again.
As we came down I saw an old style Japanese train, similar to the 80s anime series, going past, and that was cool, managed to get a picture too which was great!
Hiatt then said he had heard there were some houses on the other side of the bay that were right on the lake, a traditional sort of house that instead of a drive for cars each house had a space to park your boat! It sounded fun so we drove around the bay and tried to find them, after parking up a few times we found the problem, the boat tours could find them easily from the water but there was basically no access for cars, they didn't need it, they all had boats!
In the end we stopped in a small sailing club and asked an old lady who stopped tending the flowers and went with us down a few tiny paths between houses to the water front, the problem she said was that all the paths down were private and often led through or very close to peoples houses, and they didn't want lots of tourists wandering around, but she was happy to take us down and show us the houses, a very kind old woman and very friendly.
After looking at the houses and taking even more pictures we headed back to the car and after all saying that you (in Japanese, even me) to the old woman we left her to tend her plants in peace.
We got dinner together with Hiatt near his house and had Takoyaki, a kind of Japanese pancake filled with noodles, and Osaka is famous for its Takoyaki, and this place was famous in Osaka, and it did not disappoint! It was great, so tasty, and not so expensive, amazing!
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