After my rather odd time in Himi, not least the breakfast, I was impatient to leave. I abandoned the large, cold, fish on my plate and packed the egg for a later, hungry moment.
As I travelled by train around the south coast of the Japan Sea I could see that Toyama prefecture would be a good base for a coast-and-mountain holiday. At one point the views left and right were equally dramatic - sea and hills. Still cashless I couldn't buy any lunch. At this point I discovered that the egg saved from breakfast was not hard boiled - but raw. (Oh dear, what do I do now...!)
My inability to pronounce my destination, "Doai", got me blank looks and caused me to miss a connection. But, as a result of this, and 2 hours to kill at ski resort Echigo Yuzawa, I was able to take a cable-car ride up a nearby peak (see FB pics).
I'd used booking.com for a last-minute stop-over, en route for Tokyo, with no real idea where I was heading. Doai turned out to be an unstaffed, derelict station in the middle of nowhere - and the station name only in Japanese, the first time this has occurred. I was relieved to see Bo from Tencin Lodge waiting for me, with the Lodge a mere 200m up the road. By sheer fluke I had landed in the middle of Joetsu National Park.
Even before shaking off the dust of my journey I was boarding the bus to Takaragawa Onsen, on the banks of the Takaragawa Gorge, in the upper reaches of the Tone River. Well water flows into four bathing areas (curiously, measured in terms of tatami mats, = 470). The 55 short minutes I spent in the "ladies' pool" were probably the highlight of the trip. I was in heaven, surrounded by autumn foliage, the moon rising behind the trees, the tensions of the last 48 hours beginning to dissolve,
The following morning I discovered I was 300m from a "rope way" (= cable car) for Mt Tanigawadake (where, according to my host, more people have died than on Everest and K2). Most of this trip I've been ahead of the autumn colours; here I was a week too late, the trees up high "naked", lacy skeleton trees lining the ridges. In the valleys there were flashes of brilliant colour as the sun came and went.
As I climbed, the weather seemed to be deteriorating. Lacerated by wind, with zero visibility, flummoxed by Japanese waymarking, unstable in inadequate shoes... I turned tail at the 1963m summit. The sprinkling of snow gave me a taste of the area - and also of the French winter I will be returning to. Ugh!
By 2pm I was down and on the train to Tokyo, grateful to Bo and Kieren for their considerable help with logistics, without which I would have bypassed everything.
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