Tag Archives: train

Mt. Inari

Two train stops south of Kyoto is Inari, home of the Fushimi-Inari shrine. Although I’m pretty much templed out at this point, this seemed worthwhile because A) I was on my way to Nara on that train line anyway and B) it sounded sort of weird.

Just across the street from the train station is a large torii gate and a path leading up to a fairly standard looking temple. Beyond that, however, are more torii gates. A lot more.

There are long tunnels of these snaking up the mountain. Every now and then there’s a break in the tunnels, with a shrine or group of shrines off to one side. The shrines have piles of gates on them and next to them.

And there are extra gates around in case you need them.

There are thousands of these things, and they fade over time, so they have to keep painting them continuously, like the Golden Gate Bridge.

Many of the gates had a pair of dogs in front: one with a ball in its mouth and one with a stick. Here, boy!

Most of them had those red bibs. This one had a hat.

The whole thing looped to the top of the mountain and back down again. Mt. Inari is only about 700 feet high, making it more of a hill than a mountain, but there was a lot up and down. I was glad to get to the observation point with a view of Kyoto.

As I was standing there, a group of school kids came running up the steps.

One girl of about eight decided to practice her English on me.

Girl: Hello!

Me: Hello. How are you?

Girl: Hello!

So that was as far as that went. I went back down the mountain, said hello to some British tourists and German backpackers*, and got on the train for Nara.

* Different ones.

Mt. Aso to Kyoto

To save time, I went back to Kumamoto and north from there, rather than head over to the east coast of Kyushu and then north. I missed the first express train from Aso and the next one wouldn’t be for another 3 1/2 hours, so I took a local, which stopped at every station, parking lot, bike rack, and cow pasture on the way down the mountain. And all trains on this line have to stop twice to reverse direction. The edge of the caldera is so steep that they have to zig-zag.

I got to Kumamoto at noon, less than half an hour before catching the shinkansen to Shin-Osaka*, so no time for lunch. And I didn’t have breakfast, either. Just vending machine coffee, which is much better than you would expect. One brand is called “The Coffee.” It says:

“The Coffee” is authentic coffee with its special roasting and blending.

It’s ¥130 and comes in a metal bottle.

I missed the snack lady the first time she came by with the cart, and she didn’t come by again until after we’d left Shin-Yamaguchi. I got beef jerky, matcha ice cream, and Pocari Sweat ion water, whatever the hell that is. Cost almost ¥1000. Not much of a lunch, but it beats vending machine coffee.

From Kumamoto to Osaka is 790km (474 miles) and took 3 hours and 45 minutes on the shinkansen. That’s 126.4 mph, which isn’t as fast as I was expecting, but it does include stops.

There’s supposed to be a shinkansen from Osaka to Kyoto, but I couldn’t find it, so I took a regular express. The cities are practically right next to each other, so it was good enough.

It was clear and sunny in Kyushu. It’s raining in Kyoto. I may have to buy an umbrella.

* The shinkansen stations have “Shin” in front of them, to distinguish them from the regular stations with the older tracks. A few, like Kumamoto, are combined.

Aso Boy!

I caught the Aso Boy! Kuro to Mt. Aso (mascot: a small cartoon dog). It wasn’t the train I thought I was getting on, but it went to the right place, if not as quickly.

It’s a family sightseeing train and was mostly packed (apparently this is a national holiday), but the last car had a bench with a desk in front of a panoramic window. It wasn’t nearly as crowded.

It was only later that I found out that I was supposed to have a reservation for that train, but no one ever checked. It’s also another ¥200 to sit where I was sitting.

WiFi in Japan

So far there isn’t a lot of wifi in Japan. Maybe it’s just Kyushu, but hotels don’t seem to have it available. They have LAN access, but no wifi. In Korea it was everywhere, including on the train and the hydrofoil.

A quick scan in front of Nagasaki Station showed free wifi in a nearby pigeon-infested plaza, so this blog could be brought up to date. But while doing so, your intrepid blogger was pooped upon by one of the aforementioned pigeons. This shows the importance of making wifi available in hotel rooms.

Nagasaki

After breakfast, I checked out and walked to the station to activate my JR Rail Pass. It was pretty simple once I found the right place in that giant train station. Then, after wandering around for a while, I went back to that same place and asked them where I might find the train to Nagasaki. Thus informed, I went to the platform, which was about 50 yards away.

Incidentally, Hakata Station is not the only enormous mall and train station combo in Fukuoka. It’s just the station for the state-run train system (which issued my pass). The station for the private line is Tenjin station, which has what appears to be an even bigger mall attached to it. I know because I wandered around in it for a few minutes the previous evening before I realized that I was in the wrong station.

Anyway, this was a new day and a new train station and I was on my way to Nagasaki.

It was about a two-hour trip, which got me there at about 11:00. I then checked three hotels before finding a vacancy, but this one is substantially cheaper than the one in Fukuoka. They were a little apologetic because it doesn’t have a view. What it does have are little sliding doors in front of curtains in front of a window that looks directly into the side of the building next door, approximately 18 inches away. You can stick your head out a little and look along the gap in either direction. That’s the view.

Nagasaki is not as picturesque as I expected. It’s a beautiful setting, but the town itself is not that much to look at. It has an interesting history, being the only point of contact with the West while Japan was closed off before the Meiji Restoration. Dejima was an island in the harbor where representatives of the Dutch East India Company traded with the Japanese in a highly controlled manner. They were essentially quarantined there. With all the land reclamation of the 19th and 20th centuries, Dejima is no longer an island, and is now something you can walk to in the middle of town. So I did. They’ve reconstructed most of the buildings based on drawings from the time and used original materials where possible. There’s not a lot to it, but it wasn’t very big to begin with.

Mostly I’ve been wandering around, because I’m good at that. Right now I’m eating at Mos Burger, named after Mos Eisley, I assume.

And no, I didn’t go to the Atomic Weapons Museum. I’m sure it’s a blast and everything, but there’s a samurai castle in Kumamoto, which is right on the shinkansen line.

Fukuoka

I had read that riding in a hydrofoil feels like being inside a washing machine, but it wasn’t like that at all. Not that I’ve ever been inside a washing machine, but it does evoke an image. The hydrofoil felt more like riding on a train.

The trip to Japan took three hours. Passport control was more stringent than in Korea, but not bad. Similar to New Zealand, really. The customs guy questioned me a bit about the purpose of my visit, but let me through when he found out that I had a rail pass. I guess “American riding around on the train” is an identifiable type.

I entered Japan at 5:30 PM with 83,000 won, 150 dollars, and zero yen. The only bank in the terminal had been closed for two hours and the only ATM wouldn’t accept my card. I had no hotel reservation, but I had identified several hotels around the train station, which was where I would want to be the next morning. There was a bus that went straight there from the ferry terminal. For 220 yen. Which I didn’t have. So I walked.

I didn’t take a very efficient route. What’s with these guide-book maps? Eventually I found the train station and got a room at Hotel Active! The exclamation point is part of the name, and appears as a monogram on the pajamas they put in the rooms. It’s a business hotel, which was supposed to make it cheaper, but it wasn’t. It included an all-you-can-eat breakfast, though.

The train station includes vastly more than mere train-oriented services. It’s an 11-story shopping mall with a department store and two stories of restaurants and who knows what else. The department store has a currency exchange desk, so I exchanged my dollars for yen. The rate wasn’t that great, so I decided to keep my won for now, in the foolish hope that I’ll get a good rate somewhere else.

I had dinner at an Okinawan restaurant. The waitress spoke pretty good English and was very excited to meet an American to talk to. She’d studied English at Queen’s University near Toronto. The food was really good too: chicken with roasted garlic and some kind of salsa.

Then I walked back to the hotel and went to bed. Next up: Nagasaki.

Notes on Korea

Sometime in the last 25 years, hanja seems to have disappeared. That makes Korean a lot easier to read for us non-Asian types who didn’t spend 12 years learning Chinese characters in school.

You won’t get mugged in Korea, but you might get run over. It’s the only place I’ve seen someone talking on the phone while riding a motor scooter. On the sidewalk.

Korean people don’t seem given to wearing shirts with bizarre English on them the way Japanese people are, but almost every shirt I saw with writing on it was in English, usually an American brand of some sort. I think some of them were fake brands (one shirt simply said “Authentic Genuine”), but they looked like American brands. That seemed to be the main thing.

Passport control was just a matter of taking fingerprints and a photo (Japan did that too) and stamping my passport. Customs just took my form and put it on a pile without looking at it. I think it was the easiest entry I’ve ever encountered.

Other than the traditional hanok-style buildings with the sweeping roofs, there isn’t a lot of what you would call architecture in Korea. On the train from Seoul to Busan, the cities I saw were all miles of high-rise apartment buildings done in what you might call a Soviet style, with a smattering of Christian church steeples.

Everyone in Korea is doing something on their smartphone at all times. It goes far beyond anything in the US. Not surprisingly, most of the phones are Samsung or LG.

In Busan I saw a man wearing a shirt that said, “The Funniest Man in the World.” So that’s where he lives. Busan.

The Train to Pyeongyang

Dorasan Station

Our next stop was Dorasan Station, the last northbound train stop before North Korea. The tracks are there, and the train ran briefly when relations improved in 2002. Now it’s a mostly empty station that brings a few in a few tourists to buy things in the gift shop.

They made much of the fact that the tracks go all the way to the UK, though that’s not really a journey most people would want to take. Still, it was kind of interesting to see the entry gate to Pyeongyang.

We had lunch (second-worst pulgogi ever) near the toll gate to Pyeongyang. It seems that you can not go there by train or not go there by car. As my old Korean teacher used to say: “Two way to go this one.”

After lunch we rode t the observatory to peer into North Korea itself.

Matamata and the Shire

Next: the Shire in Matamata.

Matamata is only an hour or so from Rotorua. I made it there by a little after 9:00 and then drove around looking for anything Shirelike. There were no signs indicating directions, but after a few minutes I found this.

This is the Matamata i-Site building. i-Site is New Zealand’s network of tourist information offices. They turn up in a variety of different buildings. Most are ordinary, but in Rotorua it’s is in what looks like an old train station, in Cambridge it’s is in the old town hall building, and in Matamata it’s is in this Hobbit building that only opened in November.

I went in to ask for directions and found out that the tours leave from there and that the next one was due in 15 minutes.

The Shire isn’t really in Matamata. It’s on a working sheep ranch about 15 minutes away. The bus takes you out there, then another bus takes you to the Shire itself, which is somewhere in the middle of this 1250-acre ranch.

The last two people on the bus were an American couple. The woman was very upset because they had told her not to get on the bus and they only let her get on at the last minute and they could have left her behind.

“They should have left you behind” is what I didn’t say out loud.

The tour was informative but informal. We could wander around and take pictures quite a bit. Whiny Woman was unhappy because she “didn’t know what we’re supposed to be doing.”

“How about you shut up and enjoy yourself” is what I muttered under my breath.

The timing of the tour was perfect. After Lord of the Rings, most of the set was destroyed, per the original agreement between Peter Jackson and the landowners. But heavy rain slowed them down, and during the downtime the family started getting calls from people wanting to visit the set. That was when the family started thinking that it might be worth keeping.

For The Hobbit, they negotiated a different contract for more permanent construction. They also constructed a working Green Dragon, which just opened last month.

The Hobbit holes are built to different scales, depending on who would be filmed standing in front of them—smaller ones for humans, larger ones for Hobbits.

Of course, it is still just a set, so as nice as the Hobbit holes look from the outside, there’s nothing in them. Inside scenes were all filmed in Wellington.

At the Green Dragon, I shared a table with Lyndon and Deb from Australia (Lyndon took the photos of me) and Nikolai from Germany, who was planning a hike south over Mt. Tongariro. Whiny Woman sat elsewhere.