The day didn't start well with me waking at 3:30am dripping with sweat. I got back to sleep but woke again at 5:30 feeling nauseous, and ended up retching. On checking the symptoms of fugu poisoning (death!), it didn't seem to be that! Not an ideal start to the day and we clearly had to give away the long walk in favour of a shorter option, as most days on this tour have, but we had so far always taken the long option. Karen had breakfast at 7am, I had a glass of water and lost that too. By 8am the outside temperature had risen to a toasty -5 degrees!
By 9am I was feeling good enough for some walking, so we decided to pack up our belongings, not difficult as we only had the day packs we'd arrived with, and we set off up the Usui Pass. It was a gentle walk up through very open forest. Low down is clearly an area where rich Japanese have holiday houses, those we saw were very architected, and some were rather nice.
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| Rather nce FLW-style holiday house |
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| and a more modern one |
The walk up to the pass seemed to be quite a lot longer than our guide book said (2.5km) and certainly longer than the Japanese direction signs stated. Apart from the biting cold, it was a good walk up, rewarded at the top of the Usui Pass by tremendous views out.
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| Well wrapped up on the Usui Pass |
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| Spectacular views from the top |
The landscapes of Japan have been very varied. It is clearly geologically a young country like New Zealand, with many of the mountains we've seen having been volcanoes. From the Usui Pass, there were some very odd knobbly hills, and views across to snow-covered ranges in the distance. Instead of continuing on another 12km to complete the trek itinerary, we retraced our steps back down, through the main street of Karuizawa, and onto a shinkansen about 1pm. Karen had some of her lunch on the train, I thought I'd wait until we got to our room to start eating again, just in case!
We heard on the train that it would stop at Ueno Station, and a quick check of maps showed that was closer to our "The B Hotel Asakusa" than Tokyo Station, so we jumped off. I wanted to see if I could get a replacement camera cheaply in Japan, and there was a Yodobashi Camera shop near Ueno station, so that's where we headed on arrival. All too hard to work out in Japanese, so we gave up and headed to our room.
The B Asakusa turned out to be near new and very nice, not to mention surprisingly cheap at under $60 per night. We'd originally booked somewhere else but at 11m² it was always going to be a squeeze, so a few days before arriving we'd changed our booking to the B which boasted 18m². A good move. We did a quick shop at a nearby supermarket, and in the evening I ate my lunch while Karen had cereal. Quite a relief after the feasts of the last six nights.