Tokyo Day 3

The more travelling that I do, the more that I learn that I am not a huge fan of tours. For this day I chose to do a tour to primarily see Mount Fuji. There were other things that was planned on the agenda, but the number one thing on my mind was to see and experience Mount Fuji. The only reason I chose the tour is that it made it much easier to get to and from Fuji rather then planning something on my own like my Nikko trip. I got to the bus station early so I walked a couple blocks and was able to get some good pictures of the Tokyo Tower in the daytime right behind the Zojoji Temple.

The itinerary for the day was to go to Mount Fuji, go to the 5th station on Mount Fuji (because of the snow you can only really go halfway up in the winter time), go take a lake cruise in Hakone, then go to one of the mountain tops in Hakone to see Mount Fuji from a distance. The tour ends with people taking one of the Shinkansen trains (bullet trains) back to Tokyo.

We left Tokyo and the weather was fine, but as we approached Mt. Fuji the weather got more cloudy and overcast and got worse to the point that it started to rain. This basically sums up my day. While I stood on Mount Fuji, I couldn't really see anything, and we were not able to go up too far on the mountain because it had started to snow. We did an early lunch, but when we got to Hakone, we were not able to go up onto the mountain top because it was too windy. We did take the lake cruise that was cool, but it was pretty overcast and windy. With all the other stuff that we were not able to do I was expecting that something would be wrong with the trains, but when we arrived, everything was on schedule, so we hoped on the bullet train and was back in Tokyo in around 40 minutes.

There was another guy on the tour on his own and we got to talking during the day and got to know each other. When we got back to the Tokyo Station, we walked over to the fancy Ginza area. This was really great place, but not being a shopper, we just kind of walked around. For dinner I got another noodle bowl, this time it was udon noodles (the first time it was ramen), the noodles were much better then the other place that I went, but the broth was much better at the first place. The main reason I got the soup was that it was featured as a Christmas special and it came with "seasonal" tempura that included shrimp (not as good as the first place), oysters (which were awesome) and something that I have never had before, Chrysanthemum. Actually when I started peaking into to different places, I noticed there were a bunch of places serving this, I guess it is popular in winter or over Christmas for some reason in Tokyo. Anyway, it was surprisingly really good, overall the meal was right on par with the meal the night before.