Wednesday, 9 April 2008
At breakfast, I was surprised to notice the people sitting at the next table were the Chinese couple with the tripod from Monday afternoon in Kanazawa. At the time, we thought they were from Hong Kong, but as we exchanged pleasantries, we learned they were, in fact, from Melbourne.
They'd spent most of the last fortnight based in Osaka, heading out to wherever the cherry-blossom was good each day. They were making a loop through the mountains before heading home.
It is, as has frequently been remarked, a small world.
And it seems to be shrinking.
Given our relatively loose schedule for the rest of the day we took our time packing and checking out, and still had two and a half hours to kill before catching the train for the next leg of the trip.
Having missed some serious photographic opportunities the day before, we retraced yesterday’s route in reverse. We took our time as we strolled through the morning markets and managed a little saké-sampling.
We ended up outside Takayama Jinya, where I overheard a couple of Americans discussing the lack of an English-speaking guide to the building in front of them, which they assumed to be a temple or something.
I did my best to encourage them to venture in, despite the lack of English content, but they remained unconvinced.
I wandered away wondering why you’d set out to walk around a strange town without a map to guide you.
It wasn’t as if there's a lack of English-language material in Takayama. When we arrived, I’d been surprised to discover tourist information came in Japanese, English, French and Italian.
At least it gave me something to think about as we headed back to reclaim the suitcase and set off for the 11:35 train to Nagoya.
Seated further back than the day before we didn’t have quite the same view to the front.
That’s not to say the views to the side were disappointing. We passed through forests and paddy fields, climbing back into the mountains and crossing the divide between the westward-flowing Miya River and the eastern-bound Hida. We linked up with the Hida at Kugano, surrounded by forested slopes before moving downstream through the fringing forest, past hydro schemes and mountain villages with the highway on our right-hand side.
As we headed towards the lower reaches, we passed sections of bare-branched forest amid swathes of green foliage.
At first glance, it seemed these were belts of dead vegetation. Closer glimpses suggested they were deciduous trees amidst hardier evergreens and hadn’t redeveloped their foliage so early in the spring.
We stopped at Nagisa to let a train headed in the opposite direction pass.
While we were there, lunch arrived in an eki-bento (station box) of Hida Gyumeshi (beef, rice and vegetables). The handy pamphlet on the train said these came from Nagoya.
I assumed the pause to let the other train, which came from Nagoya, pass along the single line might have something to do with loading lunch.
In any case, I enjoyed the box of lunch and the Kirin Lager I used to wash it down.
Eating kept us occupied as far as Gero, one of Japan’s Top Three Hot Spring Resorts, where boarding passengers filled most of the vacant seats.
It’s a popular destination with a history stretching back a thousand years.
We were also back among the sakura, conspicuously absent higher up in the mountains.
Passing through forested hills Neil Young’s Be The Rain, with its call to arms in the fight to defend the Alaskan wilderness, turned up on the iPod playlist. It was a neat piece of serendipity.
By the time it had ended, we were down on the river flats, travelling around sweeping curves beside what looked like a broad stream. It was, in fact, a dam with the train on one side and the highway on the other.
As we came out onto the river flats, we started to pass low green mounded rows of a crop that I guessed was tea, as the track moved away from the stream.
Twenty minutes out of Nagoya, we were up above ground level as we headed into Gifu. We headed back out of the station in reverse on the way back to ground level with our backs to the driver, who I guessed had either swapped ends or been replaced.
With a bit over a quarter of an hour, till we reached our destination, I thought that was unlikely.
Following the usual routine, once we’d alighted, it was a case of straight to the hotel. This time we were late enough to check in before heading back to the station to meet up with the first of our two appointments for the day.
Just under two years ago, ‘Er Indoors and I had headed to the Whitsunday Coast airport to pick up an assistant teacher. It was a slightly surreal experience as a city girl from Nagoya got her first taste of rural Australia.
Three months later, three members of her family had come to visit her, and we’d met her mother and two sisters on Hamilton Island.
Now, outside the store where she'd worked before coming to Australia (quite upmarket, as far as I could tell) we met her mother and one of the sisters. They whisked us up to the 14th floor for a panoramic view across the city towards Nagoya Castle.
From there, we went on to tea rooms on the 52nd floor of the Marriott Hotel. Two hours' chatting saw the flow dominated by ‘Er Indoors and The Matriarch, with occasional comments from The Daughter and Yours Truly.
My sporadic attempts at humour produced polite laughter all round though I was unsure whether the majority of the audience actually got the joke.
We finished with the ritual exchange of gifts as I reflected that the reason the suitcase never got any lighter. Everything you brought with you as a gift was invariably replaced by whatever they’ve given you in return.
We headed back to the hotel for a short rest before dinner.
With the batteries recharged, we headed to the lobby to meet up with three more of Madam’s high school and university chums and headed to the station complex again in search of dinner.
The first option, a nice-looking brasserie, was ruled out through an inability to handle a party of five. We ended up in an eating and drinking establishment where we worked our way through another exciting variety of small platters with a wide-ranging conversation before drawing stumps around ten.