And, if the casual reader is wondering how come Hughesy was so certain that there was a station there, yesterday’s train had stopped at a station clearly labelled Tonosawa and I’d managed to catch a glimpse of a train from my stream-gazing position in the room the previous evening.
Fine, I thought. It has to be the other bridge. Should have gone that way from the start since I saw those cars going across yesterday afternoon.
Heading back to the upstream bridge which was, in any case, the more substantial of the two, involved passing the hotel. I checked Reception on the way past in the hope of gaining guidance, but the area still seemed deserted, so I carried on over the bridge and followed the road from there.
The road took me to another small hotel, and there seemed to be a path that looped around behind the buildings, so I followed that. Various side tracks branched off the main path but I figured that the route to the station would be fairly well-trodden, so I followed what looked like the best option, which gradually became less and less promising. In fact, the further I went, the more it seemed that no one apart from the odd adventurous foreigner used the track at all.
Backtracking, I tried the various paths that branched off my main track but each of those seemed to lead to a section of pipe that I assumed was associated with the spa business.
Back at the hotel, I found Reception attended and received instructions that I should turn left once I’d passed through the front door and left again at a group of vending machines.
Arriving at the downstream bridge there was no sign of vending machines, so I followed the road further downhill, crossed the bridge that took the main road over the stream, found the vending machines, which were situated close to a sign bearing the words “Tonosawa station’ and an arrow.
Fine, I thought. Shouldn’t be too far.
Unfortunately after a couple of hundred metres, I was faced with a multitude of paths with signs in Japanese (which were, of course, unintelligible to large hairy non-Japanese-speaking foreigners).
Had I received the same set of directions when I first started out I might have been inclined to explore a little further, but the thought of breakfast prompted me to head back to the hotel, where we decided to catch the bus back to the terminus and catch the train from there instead.
Breakfast was quite substantial - a croissant, juice, and a plate with scrambled eggs, sausages, a hash brown salad and a serve of pasta with mayonnaise, as well as the predictable tea or coffee.
Once we’d finished eating, packing and checking out we headed back to the bus stop and caught the bus to Hakone-Yumoto, where we missed the train by a matter of seconds.
Never mind, we thought, the next one goes at 9:03 and the weather seems to be improving all the time and we should be up at the cable railway before ten.
The train ride was a little disappointing after the previous day’s misty mystery though I guess that if we were experiencing it for the first time the reaction would have been different.