Tuesday, 8 April 2008
A week into the trip and starting Day Two of the Rail Pass Tour, a 7:09 departure from Kanazawa precluded any thought of breakfast before heading to the station.
On the way out of the city, on a bleak morning which presented no chance to see whether recent precipitation had managed to clear the ever-present haze, there were obvious signs of recent and fairly substantial rainfall, which, given our experiences of the day before was hardly earth-shattering news. Kanazawa has a well-deserved reputation for wet weather.
After we’d left the outskirts of Kanazawa we passed through an agrarian landscape, with a misty haze covering the forested hilltops. Suited salary-men boarded the train at some stations and I couldn’t help noticing that there were some upmarket homes scattered through the rural villages.
Conditions made it difficult to see the snow that I was sure capped the mountains away to our right, and as we moved away from the coast the land on the left hand side started to rise, though again it wasn’t possible to get a clear view of the peaks.
At Toyama we had a slight degree of difficulty finding Platform 3, which wasn’t particularly well signposted, but eventually discovered that the next leg of the journey involved on an upmarket version of the old-fashioned rail motor. Once aboard, we found our seats in the first carriage. It was obvious, as we gazed through the picture windows that gave a generous view to the front and both sides of the train, we were travelling a particularly scenic route.
The misty conditions were far from ideal for sightseeing, but gave a feeling of travelling in an enclosed world as we headed upcountry past increasingly wilder streams boosted by recent rainfall. Despite the rain, many of the trees still held cherry-blossom, which suggested steady drizzle rather than the sort of downpour that would knock the flowers off the branches.