Takayama > Nagoya
Sitting down at breakfast the following morning I was surprised to notice that the people seating themselves 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 that they were, in fact, from Melbourne and had spent most of the preceding fortnight based in Osaka and heading out to wherever the cherry-blossom was good each day. They were just doing a little loop through the countryside before heading home the following day.
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, taking our time as we strolled through the morning markets and even doing a little sake-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 inside, despite the lack of English content, but they remained unconvinced and I wandered away wondering why you’d set out to walk around a strange town without even a map to guide you.
It wasn’t as if there was a general lack of English-language guides in Takayama. When we’d arrived I’d been surprised to discover that the tourist information was available, not just in Japanese and English, but also in French and Italian.
At least it gave me something to think about as we headed back to the hotel, reclaimed the suitcase and set off for the station and the 11:35 train to Nagoya, where we found, being seated further back than the day before we didn’t have quite the same view to the front.
That’s not to say that the views to the side as 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, which we linked up with at Kugano, surrounded by forested slopes before moving downstream through fringing forest, past hydro schemes and mountain villages with the highway on our right-hand side.
As we headed towards the lower reaches, we also passed large sections of bare-branched forest amid swathes of green foliage. At first glance it seemed like these were belts of dead vegetation, but glimpses of some of the closer specimens suggested that these were deciduous trees amidst hardier evergreens which hadn’t quite redeveloped their foliage so early in the spring.
We stopped at Nagisa to let a train travelling in the opposite direction past, and while we were there lunch arrived in the form of an eki-bento (or station box) of Hida Gyumeshi (beef, rice and vegetables) which the handy pamphlet on the train informed us had been loaded on board at the Nagoya Station so I assumed the pause to let the other train, which had come from Nagoya, past might have something to do with loading lunch as well. 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 in the train. It’s obviously a popular destination with a history stretching back, according to the pamphlet, a thousand years. By this time we were also back among the cherry-blossom, which had been conspicuously absent higher up in the mountains.
Passing through forested hills Neil Young’s nine-minute Be The Rain, about fighting to defend the wilderness in Alaska, turned up on the iPod playlist; a pleasant piece of serendipity. By the time it had ended we were down on the river flats, travelling round sweeping curves beside what looked like a broad stream but was, in fact a dam with the train on one side and the highway on the other.
As we came out of the mountains and onto the river flats we started to pass low green mounded rows of a crop which I guessed was tea as the track moved away from the stream.
By the time we were twenty minutes out of Nagoya, we were up above ground level as we headed into Gifu station, heading back out of the station in reverse as we headed back to ground level with our backs to the driver, who I guessed had either swapped ends on the rail motor or been replaced. With only 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 in Nagoya it was a case of straight to the hotel though 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.
It was just under two years ago that ‘Er Indoors and I had headed off to pick up the latest of her assistant teachers from the airport, a slightly surreal experience as a big city girl from Nagoya got her first taste of rural Australia. Three months later three members of her family had come to visit her in Australia and we’d met her mother and two sisters on Hamilton Island.
Now, outside the store where she worked before coming to Australia (quite upmarket it was too, at least as far as I could tell) we met up with the mother and one of the sisters, who whisked us up to the 14th floor for a panoramic view southwards across Nagoya towards Nagoya Castle.
From there it was on to the Marriott Hotel tea rooms on the 52nd floor where we spent the next two hours chatting. The chatter was, predictably between ‘Er Indoors and the Matriarch, with occasional comments from the daughter and Yours Truly. My 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 usual ritual exchange of gifts as I reflected that the reason the suitcase never got any lighter was because 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 three more of Madam’s old high school and university chums. With the batteries recharged we headed down to the lobby to meet up with them, then headed across to the station complex again in search of a dinner venue.
The first choice, a nice-looking brasserie, was ruled out through an inability to handle a party of five so we ended up in an eating and drinking establishment where we worked our way through another interesting variety of small platters with a wide-ranging conversation before drawing stumps around ten.