Shinkansen to Takayama

Shinkansen to Takayama

Catching the shinkansen (Bullet Train) to Takayama was quite an experience made a little easier because it was Sunday morning and the railways were not quite as crowded as weekdays.  We’d booked our seats earlier in the week, but we still needed to catch the train from Hamamatsucho (near our hotel) to Shibuya, where the shinkansen station is, so we left ourselves plenty of time.  Once at Shibuya, we purchased amazing bento boxes for our lunch and waited for the train.  These trains are amazing – they stop at the station for only a couple of minutes and doors open EXACTLY where the footmarks are on the platform.  They leave exactly, to the second, at the scheduled time!

We were soon speeding through the outskirts of Tokyo on our way to Nagoya, where we changed trains to take us to Takayama in the mountains of central Honshu and the home of a heritage listed “old town” where original homes and shops, along with sake breweries and cafes, are surrounded by a modern city.  Takayama is the centre of this mountainous area and is home to the Takayama Festival, a twice a year celebration in spring and autumn, of bounteous crops and health and joy, where hundreds of thousands view a parade of traditional floats and costumes, dating from the 16^th and 17^th centuries. A museum just north of the old town is devoted to the display of the floats and costumes.  There is a daily market where people from surrounding farms bring their produce to sell – vegetables, flowers, apples and other goods.

Takayama is also the centre of the Hida beef industry – Hida is a particular type of beef cattle which are handfed, rubbed daily and their feed is laced with beer.  The meat is marbled and streaked with fine veins of fat which give it a fantastic taste and each cut of the meat is labelled as to where on the cattle it came from.  We ate hida in the Japanese restaurant in the hotel and it is sweet, juicy and extremely tasty.  It is akin to wagyu, except is much more succulent, sweeter and softer.  Fantastic!

The Onsen

We decided to try the onsen – Japanese public bath – prior to dinner and found it quite liberating.  There are two bath-houses in the hotel and men and women, of course, part ways at the door.  There is a ritual which involves scrubbing in the washroom prior to bathing, then immersing oneself in the public spa – most are natural mineral spring-fed and chemical-smelling, but these are not quite as strong.  Then a few minutes in the sauna and a trip outside to the cooler spa before showering and re-dressing in the hotel yukata, or gown, which everybody wears around the hotel.  It was certainly an experience and we’ll happily try the ‘dip’  again whenever we get the opportunity.