Nagano — The road liss traveled

So it was finally time to head out of Tokyo for good. I figured I’d be on the road for two weeks, so I bought a Japan Rail Pass for 14 days. This gives you access to almost all the major railways and bullet trains. You can’t book the fastest ones though. Although the ones you can book are certainly fast enough! It’s not exactly cheap though, a bit under $400 for the two weeks, but man is traveling by bullet train just about the best way to travel in the whole world. It used to be you had to buy this pass outside the country, but not anymore. I picked mine up at Tokyo Station the same morning I wanted to hit the road.

First stop: Nagano! These trains go often, I only had about 10 minutes from buying my ticket to departure time. But it’s really easy to find the Shinkansen area, find your track number, and you’re there. Inside the train the seats are comfy, plenty of legroom, and very easy to get a window seat as the trains are not very crowded this time of year. I never even had someone next to me the entire duration of the pass! I pulled down the tray, set down my coffee and opened up my laptop to go through some photos, all while having time to watch the scenery go by while throttling along at 300 km/hr. Smooth as a whistle. So nice. We were there in an hour!

Now, off to find my guesthouse. I guess I expected to see a bit more mountains, as Nagano is one of the mid-level cities everyone knows about because of it hosting the winter Olympics. But I guess most of the snow is further out in the mountain resorts and not so much in the actual city of Nagano. Oh well. It’s really kind of weird walking around in some of these cities, outside of a few main streets, there’s just so few cars! I mean zero traffic. It feels a little eerie. But there’s plenty of people walking around and on bicycles. And the roads are just in such good shape, everything seems to be recently paved, shiny, no potholes, no litter, it’s just very satisfying walking around. You could eat off the damn streets. I don’t know how they do it.

I booked a 4 person room at a guesthouse that included an ensuite kitchen and small dining area. It had 2 sets of bunk beds, but it’s not like usual dorm beds, they’re like fully contained capsule-like beds. I met the owner and he gave the rundown, a shockingly long list of things, where to put your shoes, what lights to turn on and when, rules for the kitchen, what to put in each type of garbage bin, how to use the remotes, dimming the lights, using hot water, damn. They like running a tight orderly ship in Japan! Hopefully I was putting my toiletries in right spot on the shower caddy! I’d be sharing the room with just one South Korean guy, although he didn’t really speak English, so I was kinda on my own.

I dropped off my big bag and headed right back to the train station as I wanted to get to Matsumoto castle, maybe 50 minutes away by train, covered by the railpass. Although I screwed up and booked the local train instead of the express, so make that an hour and half! Didn’t matter though, I still had plenty of time. The castle was a 20 minute walk from town. Once again, fantastic looking town. Lots of cute cafes, French pastry places, just generally well designed and decorated shops and building, and if my ice cream bar happened to fall off the stick onto the road, I’d be happy to lick it off.

So onto the castle, it was built around 1600, needed for the great clan wars going on at the time. At the entrance they offered a free English speaking guide, but he was about 75 and spoke really bad English, so took a pass. Kind of a nice gesture though! The inside of the castle is actually kind of dull, as they were mostly used for stockpiling weapons and munitions and having strategy meetings, nobody actually lived in them. Although they did have a cool display of lots of old guns, and a decent a view of the city from the 6th and final floor. But I honestly preferred walking around the outside and taking photos, it’s a helluva good looking building, with a moat. Really nice moat. Great moat.

After the sun went down, at around 4:00 since it went behind the mountains, I had some time to mosey around town a bit and then hop on the express train this time, back to Nagano. I found some Ramen place that looked inviting, as one does, and called it a night. I wanted to be up early to get out to the snow monkeys the next morning.

It was an hour long, 8am bus to the monkey park plus a 30 minute walk to get up to the hot spring where they like to hang out. I was kind of hoping it would be a larger area with a bunch of natural pools, but nope, just one small hot spring! They were mostly just hanging out on the sides of it, because the weather was relatively mild, unlike freezing winter temps when they chill in it for long periods of time. But I had beaten most of the tourists – the tour buses come midday, so it was a pretty tranquil experience. The monkeys also hang out up on the rocks and along the river that runs through, so it’s a bit more than just the hot spring. An hour there was plenty and then left out and decided to do a stroll to the train station an hour away. I walk so much in Japan, but it’s just so damn nice. I can’t recommend it enough. Especially when it’s 50’s and sunny.

Here’s the onsen, or Japanese hot spring resort type place

It was a slow moving local train, but that’s fine. I got off a few stops away from downtown Nagano at the Zenko Ji temple. This one is an old one, started in 650 AD, not long after Buddhism was spreading through Japan. This temple was created to enshrine a large budda image. In front is a walking street with all sorts of sweets and street food, the regional specialty being a wheat bun, fried, and filled with mostly vegetables like pumpkin, or radish, leeks, or mushrooms. Not bad! Very earthy. A little bit different. And then apple pie pastry for dessert, mmm.

Back at the guesthouse this time there was a Japanese guy, who spoke no English or pretended to – seriously the level of English is Japan was much worse than I was expecting. And then there was a young Czech guy, who was trying to get a visa to stay in Japan for a bit and learning Japanese. Not a bad idea when you’re 23! We went out for some gyoza, fried pork dumplings, which you can never go wrong with. I’m wondering what food you can go wrong with. The next day it was a train to the mountainy (hilly) town of Takayama, known for their high quality beef.