St Edmund's
Day 2
The St Eds tour was in high excitement this morning as we prepared to take the bullet train (Shinkansen) from Tokyo to the mountains and venture towards one of the world’s iconic peaks – the live-volcanic brute that is Fuji. Henry Hudson, our resident railway anorak, was fizzing (as was I – an avowed trainspotter).
There is something special about the serpent-like aesthetics of the Shinkansen: its elongated muzzle and hooded cockpit give it the look of a modern-day dragon. So mesmerised were we by the prospect, we nearly missed it. However, we all found our seats in carriage 14 and moments later were accelerating beyond the skyscrapers to our first, if rather blurred sight of rural Japan. Henry leant back in his seat and gave the double-thumbs up, sensing the jealously of his fellow enthusiasts on the other side of the planet. For them, poor souls, high-speed train travel looks set to mean little more than catching the Shinkansen’s sluggish second cousin twice removed, which can only make it from somewhere outside London to a field somewhere outside Birmingham, sometime in the next 10 years. By comparison, the ‘bullet’ does not disappoint. It is straight, smooth and so rapid that it feels like… well, being strapped to a bullet, racing over the ground at 300mph. It was so rapid, that Henry ran out of time to finish his game of steam locomotive Top Trumps.
Suddenly mountains blotted out the view from our airline-style windows and we disembarked with jelly legs to find the bus. A journey through steep-sided wooded valleys, on the verge of their autumn show, brought us winding over a ridge to our first glimpse the volcano. It was a powerful moment, big enough to cork the hilarity on the back seats. To see the strange, regular triangle of this vast object rising like some alien craft on the horizon is to understand clearly how more thoughtful people of days gone by have seen great and awesome power in the forms of nature. It is, to say the least, an intimidating and angry looking thing, even with its lace collar of snow.
Then somebody, probably Fraser, spotted the cable car that was to take us up through the cheerful pine forests to the sulphur pits on a neighbouring slope. Here we sampled the famous black eggs cooked in the steaming emissions. Legend says that four black eggs consumed will add seven years to your life, which was good to know when tramping around on what was clearly a live-volcanic landscape. The strong, sulphureous whiffs and the aroma of the warm eggs were sufficient to drive us back down to a lake, where we explored a beautiful Shinto shrine at the water’s edge. Monstrous black pine trees, with trunks several hundred feet high, guarded the approach, and the St Eds crew showed great respect as they made offerings, bowed and explored the precincts of the shrine.
It had been a busy and genuinely awesome day, and as the pink light of evening crept over the mountains, we wound our way downwards through the interlocking spurs of the valley towards the beckoning city, where supper and an early night awaited.
Our word for the day was ‘sumimasen’, which means excuse me, a soft sorry. There are many moments in a day like ours where the phrase is useful as you negotiate the sights busy with other tourists who queue and take a million photographs, just like us. I wonder if perhaps we should have offered the same to Fuji, for trespassing in its land, certainly an ‘arigato gozaimasu’.
As for tomorrow, I don’t know how to put this, but we will be mostly sumo wrestling. Mr Kincaid???
St Ed’s model railway enthusiast – Henry Hudson – had his dream come true this morning at about 300mph, as we rode the Shinkansen from Tokyo to Hakone. While taking a bullet means something else in Britain and High Speed Rail Travel means starting in a field outside London to finish in a field somewhere outside Birmingham, in Japan it means something like flying in a jet plane in a dead straight line across the ground, on time and so fast that Henry didn’t have time to finish his game of steam locomotive. Top Trumps!