Anowda Mornin, another day.
We headed for ze train to Ueno station, before getting the Hakutaka Shinkansen for the three hour ride to Kanazawa, a city towards the North of Tokyo. When we booked the car rental there was meant to be an East and West side of the station car rental, but somehow we found the right one straight away.
I think we were a little bit late, because the train I thought we’d get booked on we couldn’t. Anyways, we grabbed our little Toyota Corolla again, but this GPS didn’t have English so we had to work around it. Got the music goin, and we headed off through the suburban-ish area onto the Highway. The highways in Japan are normally elevated/really out of the way, so when you enter you get given this little card and when you exit you give them the card and they work out how much you need to pay.
After driving through various very long tunnels through the mountains though scenic at about 130kmp/h at some parts (do as the locals do right?). Even after following some car who looked like his bumper was about to fall off, we got to Shirakawa-go and prayed we didn’t have to pay for parking. Seeing how the surrounding scenery was in a valley, it made sense there was a town in the only Plateau next to a river.
After we go out of the carpark next to the river, we walked over the bridge along with the many tourists into the main town of Shirakawa-go. We walked around but didn’t go see the museum cause ceebs?.
After walkin around and checking out the houses, we headed up a steep hill towards a look out where the infamous ‘charlie’ jump was born. We tried getting some American couple to help us take a photo, but being from ‘Murica they couldn’t, so we had to make do with the selfie stickerino.
Not gonna use the word after, we left Shirakawa-go soon after back to Kanazawa, but decided to take the slow way to save $ on tolls, which ended up sucking since none of it was freeway, and there were sooo many roadworks going on.
We returned to Kanazawa and returned the car before we walked around for a good amount of time trying to find the invisible bike rental place, in the heat whilst we were hungry. For some reason I don’t seem to recall us having lunch in Kanzawa or anything. We eventually went to the head office of the rentals after like half an hour; super sweaty, and they gave us these codes for us to go to another bike rack to hire our bikes.
We went back to the station to grab the bikes, and I set my GPS for the Kenrokoen and the Kanazawa castle, supposedly two of the best garden/castles in Japan. As the five of us rode along the road, footpath in a single file (#squadgoals), we eventually found a bike park for the Kenrokoen up some massive hill which killed our legs. Everyone except Nathan paid the few hundred yen entry fee, and we headed inside the Kenrokuen which was a bunch of trees and lakes and shit.
It probably looks good in like winter/cherry blossom season but us coming from Down Under, looked like the Botanical Gardens in Sydney or somethin. About an hour into the walk, we got bored and left and headed for the castle which was literally across the road.
For some reason, we almost ended up cancelling the plans for the next day (probably fatigue + heat + hunger) with yung Charles coming up with some alternate plans but thankfully we stuck with our original plan, since we would have to pay a cancellation fee regardless (I don’t know how tho).
After riding back to Kanazawa and my phone plonking out of the pockets of my green short-shorts on the way back, we re-parked our bikes and got some food from the station and headed on the next Shinkansen back to Tokyo. ( I still don’t recall my card getting charged for using the bikes).
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