Above the clouds
It's a 3-day weekend here in the Land of the Rising Sun, Monday being the Respect for the Aged Day. There was a bus tour that seemed like a good deal--ice cave, ride up to the 5th Station of Mt. Fuji, wine tasting, and grape picking where we get to eat the grapes we picked straight from the vines. Most bus tours start from Tokyo, but this one started from Yokohama, which is closer so I didn't have to wake up practically in the middle of the night to catch the first train.
So I wake up bright and early on Sunday morning, hop on the train, and headed for the meeting place. The map said "exit G," but there was no exit explicitly labeled as exit G. Fortunately, I knew the building where I was supposed to wait at, so I looked for that on the map. Found that. The bus ride to the first destination, the Narusawa Ice Cave, went smoothly. The Narusawa Ice Cave is one of the 3 bigger lava tubes created when Mt. Fuji erupted in 1707 and is a Natural Monument of Japan. Since the cave maintains an average 3°C year round, the ice never melts. In the colder months, you can see pillars of ice in the caves, but all I saw was a huge slab of ice. It was rather chilly in the cave. I had to go through pretty tight spaces to get to the open area where the ice is. I'm glad I didn't slip going down the steep steps after crab-walking through the low space. It was kinda anti-climactic just seeing a partially melted slab of ice.
We then headed off to Mt. Fuji, to the 5th Station. The road is usually restricted during July/August, when the mountain is open for climbing to the summit but the restriction gets lifted after the mountain is closed. Since every rock and fallen leaf is considered as sacred, people aren't allowed to pick anything up to take home as a souvenir. Apparently, our tour was extremely lucky to be able to get a glimpse of the summit and also see the "雲海" (unkai), literally sea of clouds. Since we were about 2400 meters high, we were able to see clouds below us. It was a pretty amazing site. But, just as mountain weather acts, the weather changed and a thick wall of clouds hid Mt. Fuji in no time. I could see the curtains closing. I got myself a Mt. Fuji ice cream cone. It was pretty good.
We were supposed to go grape picking next, but plans changed since it looked like other tour buses were going to the grape growers at the same time, so our bus decided to go to the winery instead. All we did was wine tasting. They gave us a little plastic cup to go around the barrels. Out of all the wine I tasted, the only wine I really liked was the new wine made out of Delaware grapes. There was a bakery attached to the winery and they made raisin buns made with homemade raisins. The buns were pretty good. I got myself a bottle of the wine I liked.
The next stop was grape picking. We were picking shine muscat grapes and eating them fresh off the vines. Shine muscat grapes have thin skins and are seedless that make them easy to eat. These grapes are popular for these picking events. They're set up to be all-you-can-eat, but in reality, it's hard to eat more than 2 clusters since they're big and really sweet.
After we got our fill of grapes, we started to head back to Yokohama. Since it was the middle day of a 3-day weekend, the traffic was really bad. The drivers decided to take the regular roads part way until they got past the really congested areas of the toll roads. It took about an hour or so longer to get back, but we all pretty much anticipated that.
I got to test out my new little action camera to take vids. The water was choppy on Saturday so I did some shopping, I went on the bus tour on Sunday, and it rained on Monday so I stayed in and chilled. I'm yet to test the underwater casing, but the vids it took was good enough for my purposes. I must say, the action camera takes better vids than my digital camera does.
It was a pretty good weekend all in all.
How was your weekend?
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