mytravelbugbite

After two beautiful days of weather today was horrible. It rained a lot but worst of all it was foggy which was less than ideal for what we had planned for the day. We were booked onto a day trip to visit Mount Fuji and Hakone National Park.

Our first stop was Mount Fuji. The plan was to drive to the 5th station, however the weather prevented this with the road up closed due to snow. We were only able to get as far as the 1st station where we could see pretty much nothing of the mountain.

Far earlier than planned we set off for Hakone and had some lunch before going up the Hakone sky gondola to the Owakudani Valley. Here we went for a walk up to where the geothermal activity was taking place so we could see the sulphur clouds hard boiling eggs and turning them black. It reminded me a lot of Rotorua in New Zealand.

We descended back down the mountain on the coach ready to get on our pirate boat across Lake Ashi. From here you can often see Mount Fuji in the distance but the weather had closed in further at this point so no such luck. We did have a nice boat ride through the heart of Hakone though and we managed to see a couple of Torii gates on the banks amongst the colourful autumn foliage.

The coach then took us back to the hotel at the end of what was quite a disappointing day. I expect it would have been beautiful under different circumstances but today the odds were certainly not in our favour.