Hi ho, up the mountains we go

On a cable car to the mountains. It's like a sharply inclined tram though..


Post-trip

Souvenir given to us by an old man who was manning the information counter at Hakone Yumoto station. The cranes did not survive our bags. :(
I asked him, "Eigo wo hanasu ii desuka?" (can I speak English?) and he cheekily replied, "Can you speak Japanese?)

We reached Hakone Yumoto station and took a chartered ryokan bus to our second accommodation, Hotel Okada. We reached around 12:30 ish. And proceeded to dump our luggage there and booked the family bath at the hotsprings.

(This was when I realised I forgot my cards)

Hotel Okada's sister hotel's spa resort.

We ran back to the hotel lobby to get on another chartered bus back to Hakone Yumoto station. We had no change for the bus (100jpy per person) and apparently they only accept exact change. One of the hotel employees (a guy standing at the door of the hotel) helped us get the correct change while the bus driver waited.

Quite impressive service.

Back at Hakone Yumoto station, we purchased our Hakone free pass for 3900jpy each. This allowed us unlimited rides on most of the public transportation in Hakone for 2 days.

Thus we embarked on Hakone round course.

Hakone's cable-car is different from ours - instead of cabins travelling on ropeways, theirs is more of unmanned trams that travel along extremely steep slopes.

Weather was really cool, so it was a rather nice relaxing trip around Hakone. It took us around 5 hours to complete it, we spent more time at Owakudani than anywhere else.

This is Hakone Ropeway. We would have called it cable-car.

An empty ropeway cabin hanging over Owakudani valley.

We hiked all the way up from the Owakudani ropeway station. The experience of eating hot soft-boiled egg in the cool environment is really something you can't do in Singapore. There were wooden tables with pieces of egg shells all over it. People were just standing around cracking and eating their eggs. Awesome experience.