Tasty snacks

We wanted to take advantage of having our rental car whilst in Japan and visit some villages that are not on the train lines.  So we drove out of Kanazawa, trying to follow our Japanese language GPS system.  Not so easy as it kept trying to take us onto the expressways, which are REALLY expensive.  A 100km journey would cost around £30 in toll fees.  But Alex got quite good at programming the GPS system, and working out which roads to use as alternatives to the expressways, given the small scale of our maps.

Anyway, we wanted to go to visit the praying hands villages of Ainokura and Ogimachi.  Once again it was raining, and the villages did not really look their best.  Grey snow all around and cold drizzle is never a good thing.  I tried the local cold soba noodles speciality at lunch time, not great in this weather, but I'm sure they'd be nice in the summer.

naked-in-the-snow

As we continued up the valley the rain gave away to snow, and then, quite heavy snow, very pictureseque.  We stopped to take pictures of a pretty little shrine.  Whilst Alex was snapping away I followed a stream of water running down a footpath between 2 small snow banks.  The water got a bit steamy towards the top of the path and it was indeed quite hot.  Looking a bit closer it seemed that it was a nice little onsen (hot spring bath).  It was really nice to sit in the hot water with snow falling on your nose.  The girls were lucky as they had the lady onsen to themselves so could wear their swimming costumes, but there were a couple of other chaps in mine which meant naked-in-the-snow time.   Chilly.

Into Takayama for the night where we stayed in a nice tatami roomed hostel in a temple and had a really nice dinner in an izekaya bar.  These are the closest things in Japan to pubs, they sell beer and sake plus a huge variety of snacks.  We ordered chips and croquette potatoes, sashimi, bbq rice balls, aubergine and cheese bake and my favourite, grated yam and tuna.  Actually, the last one wasn't all that nice.  Grated yam is an aquired texture so to speak, particularly when it is mixed with a raw quail egg as it was here.

Another rainy and cold day greeted is in the morning.  We walked around Takayama's old town streets looking in the various tourist shops and trying to work out where we could do some free sake tasting.  No luck there.  We also went to the markets that our guidebook describes as 'unmissable'.  Not sure about them either, very quiet and only seming to sell pickled raddish, rice crackers and apples.

The afternoon was much better, we went for a short walk amongst the temples just outside town, the sun came out and it was really nice and peaceful, I'm not sure where all of the tourists from this morning had gone.