Our 7 Month Travel Blog

• From Shinjuku, Tokyo to Hakone by Romancecar
• Hakone broken down buses, cancelled boats, bad weather…and failing to see Mount Fuji, lake Ashi and other volcanoes

We left Tokyo and travelled on the Romancecar to Hakone. It’s a scenic train journey with great views of the countryside and rice paddies!

We arrived in Hakone which is an incredibly picturesque town with great scenery!

This is perhaps where the magic of Hakone ended!

We checked into our accommodation (which neither of us could remember booking!) and were surprised to see what would now be home for the next two nights… wooden boxes stacked on top of each other! That said, they actually ended up being quite cosy! We were in box N!

We headed out for dinner and had a great meal in a local BBQ restaurant!

The beer was particularly nice, Hakone Kenjyou!

The following day we starting the Hakone loop, but didn’t get too far as shortly after leaving the bus broke down!

We were told by the driver to get off the bus and onto a different one which little did we know took us to somewhere else! So we ended up getting off the bus and then we were stranded in the rain!

We decided it best to find our way back and then take shelter in a cafe, until it was time to leave and realised we were locked in!

We regrouped that evening in our capsule coffin and decided that as the weather was looking better the next day, we would go up again!

Initially the following day things were looking good, however when we got higher up it suddenly turned!

And then got much worse…..

It turns out the boats also couldn’t see anything and it was too windy for the ropeway over the volcano.

Instead, we decided to go and visit a temple in the woods!

Hakone-jinja shrine was really interesting and the fog and weather made it very atmospheric!

However by this point we were completely sodden, and thought it was for the best to leave Hakone…..Hakone however had different plans.

When we tried to leave it turns out the bus timetable had now changed, our tickets didn’t work, and we had to pay extra to leave…so unfortunately it was Hakone-not-to-be.

Nb. To make things better Bethany also lost a ring!