Golden Week: Shirokawa-go...Day 34

Day 34 - Tuesday, May 4





I thought Fukuoka was far. I was wrong. Shirokawa-go is far. Far. Far. Far. It's like going back in time a few hundred years plus a three hour train ride and one hour bus ride. But so worth it. The train ride in itself was amazing. The train snaked along some river (didn't catch the name but I do know it is the third fastest river in Japan) and weaved between mountains. The river was clear and blue and the mountains were gorgeously green with specks of white and red trees.


I'm Sideways!!!

The train did not go all the way to Shirokawa-go, but instead stopped at a small-ish Edo period town, Takayama. Here, Rachel and I had to do a bit of rearranging so that we had enough time to go to Shirokawa-go, but we rebooked our JR tickets (thank you JR pass) and booked seats on the next bus. And by next bus I mean that after booking the tickets we were booking it (haha I'm so punny) to catch the bus because we had a minute before it departed. But we made it and had another beautiful ride to the village.



Given that it was Golden Week, there was a bit of traffic, so to err on the side of safety, Rachel and I decided to take the earlier bus home which only gave us about two hours to explore Shirokawa-go. Unfortunately this meant that there was no hike to the vantage point overlooking the village, and no onsen. But there was a lot of picture taking and consumption of delicious goods, as always. Let's see, I had a stick of Takayama beef (not as famous as Kobe beef, but well known in Japan) (it was good, but I really can't tell quality of beef, not my forte), a coroquette (don't know how to spell it in English), and shoyu soft serve, which thankfully tasted nothing like shoyu so was delicious.








But the village, yes the village, it's located deep in the mountains (obviously) in a region that receives some of the heaviest snowfall in Honshu. so the houses are called gasshoku and have these crazy cool slanted roofs designed to allow the snow to form a uniform layer along the top and have any excess roll off. So we wandered around the village stopping in some gift stores and admiring the flowers. Oh yeah, because it's in the mountains there were still a few trees with cherry blossoms and tulips were still in bloom so pretty.



Then back on the bus and back to Takayama. Remember how I said we erred on the side of safety, well yeah we had about an hour to kill before going back to Kyoto so we wandered Takayama a bit. And picked up some food for the train ride back.