Nonstop to Tokyo [.co.uk]

Hakone is an area near Mt Fuji, with volcanic springs and all sorts of other gubbins, as you'll see shortly. This picture is of a party of Japanese infant (kindergarten) school-children in their cute little yellow hats, stood in front of what I was actually taking a picture of, namely the volcanic steam escaping from the side of the mountain.

Luckily though, I'm not the kind of man to be outdone by a bunch of school-kids, so here's an uninterrupted view of some steam coming out of some rocks. Whoo-hoo! Rock on! For the record, the steam was actually gas, which was extremely sulphurous, and there were warning signs all over the place about the danger of exposure, especially to people (like me) with respiratory problems.

The Japanese turn into veritable Jamie Olivers whenever a hot spring is involved. One of the delicacies on offer here were eggs cooked in the hot spring waters, and which had been blackened in the process, as modelled by my capable assistant, Emma! As you can see from the picture, there were tables provided to eat these eggs on, and they were just covered in blackened shells, it was really quite bizarre.

Can you guess what this cute little fella was advertising? I just *had* to buy a pack of black eggs after seeing that .....

Pre-empting Pirates of the Caribbean by several years, Hakone lake has 3 replica pirate ships operating as ferries taking people from one side of the lake to the other, for no real reason that we could discern. If I remember rightly, there was a red one (pictured), a green one, and a blue or purple one. They were pretty darn cool! (If you look closely, you can see the fibre-glass 'Captain' stood by the mast on the main deck).

This enormous torii (temple entrance gate) just nonchalantly straddles the road from the ferry terminal to the temple up the hill. (As an aside, we actually missed the last ferry back because we spent too long at the temple here, and so we had to get a bus from here to the nearest large town so that we could get a train back to Tokyo!)

Seen at many temples, these contain something that you want to be prayed for by the monks at the temple (eg: health, happiness, children, exams, etc etc). You can write your own or, of course, you can buy one of the reasonably-priced conveniently pre-made 'wishes'. Apologies for the over-exposure of this picture by the way .... it didn't scan very well.

This is a picture of Emma, my long-suffering travelling companion, walking down a very mysterious looking path alongside the lake through the forest. We wouldn't have been strolling so leisurely if we'd realised that we'd missed the ferry back!

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