Monday 30th March
Kanazawa
Today we have a bus trip to Shirakawa-go. The bus is scheduled to leave, as we discovered yesterday, from bus stop 4 at 09:10. This is too early for the shuttle bus, so we walk to the bus station, leaving plenty of time. At first we join the wrong queue but a helpful Japanese lady soon puts us right. (I was almost right, just standing a 1 metre to the right of where I should have been - I could have ended up at the airport!)
We have been allocated seats 1A and 1B, so are sitting at the front with a good view of where we are going. The journey takes about an hour and twenty minutes, most of it spent getting out of Kanazawa and the rest on a motorway. What does become evident is that we are climbing into some mountains, and it isn't too long before they are snow-capped.
We leave the motorway and after a few tortuous bends arrive in Shirakawa-go. This village, together with two others nearby, form a Unesco World Heritage Site. The village reminds me a little of Kandersteg, with houses dotted over an alluvial plain, with only a gentle slope from one end of the village to the other. The main reason for the villages' World Heritage status is the thatched houses, with very steeply shaped roofs, said to mimic the shape of hands in prayer, designed to throw-off the snow in winter. There are quite a few houses having their roofs re-thatched. Apart from tourism, the main 'industry' is rice growing. It looks very quaint, but the village is slowly depopulating, now a little over 1,500 whereas in 1970 is was 2,500. The village is thronging with visitors, but isn't overcrowded; we stopped at a cafe for drinks, and later ice creams, with no queues, but most of the visitors, like us, visit just for a day, bringing little income to the village. It's an unanswered question: would the village be better-off without the tourists? I don't know.
But they are the same tourists everywhere! Whilst waiting for the train from Kyoto to Kanazawa, there were some other people who had also arrived early and were sitting/standing near us. I didn't really pay much attention to them, but one of the women was wearing light brown, wide-legged, corduroy trousers - which looked a little unusual. Well, who should I spot walking towards us on 'main street' Shirakawa-go, but the same group of three people, including the lady with the corduroy trousers. I'm not sure what distinguishing feature I have, but we acknowledged each other and passed on our separate ways...
A couple of hours is all one needs in Shirakawa-go, and our tickets were booked for the 13:50 bus that gets us back to Kanazawa Station just after 15:00.
As we walked back to the hotel from the bus station we came across this parked car. As I have previously mentioned, car park spaces are like gold dust. It's not particularly obvious from the photo, but reversing back another few inches would have resulted in the car ending up in a little brook, about a metre below the level of the road. A good reason not to ask your teenage son to park the car! (I originally had 'wife' instead of 'teenage son', but my prose got hit by the censors!!)
As usual we had asked to hotel to recommend/book a restaurant for us, and knowing it was in the area of the station thought we would do our usual reconnoitre to find our where it was. This time Google Maps completely failed us. In desperation we went to the Tourist Information office in the Station and found the 'English' queue. Luckily no Brits were admitting to need help other than us! The lady was, of course, very polite, but having said it was a good restaurant, sent us in completely the wrong direction (i.e. 180 degrees out). Back to Google Maps; this looked promising but we were left mainly with blank walls. I think it was Jo who suddenly had the inspiration that perhaps the restaurant wasn't on the ground floor! We eventually found it on the 3rd floor. (I do wonder how Japanese and other tourists cope with our floor numbering system; quite logically they call the ground floor, 'floor 1', which makes complete sense.)
Back to the hotel for a rest before dinner, then a walk to the restaurant (Ekinoura). I had some beef-based dish, that rather caught me by surprise when it arrived. It looked like raw minced beef with a raw egg-yolk on top that the waiter then 'mashed' together. It was, amazingly, very good,
Another walk back to the hotel - we're getting to know the route now, and the hotel looks completely different at night.
