Sunday 7th April

Left the hotel at 8am to see the Black Castle in Matsumoto, another fine example of Japanese castle building in 1593. As with all these places the outer walls are surrounded with a moat, in this case bright green & shallow with the compulsory carp. Inside the outer walls lies the keep which is a 5 storey construction with a wooden frame on a sloping stone wall of about 3m.

Our assault on the floors via extremely steep stairways was hindered by what appeared to be a continuous stream of visitors and the need to traverse the place shoeless with the shoes carried in a plastic shopping bag. This was too much for a lot of our party but as we had piked at the last one we persevered & ascended to the small room at the top where we had a very limited view of the surrounds as the shutters were half closed. Still we felt proud of our persistence in this, somewhat pointless, exercise. Several of the rooms had a great display of early firearms used there & there were some lovely painted screens of battle scenes in the area.

Moving on we set out to see Mount Fuji & after some very fine driving we arrived at a lake below it & took photos. Here there were men fishing on elevated tennis umpire seats out in the lake about 30m from the shore but we couldn't understand how they arrived & left their chairs in a dry state.

The bus took us up the side of the mountain on a winding road through heavily timbered country & it was noticeable how many of the trees of about 30cm diameter had either snapped off or been uprooted presumably in a violent storm. On reaching about 1900m we pulled in to a car park & it was decided that going further up would be futile as many buses & cars were queued up waiting to turn back at the next car park. The crest was starting to become clouded up so some of our group amused themselves with the melting snow on the ground. Apparently at level 4 the road had been closed due to snow falls.

Descending again we spent another 2 hours on our way to our overnight hotel which has traditional Japanese rooms. After a complex system of navigation within the hotel at Hakone.

We found our room & most impressive it was. The floor was covered in Tatami mats each 90X180cm & the bed was of 2 mattresses on a raised platform. On the balcony outside was a cedar hot tub about 120X80X70cm with raffia blinds.

We all changed into our Japanese outfits, pyjamas for men & dressing gowns for the ladies & went down to the restaurant for a formal Japanese dinner. This included sashimi & a variety of small items before cooking fish & vegetables etc in broth on small spirit stoves. As a meal it was a bit mixed but it looked rather fine. Hero, our guide, showed a different side when one couple didn't want to move to our area of the dining room. He was quite upset & yelled at them, much to our surprise.