The Tateyama Kurobe Alpine Route. This was only a recent addition to the itinerary when I was looking through things to do later in the trip.

It was spectacular, and the most scenic countryside I have ever set eyes on, but I can now say that I've done it and will never, ever, ever, think about doing it again. EVER.

Why? Quite simply, it was too damn crowded to enjoy it. There was just no time in the entire journey when you could relax, and just spend time to appreciate the beauty of the countryside laid out before you. You always had someone trying to push past, or push in front of you, or try to stand on the exact same spot you were standing, at the exact same time you were standing on it.

And there was one unfailing common denominator among the rudest and pushiest of the tourists on the mountain today. I've heard horror stories about the rudeness and pushiness of Chinese tourists from others, but on the 3 previous trips to Japan I've never noticed it, or it has never been evident enough to bother me.

Today however, it was quite simply appalling to the point where I lost count of the times where I didn't know whether to laugh, get angry or shake my head in disbelief at my fellow traveller due to to their behaviour. I think I spent a fair bit of time doing all 3. It is apparently normal or socially acceptable for them to be blatantly pushy, rude and inconsiderate, since so many of them were doing it today, but when you're so used to the politeness and courtesy of the Japanese, as we have become accustomed to over the last few weeks, being thrust into the middle of this abruptness was a little jarring.

And the fact that, on my estimation the Chinese tourist made up 50%+ of the crowd on the Alpine Route today, made for a fairly unpleasant time for much of the day.
It wasn't enough to ruin the day, and I'm still very glad we went, but it did take the shine off what could have been a spectacularly great day. Instead of wanting the day to never end, we found ourselves continually looking for the exits to get the hell out of wherever we were, and onto the next station.

The day started out fairly early, since none of the information available could give an accurate estimation for how long it would take to traverse the Alpine Route, due to the "extreme congestion". Fair enough too, but it meant that we didn't know whether it would be 3 hours or 10 hours to do the Alpine Route and get to our destination on the other side of the mountain to collect our luggage by 6:30pm.

So waking at 5:30am, and heading downstairs after 6pm we checked in our baggage at the Toyoko Inn front desk, which for 1300 yen per bag (~ $15) they would drive your bags to the other side of the mountain, to a town called Shinano-Omachi.

Arriving down at the Toyama station at 6:30am, we were met with the first of the queues. Even though we had purchased "Option tickets" beforehand, we still had to book a timed entry to the Tateyama cablecar. Not a huge problem, and before long we were onboard the crowded and slow train through the Tateyama rural countryside headed for the base of the mountain.

From that stop onwards, every station, be it a train station, a cable car station, the ropeway station, the bus stations, whatever, was absolute chaos. There was no plan. No order. It was just a free-for-all of people going in every different direction, pushing each other out of the way trying to get to something. Anything.

The best analogy I can give is, imagine getting 1000 alive and energetic cockroaches, and letting them all go at once, inside of a shoebox. If you looked down from overhead at what the cockroaches were doing inside that shoebox immediately after you released them, running everywhere, climbing over the top of each other, etc, that's pretty much what each station looked like today.

My favourite trick of the day was when the poor station attendant would say "Form 4 orderly lines" so the crowd would do it, mostly, then when the gates would open everyone would just push their way to the front, making the 4 orderly lines completely and utterly redundant. It was a textbook example of futility and chaos, and each station attendant knew it. I'm convinced that they absolutely knew they were wasting their time getting people into lines, but since they'd been told to do it by their superiors, they complied. I lost count of the number of times where some simple planning and crowd control or structure could have made things so much more pleasant.

After the Tateyama train was the first cablecar. This, in a nutshell, was a train carriage, cram packed full of people, being pulled up a steep hill by a cable. Nothing more romantic than that.

Once again, a hellish push through the next station saw us on our next mode of transport, which was the Highland Bus. This journey was the most pleasant of the trip.
Rather than being pushed into a carriage like sardines, each bus could only take seated passengers, so numbers were regulated, which made it pleasant. The bus once loaded took the slow but immensely scenic journey from Bijodaira at 977m to Murodo at 2450m, through the snow corridor.

The snow corridor is the road running across the mountain ridge with the snow plowed to form massive snow walls on each side of the road. Busses travel through the corridor, and it is open to foot traffic as well. If you've seen photos of the Kurobe Alpine Route, I can guarantee you've seen photos of the snow corridor.

It was very pretty, and the snow corridor was fairly amazing...for the first 5 minutes. After being in a cavern of 15m deep snow for 20 minutes, it lost some of its novelty. Still, as I said, this was the best mode of transport on the trip.

The bus drops you at Murodo station, and you're ushered into the station...to be told that you should walk out of the station if you want to look around. This I didn't understand, but since we were being herded like sheep I didn't think too long or hard about it.

Instead, we headed out into the Alpine air, and into the only part of the trip which actually felt cold. Temperatures on the whole today were fantastic. This was the only stop that I bothered to ever zip up my jacket. At every other stop the temperature was t-shirt weather, which astounded me.

The first stop was a simple toboggan run. Basically kids, and whoever else wanted to have a turn, would sit on a plastic upturned bin lid, and rocket down a small hill, inevitably falling off and getting very snowy and wet, or crashing into the snow wall at the bottom of the hill.
It was good for a few laughs, and the girls enjoyed their runs, but even for a couple of kids from snow-free coastal NSW in Australia, the novelty wore off after just a few turns.

Next, we did what every other tourist was doing, and we headed for the snow corridor to walk through it. Reading the information before coming here today, I assumed that the snow corridor could be traversed by either bus, or on foot. Apparently not, or at least not from what we could see. What happened today was the bus drove us to Murodo station, and then you've got to backtrack down the hill on foot, as far as you could be bothered walking, before turning around and walking back up the icy hill.

The the walking path in the snow corridor was just so crowded that it was just one huge, slow moving queue. With everyone stopping to take photos of themselves or their loved ones, and others trying to shove those people out of the way to get in front of them, or past them, it didn't take long for us to abort our walk through the snow corridor, and return to the station out of the madness.

Once we'd walked a short distance through the snow corridor we couldn't imagine it doing anything else special anyway, so we figured we probably weren't missing much. Yes the snow would get a little deeper the further you walked, but if you've got to crane your neck skywards to see the top of the snow anyway, will a few more meters of height in the snow wall really make much difference?

Fighting our way through Murodo station however was not without its rewards. On the other side of the station was a huge open expanse of snow, with a much smaller human to snowflake ratio, and a spectacular uninterrupted 360 degree views of the Alps.

Refreshed after having some room to move and actually appreciate the sights we came to see, we were stuffed into an underground "trolley bus" which is an electric bus on an overhead guide rail which runs through a tunnel, meaning you spend a 10 minute journey looking at your reflection in the window.

While on the bus, we were warned that the next station "Daikanbo" was a small station, so we should keep moving and be considerate to others for the comfort of our fellow traveller. They were right about one thing. It certainly was small.
This was, without a doubt, the worst station, by far, of the trip. It was absolute chaos. It was so badly organised, and so tightly packed with people, that we could not wait to get out of there.
Unfortunately, this station also boasted one of the best views of the trip. At 2316m, the station has an observation deck with magnificent mountain views. We visited the observation deck, but it was just too crowded to appreciate.
I got some excellent shots, and it was beautiful, but I would have liked to just be able to stand there and appreciate the vista without having someone trying to get in under my elbow or push me out of the way to get in between me and the fence I was standing against.

This, more than once, made me contemplate a few important theoretical questions:
1) If I threw this person over the fence into the soft white powdery snow perched on the cliff edge, would they sink into the snow, or just sit on top?
2) Would the weight of their body and the impact onto the snow pile cause an avalanche?
3) How could I accomplish this and make it look like an accident?

With the observation deck done, we moved onto the ropeway. This should have been one of the most scenic highlights of the tour, but it was just, quite frankly, a joke. So many people were stuffed into the ropeway carriage that it was just 5 minutes of discomfort. To add to that, we were on first, so we were able to get the front carriage, which meant that there were about half a dozen Chinese women trying to push through to get to the window in front of us. Actually pushing. Charlotte and Angela had prime position at the window, and as they were pushed I just instructed them to hold their ground, which admirably they did (since they were both about 6 inches taller than the women trying to push them out of the way).

One Chinese woman in frustration at not being able to push Angela out of the way started taking photos around her and over her head, and by putting the camera in front of her face. It was the pinnacle of rudeness for the day, and exemplified the typical behavior we'd witnessed today. As the woman was leaning on Angela I told her to just push back, which she did, much to the woman's disgust. We actually thought it was pretty hilarious. I blatantly started taking photos of the woman, which I don't think she liked.
Ironically, had she asked me, I would have let her stand in front of me to take photos, since she was quite short and wouldn't have obstructed my view. After her attempt to elbow me out of the way to get to the window however, that feeling of benevolence was extinguished.

Another cablecar, this time down the hill instead of up, was dispatched with the same level of carriage stuffed discomfort as the previous cablecar trip. At least these rides were short.
The cablecar however let to the scenic highlight of the day, the Kurobe dam.

This section of the day, which saw you walk from the cablecar station on one side of the dam, to the trolley bus station on the other side of the dam, saw you out of the crowds, and not in a queue, and with access to uninterrupted views of the mountain, and frozen lake, without someone trying to push you out of the way or hurry you along. It was only the second time today I can remember feeling relaxed (with the wide open snow fields of Murodo station being the first).

We were free to take our time and stroll across the huge dam at our own pace, with relatively few dam tourists. With so much dam space, we were able to take as many dam photos, and take as much dam time as we wanted, which was dam nice.
It made me realise how magnificent the rest of the day would have been if all of the other stops had been like this one. It is certainly how the tourist brochures make it all seem.

The relaxation ceased when we got to the other side of the dam. Everything I'd read recommended trying the dam curry at a little restaurant on the other side of the dam. But when we arrived there, we banished all notions of even trying to get a meal there. We found out why the dam was almost deserted...everyone was on the other side eating the dam curry.

By this stage, we'd seen everything we'd wanted to, and we were all starting to get fairly tired, so we made our way for home. After the dam was another trolley bus, just as uninteresting as the first, followed by a regular bus down to the civilisation of Shinano-Omachi station.

We beat our luggage by about 30 minutes, which gave us a good excuse to grab some food at a nearby bakery, since we hadn't really eaten anything today.

Our luggage turned up at around 2:30pm, and we were on our way to Matsumoto at 3:10pm.

So all in all, the Alpine Route took us 8 hours, since we caught the first train from Toyama at 7:10am. It could have been much longer if we'd done the side activities such as the full snow corridor walk, and some of the hiking trails, and the full dam observatory walk which takes an hour (or 2 today, with the inevitable queue). But what we did was enough. I feel we saw a good representation of the beauty of the region, even though the day was let down by the transport options.

Still, I'm very glad we did it. But as I said at the beginning..never, ever again.

I've only visited Matsumoto briefly on a previous holiday as a day trip. The city on that occasion impressed me greatly, as it has done again. I really like the city. It is open, well laid out, and just has a comfortable "feel" to it. Aside from the rain that started this afternoon while we were on the train leaving Shinano-Omachi station heading for Matsumoto. Rain isn't comfortable.

Dinner, at Charlotte's request, was Bikkuri Donkey again for the last time this trip. We were all starving, and since we wont get to have it again, and it's a pretty unique "Japanised" western style dish that doesn't really have any comparison in Australia, we were glad to oblige. Even though it meant we had to get on a crowded train for 10 minutes before walking 20 minutes in the rain along a main road in the dark, we were still glad to do it.

Right now, broken, everyone has crashed except for me, still somehow awake writing this blog entry.

We have one night in Matsumoto. Tomorrow, we leave here and head down to Tokyo, for 3 days of Disney insanity. Checking into the Disney "Celebration" hotel, before doing Disneyland on Wednesday and Disney Sea on Thursday. If I think I'm feeling exhausted now, I suspect that after 2 days of Disney I'll have a new definition of what exhaustion really feels like.