Misadventures in Hakone

For today, we say sayonara to Tokyo, although we will return for several more days at the end of our trip. Our first order of business on this busy day took us winding through the long underground passages at Shinjuku Station en route to one of the first stress tests of our itinerary planning. We had purchased advance tickets for the Odakyu Express Romancecar, the quickest method of transport between Tokyo and Hakone, and all seemed to fall into place relatively easily. We arrived with enough time to verify with the information desk that we had the tickets we needed, we had found the correct platform, and we could let go of any fretting we were experiencing over locating where we needed to be. We settled into our seats with plenty of time until departure, so Paresh stepped off to fetch a drink from a nearby vending machine. All was good.

The world has a twisted sense of humor sometimes.

As it turns out, we’d boarded the 9:40 train to Odawara—not the 10:00 train to Hakone—and a jolt of surreal confusion shot through me as I felt the train begin to move. I looked over my shoulder to see Paresh standing helplessly on the platform as I slowly accelerated down the tracks away from him, his belongings tucked into the overhead bin above me. But such moments are about the way you respond to them. I was relieved at how quickly we mutually acknowledged the humor of our ordeal as we scrambled to amend the situation to the best of our ability via text message. We also couldn’t help but reflect on how this incident was nearly a nonissue in 2025 but could have been nightmarish to navigate in bygone times. We quickly reunited an hour later and were on our way to meander around Hakone with an additional notch in our belts for managing a tricky situation pretty seamlessly.

While noshing on wagyu beef curry and mitarashi dango (grilled mochi with sweet soy glaze), I couldn’t help but note an eerie similarity between Hakone and Sogndal, a city about which much ado has been written on this blog. A small river babbles through the middle of the train station area, a small set of waterfalls at its inception point (to compare them to Fossfossen, however, would be an unfair jest). Encircling the city, lush green mountainsides tower over the horizon in every direction. And Lake Ashi might almost be more accurately described as Ashi Fjord, where if you swapped out the pirate ships for silent electric ferries, you could have easily convinced me that I had fallen unconscious and woken up in Norway. Adding the gondola-style “ropeway” identical to the one we rode in Vik in 2023, the déjà vu was palpable.

The ropeway is one of the advertised ways to glimpse a picturesque view of Mt. Fuji, but today’s conditions were just shy of clear enough to provide the necessary lookout distance. But we did get to soar high above the sulfur mines at Ōwakudani and view the 大 character burned into the side of Mount Myōjō as part of the closing of the Hakone Gora summer festival. The views were breathtaking, even in Fuji’s absence.

You never know what you’re going to get with an Airbnb reservation, and our stay at Hakonetent was probably one of the more iffy choices with multiple variables that could have gone sideways if all wasn’t as advertised. But any trepidation I had has been squelched by the experience we’ve had here. The rooms feature traditional Japanese futon style beds on tatami wood floors and are scattered throughout a maze-like floor plan. The complex also boasts access to two private onsen rooms for guests, which we enjoyed as part of our evening festivities. The staff has been a delight. And there’s a coffee shop right next door where our tenancy at Hakonetent earns us a discount. What more could we want?

I hadn’t previously chronicled in this blog that we ate dinner at an okonomiyaki restaurant in Tokyo close to our Airbnb in Shinjuku. Part of my reasons for the snub was that it was an unremarkable and even regrettable meal—the only one we’ve had so far. And I’d been the culprit who chose it. My selection of Pizza Studio Takami yesterday had done wonders towards mending that misstep, but today’s dinner choice at Kaji redeemed the gaffe for good. Kaji is a tiny okonomiyaki-focused restaurant with about five tables run by a husband and wife pair a short block from our lodgings in Hakone. Reviews were a mixed bag—some gushed about the food and the experience while others lambasted the long wait times and the apparent stoicism of the owners. But the naysayers miss the point. This was a meal where as long as you were willing and able to operate within the boundaries and guidelines that your hosts laid out for you, it was a home run. Okonomiyaki is one of my favorite dishes in the world and I am so glad I (eventually) got to experience a memorable execution in its home country.

Our evening wind-down activity gave us a chance to kick it with one of the staff members at Hakonetent while we had a takoyaki party and cooking class. Paresh and I were the only two hotel guests who attended the event (not everybody can have good taste), so the interaction was much more informal and we got to chit-chat with our teacher, Yugo, about his brief time working here. At one point, he and another staff member remarked about how he was nervous having to hold conversations with us in English because casual conversation is so much harder than written communication or listening exercises. It’s easy to forget that language anxiety runs in both directions. Our reassurances to him that he was doing a spectacular job despite his more pessimistic self-appraisal were a good reminder to us that making the effort to push through discomfort in order to form connections with people is not only rewarding, but also necessary. That has been shown to us over and over again via the graciousness of nearly all of the Japanese people with whom we’ve interacted while here.

Tomorrow, it’s back to big city living as we head off to Osaka in preparation for one of our marquee experiences that we have planned for this trip (no spoilers, but it involves a big monkey, an Italian plumber, and a dinosaur). Let’s hope we end up on the right train this time.