Getting Close to the Mountains in Kamikochi

Our final destination in Japan was further up into the mountains to do some hiking and visit a hot springs. From Matsumoto there is a very well communicated train+bus trip (there are signs all over the Matsumoto train station) to Kamikochi in the Chūbu-Sangaku National Park. It felt very unusual to board a train in the city alongside people wearing head-to-toe mountaineering gear and carrying ice axes, but after about 40 minutes on the train we transferred to a bus that took us an hour up a winding mountain road and dropped us off in a valley surrounded by snowy mountains where ice axes made a lot more sense.

It still felt like winter up in the mountains; there was plenty of snow on the mountains for the mountaineers and the trees in the valley didn’t have their leaves yet. We didn’t have any intense hiking planned; we spent the day hiking a loop around the valley, where it was cool but mostly not snowy. We felt a lot of similarities with Yosemite Valley in this Japanese National Park experience, especially with tall walls surrounding us, a river flowing through the center of the valley, and similar feeling buildings in the park’s “village”. On our hike around the valley, we got to see jungly forest with monkeys, excellent mountain views, and a variety of waterscapes.

In the afternoon we headed to our lodging for the evening, a traditional Japanese inn at a mountain hot spring. We weren’t really sure what to expect from this, but it ended up feeling a bit more like a hotel with several stories of rooms off of typical hotel hallways, though the rooms were still traditional tatami mat setups. The hot spring aspect of the hotel consisted of a men’s bath and a women’s bath with several pools of varying temperatures. Similar to our stay in Tsumago, dinner and breakfast were a series of many small dishes made with local ingredients. We had a salted fish for the second time and felt like experts with our existing knowledge of how to eat it like corn-on-the-cob, by picking it up by the head and tail. A particularly memorable part of breakfast was that one of the dishes was tofu that was made/cooked at our table while we ate the other dishes.

The next day we headed back down the mountains and off to Tokyo for our final night in Japan. Thanks to a credit card points tip from Max and Kristan, we got to spend a lovely night in the Tokyo Park Hyatt with incredible views out over the city.