21 days of travel through Asia – part III

Reaching a toll booth, which is anything but cheap, a friendly face smiles at you without understanding a word of English and showing you – as the only direction – straight ahead, which actually is the only way you can go on a highway. At the next toll booth you start wondering if the previous attendant didn’t run behind you to charge you again, for they all seem so incredibly similar. But you’d even get problems just to reach the toll booths.

After getting through the heavy city traffic and finding the right way we came to Hakone at the lake Ashinoko. In fair weather this is the best viewing point to see mount Fuji, with its 3776 meters, the highest mountain in Japan. It’s a sleeping volcano that last erupted in 1708 and can be seen even from Tokyo or Yokohama. It used to be worshiped as a holy mountain and popular among artists and population. But you need quite an amount of luck to have a clear view of the Fuji and we had it in the sunny morning when we saw it from our airplane arriving to Japan, when its mightiness covered with a white hat took our breath away.

With a glimpse of hope of a view disappearing, we headed back taking the seaside road through the tourist town of Kamakura, an hour’s drive away from Tokyo. It’s a popular tourist destination with rich history and culture and has many temples, shrines and other cultural heritage, as well as a sand beach attracting people to have a summer vacation. In this rain, however, nobody felt like walking on the beach. Outside Kamakura we crossed a 600 meter bridge to a small island of Enoshima, dedicated to the goddess of music, fun, arts and happiness, Benzaiten. She’s usually represented through a Japanese mandolin playing the lute. We came to this island full of monuments by accident and in better weather you may want to visit the Enoshima-Jinja temple and then walk to two beautiful caves, on the south of the island, with many statues of Buddha. We instead visited a small street full of souvenir shops and climbed up the stairs to a Buddhist paradise. The temple is divided into three smaller shrines dedicated to the goddesses of the sea. But instead of me talking about it, take a LOOK FOR YOURSELF.

We then continued toward Kamakuri and the big Buddha, a 13,35 meter tall bronze statue of Buddha Amida at the Kotokuin temple. It’s the second tallest statue of Buddha in Japan. It used to be in the big hall, which was destroyed several times by typhoons in the 14th and 15th century, thus the statue is out in the open since 1495. Unfortunately it was too late for us to see this attraction, so here’s a tip for all visitors travelling around Japan – mind the time, for many sights close relatively early.

We walked through Tsurugaoka Hachimangu, the most important part of Kamakure. It’s meant for the Samurai and you can reach it from the centre of the town. You climb to a terrace, through wide streets, where the mighty main hall of the temple stands. There is the museum with temple treasures, such as samurai swords, masks and documents, on display. And HERE are the pictures from this wondrous place.

And this also concludes our visit to Japan, as we once again had a great view of mt. Fuji, while taking a short flight to Bejing – which I’ll introduce to you in the next issue of the Globetortterja.