Day 6 – We Stayed in a Traditional Ryokan

Woohoo, we finally got to sleep in. Henry didn’t stir until 6:30am this morning. Maybe it was the darker room. Maybe is was the rumbling of the swollen river flowing right past the hotel. In any event, it was nice to feel more rested. We went down for our mix of Western and Japanese breakfast – bacon, cubed eggs, meatballs, miso soup, odd garlic vegetables, cod, pain au chocolat, and cereal. Henry ate lots but then vomitted some up.

I went for a morning dip in the onsen. We could be relatively relaxed this morning, since we only had a 3 hour hike, and the train didn’t leave until 11am. We also had little desire to preemptively leave the hotel, as it was torrenting down with rain.

We left around 10am and stopped by a sake brewery to have a few samples, and then the 7-Eleven to pick up our lunch for the day. We then took the train 15 minutes to Yabuhara, where we would walk over the Torii pass, the highest part of the Nakasendo, to Narai. The path today was predonintly on trail, rather than road, and we passed some interesting shrines and monuments, the coolest being the Ontake shrine at the high point, which had a bunch of carved statues and a Torii gate. We then descended down to Narai, looking forward to putting down our heavy packs and getting into dry clothes.

We arrived at our ryokan for the night, Iseya. A ryokan is a traditional Japanese inn, typically family run, generally with traditional Japanese rooms where you sleep on tatami mats and eat dinner and breakfast at the inn. The dinners are known to be quite extravagant, and be primarily from locally sourced ingredients.

We’ve had a really nice evening at the ryokan. There was a private onsen, rather than gender separated onsens, so we could go to the onsen together. Henry particularly liked alternating between dipping his hand in a bowl of cold water and then hot water, and found it quite thrilling. Dinner was fantastic. We saw that there were a total of 6 couples staying here, since we could see all the tables in the dining room. We each had 14 plates, each with some sort of vegetable, fish, meat, or soup.

We’re now settled in for an early evening and will head tomorrow to Matsumoto.