Our Trip South, Part 1: Ferry, Takayama and Gero

We began our trip by boarding a ferry on Thursday morning at 9 AM. I returned from the United States the night before, and only had time to pack quickly before leaving Akita again. The ferry was almost exactly like the one we took to Hokkaido, but was a longer trip. We slept on the ferry and woke up at 5 AM on Friday morning to drive off the ferry and into Tsuraga (only a train stop away from Obama, Japan). From there we drove through the mountains to Takayama, Gifu-ken which is in central Honshu. We probably could have driven to Takayama in couple of hours, but it took us five. We chose the wrong route…which is not unusual for us when driving through Japan.

Our newly married friends, Meredith and Abe met at us in Takayama to begin our 10 day adventure. We stayed at Minshuku Kuwataniya, which was a good value for Japan. We had fun visiting a sake brewery (no tour unfortunately, but we did taste some of the sake), visiting the morning market and walking around the town. We stayed across the street from Takayama’s oldest temple, Hida Kokubunji. Supposedly there is a 1200 year old gingko tree by this temple. Unfortunately we missed that.



Our first night we had a traditional Japanese dinner at the Minshuku, which included tofu, Hida beef cooked over a flame with vegetables, sashimi, pickled vegetables, rice and fruit.



The next morning we had a traditional breakfast, which is growing on me. It included cooked salmon, green beans, a hard-boiled egg, fruit, seaweed, miso soup and rice.



Our friends, renters and current Lou caretakers, Christine and Wellan, lived in Gifu-ken for one year on the JET program. Christine outlined a day trip for us from Takayama, which included seeing Gassho houses in Gero, eating ring toast in Hagiwara (their Japan home) and visiting an incredible onsen near Hagiwara. The ring toast is hard to describe, but it included a lot of bread and was very sweet. The onsen had every imaginable indoor bath contraption, including individual sauna boxes that you could sit inside.

Mer and Abe in Gero


More Gero



A Gassho house in Gero



Mer and a lucky cat in Gero. A smaller version of this maneki neko cat often greets you at restaurants in Japan or at Japanese restaurants outside of Japan.



Jonas playing with a rock that entertained him for awhile



We saw these "monkey babies" all over Takayama. I know this creature does not look like a monkey baby, but this is what more than one Takayama-ite told us they are called. It is not unusual for an area or town to have a mascot and Takayama has the monkey baby. Mer and I both bought mini monkey baby cell phone charms.



We bought apples from this sweet couple at the morning market in Takayama.



We spent two nights in Takayama and left for Kyoto on Sunday. Mer and Abe boarded the train with their handy JR passes and Jason, Jonas and I packed our stuff and ourselves into our Subura.

People often comment about determining the author of our blog entries…reviewing this one, I can’t help but think that is obvious that it is me (Tricia), because I am just not funny like Jason. The only funny story that I think of from Takayama makes me look a little crazy…and probably won't be funny in my telling...but it consists of me running down dark and winding streets pushing an empty stroller and asking every local I could find about the location of a Mexican restaurant that we read about in the Lonely Planet. Jason, Jonas, Mer and Abe all followed, cautiously. We eventually found the restaurant, and like most situations in Japan like this, a local walked us to the restaurant. If Japan would only use streets names…

Many, many pictures of Takayama and Gero