We left Tatsuta Ryokan around 9:30am – about 11 hours before our expected flight for a two hour drive to Haneda and then another two hour drive to Narita. But knowing what we know now about Japan traffic and how unreliable Google Maps and Sandoro (all GPS units are called Sondra, like bar maids – but I digress) can be, we felt it wisest to just set the whole day aside for the transit.
Which turned out to be largely okay… the weather was glorious as we left the Izu Peninsula and Mt Fuji was my constant friend out the passenger side window. Just stunning with clear blue skies today – these were the best views I have ever had of the mountain in four trips and multiple opportunities for viewings.., and we’re stuck in the car!
Weirdly as I was earlier complaining about Sandora, I was reminded just now of how she unexpectedly said at one point on the drive ‘Warning, there is congestion ahead due to a car on fire!’ Mr K and I just looked at each other and said, ‘Did she just say…?’; ‘Yeah, yeah she did.’ Weird. But sure as eggs ten minutes down the highway, there was a burned out car on the back of a tow truck with several emergency vehicle and personnel around. Sandora can’t seem to tell us how long it will take to get from A to B accurately, but magically she can give us live updates on a burning car on the side of the road.
No I didn’t take a photo of the car wreck.
We noticed this on our way out of Tokyo – all the buildings looked like they were in 8bit due to a type of mesh barrier that is in use along vast sections of the highway. But now we are seeing Mt Fuji in 8bit, we are starting to ask ourselves if Tokyo’s civil engineers got together with various community artist and designed the road furniture this way deliberately to create a cool, and very Japanese style, 8 bit landscape! It’s very cool but also weirdly like looking at the world through one of those halting flick motion books. 🙂 
We’ve seen some fun traffic signs on this trip – but I think this one takes the cake. Not only is that a convoluted as fuck depiction of the Shuto Expressway, but it’s live and shows congestion points – no doubt sometimes the entire thing is lit up red like Christmas tree. 
We made it back to Haneda to return our rental car around 12:30pm – so as expected the two hour drive was more like three, and decided to try and find some one last fabulous sushi meal before we boarded our sad flight home… Google to the rescue and I found a well located sushi restaurant at Haneda Gardens (a shopping centre across from Haneda Airport’s Terminal 3). The place is called Tsukji Sushiko Takumi.
It was unexpectedly quiet, but perhaps not for midday on a Sunday, so we were pleasantly surprised by that – in no small part, because it feels a bit like every other time I picked a restaurant, we ended up waiting for a table for ages! Mr K had better luck with his eatery choices, though he may not have been heading for the high end of town like I was. 
Menus were in English, ordering on an ipad, ad we started with a little salmon, tamago and ikura sushi starter. 
Mr K ordered at tempura rice bowl set, and I tried a bit of his eggplant which was delicious.
I ordered the tuna four ways, and OMG if it wasn’t the best damn tuna sashimi I’ve ever had, it was damn close. For a shopping mall restaurant, it was quite ten times better than any sashimi I’ve had in Australia, which is both fabulous, but also sad as.
Definitely saving the details of this place here, in case we find ourselves with time to kill near Haneda at some time in the (hopefully near) future. It was fantastic and cost roughly the same as a weird and disappointing hamburger meal we had a couple of days ago!
We then dropped off our car and met up with our driver – a step that was necessitated by Qantas changing our flight on us. We booked back in April on sale fares, which is the best way to do it if you can. However, at that time QF62 our flight home was operating from Haneda Airport – so we booked to fly in and out of Haneda because that would make the region we needed to travel to more accessible. IE: we didn’t want to have to drive the two hours across Tokyo from Narita. :/ A couple of months ago though, we received notice that all QF62 flights were being moved and would now be coming back from Haneda – turns out today, and our flight, was the first QF62 out of Narita.
So we meet our driver who was thankfully going to expertly manoeuvre us the rest of the way – a solid 1hr 45mins to 2 hrs – across Tokyo as the cost of returning the car to somewhere other than where we picked it up was going to be roughly the same as getting someone to collect us. Plus we figured a professional driver would be way better at driving in Tokyo than we would be, We may have overestimated on that – because instead of taking the Shuto and skirting around the entire city, we found ourselves on some of those inner spokes of this previously displayed nightmare and literally driving on an elevated highway right past Shibuya and Shinjuku! WTF?
But also, comforting to know it’s not just useless foreign tourists who fuck this up!
Anyway, we got to the airport in plenty of time to check in early, and thank goodness for that – seems half the ground staff were in training given the flight was newly moved from Haneda. So there was some unusually be-suited management types trying to train and guide the staff in checking people in.
After that, we sailed through customs and security (yay, express passes) and got to potter around a couple of duty free shops before installing ourselves for a while in the JAL First Class Lounge – which was quite okay actually. Saké on tap, literally and a touch screen to order curry, noodles or sushi. Best things about it – it is the quietest airport lounge I’ve ever been in. The Japanese and their inherent politeness manifesting in doing things like – taking phone calls in private booths designed expressly for this purpose, having conversations in what Westerners would call ‘indoor’ voices, and not having Sky News blaring at you whether you like it or not. Take note Qantas!
Boarding went smoothly and it was out with the bubbles to say good bye to Japan. For now.
Last Japanese selfie complete with obligatory cutesy filter. It’s tradition! 
Dinner options were pretty good and there was a Japanese set menu on offer, that I was certain was going to be disappointing after my fabulous sushi lunch, but when else am I going to get offered a Japanese meal on a plane?
The starters were in a neat little bento box and consisted of some shrimp, tofu, pickles, vegetables, beans,and all sorts of beautifully presented tasties. I was pleasantly surprised – this was airline food after all – but it’s obviously been prepared by people who care. It was really quite lovely with some crisp saké on the side.
There was also a Main course of Dainomono, seasonal grilled fish (mackerel I was told), served with rice, miso soup, and pickles .
Followed by a desert: wagashi which came with a cup of green tea. Nice job Qantas… I was actually quite impressed with an airline meal; first time in years.
Unfortunately our flight wasn’t as comfortable as it should have been – there was an ungodly glow coming from the ‘no smoking’ sign over our head which was a multiple of lumens brighter than any other ‘no smoking’ sign in the rest of the cabin! I was wearing an eye mask and trying to hide under my pillow and still couldn’t block it out. Also the cabin temperature was too warm… which is weird because we always travel expecting to freeze on flights, but at one point when I got up to use the bathroom at 2am, I walked down the aisle and noticed that nearly everyone had kicked off their blankets, so it wasn’t just me being Goldilocks (for a change!).
Other than that our flight was uneventful, which is just how we like them. Getting through Brisbane Airport was no problem and our cabbie was even super friendly and competent! All up it was a great transit* taking about 22 hours from leaving Izu to walking in the door at home.
Sayonara, Japan – for now.
* One slight hiccough of my own creation … I left my iPad on the plane! I never do things like that. Ever. But the stupid thing has a grey cover, the exact same colour of the side table of the business capsules so I can see how after not enough sleep and feeling a bit fatigued, I totally didn’t notice it. Oh well, thanks to the “find my device” and a bit of Googling to find the international airport’s lost property, I managed to get it back a few hours later – but that did mean driving back to the airport again! I swear our cars know the way tot he airports on autopilot.
This is the view from the ryokan’s riverside restaurant on the first floor… just beautiful.
The menu is predominantly Kawadoko cuisine in this part of Japan (not entirely sure what that means, but I am writing it down so I can hunt for it later). The starters were as impressively presented as they were flavoursome – there was an umeshu aperitif, sakiwan golden soup, boiled rockfish, pork hachimanmaki, forest boar liver, and tengyo nanban (I need to look that one up too!). 
We were also served some tempura seasonal vegetables with wasabi salt – I never thought I was overly fond of tempura…. in Australia it tends to feel heavy in oil, and the one time we went for tempura in Asakusa with a Japanese friend, Amané, she took us to her favourite and she claimed ‘best’ tempura restaurant in Asakusa and I honestly didn’t like it that much. But the ryokan meals we have had have served tempura that is light and delicate and doesn’t taste like heavy deep fried food at all.
We discovered that Izu is really well known for their fresh wasabi – and we also discovered, when you grate your own wasabi and not using the squishy over processed stuff you see most places, it is more flavourful and less hot. Very nice.
Dashi broth heating for our rice set course – 
The rice set came with more red fish, sesame, miso pickles, nori, wasabi, and coriander (thank you so much for the heads up on the devil’s weed!), then of course you pour some broth on once you have loaded up your rice.
Ta-da! Super tasty. They gave us a large pot of rice and said to call if we wanted more rice – but after such a large meal, I nearly had more condiments than rice in my donburi. 
Thankfully, with these multi course kaiseki meals, the dessert/sweet courses are usually simple and small… I say ‘thankfully’ because many Japanese abhor waste when it comes to food and it is considered rude not to clean your plate – if you are at a buffet and choosing food for yourself, it is VERY rude to take more than you will eat.
Looking very relaxed and chilled there Mr K. 
Waking up to this in the morning is something I could really get used to.
I’m getting used to cooking with the chopsticks and have even mastered removing the fish bones from the morning’s grilled fish offerings, with my chopsticks. 
The miso soup here was excellent – one thing travelling around to so many different areas throughout the country is you rapidly learn that not all miso soup is made equal! Nor is all curry or all ramen. 
They all look great and super uncomfortable in their samue… I’m sure a bit of saké will dispel the discomfort quick smart. 
There was also a savoury egg custard made from tortoiseshell and yuzu paste (?), and some grilled swordfish with magnolia leaves, but I got busy with the cooking of the hot pot and failed on the photos. 🙂 Dessert again was lovely and light and simple: almond pudding, with orange and local melon.
An impromptu work meeting transpired over saké…
Less so as the night went on… 🙂 
≈
One of the first things we navigated to get onto the roads we wanted was this impressive elevated spiral road system, called the Kawazu Nanadaru Loop Bridge, that brings traffic up or down a steep embankment that probably used to have very dangerous switchback roads. It’s located on Route 414 that connects Namuzu to Shimoda and is a 1km bit of road with a height of 45m and a diameter of only 80m… it corkscrews the traffic uphill counterclockwise and downhill clockwise and feels really weird as you get a 720 degree view as you go down through two full loops. 
We didn’t have to wait too long for it to go off, only about ten minutes, and I chose a safe place where the ground wasn’t wet to wait and take pictures. 
After leaving the 414 at Kawazu, we were spat out of the mountainous roads at Kawazu Beach. From here we would be following the coastal roads around the peninsula. 
Still beautiful, and nice they have gone to the trouble of planting palm trees to frame the view – why, people? 
Minamiizu, Kamo-Gun
The forest was beautiful and cool to drive through, lots of autumn colours sprinkled in amongst the trees.
We had a quiet little garden villa at the back of the properly in a tucked away secluded little spot.
His and her yukata for the stay.
and his and her towels. The blue is for boys, and pink is for girls really is ubiquitous. 
Outside was a lovely deck overlooking a private garden. Not as established as some gardens but will be lovely in a few years as the plants mature. 
Dressing room:
Bathroom:
Snackage and drinks: 
Before scubbing off the road and into the onsen. It was a very warm 41C – which probably only felt warm because the ambient temp was closer to 20C than 10C this close to the coastline. The water really is crystal clear, and while not as soft as some others, was lovely and refreshing. 
After a couple of dips in the bath (in between getting some work done) it was time to go for dinner. Here was the menu for the evening, laid out in a lovely autumnal design:
Maguro sashimi – this was delicious. Lovely three different cuts of tuna of varying grades. <3 Big fan! 
Had to try the local saké of course – cute little saké jug.
Shimonita leek soup. 
Followed by a house speciality – deep fried tuna cheek. This was possibly the most flavourful cooked piece of tuna I’ve ever had in my life. I’m not super fond of tuna once it’s more than lightly seared, but this was fantastic.
Local fish with Chinese cabbage served with seaweed sauce.
Simmered Shrim Potatoes.
Marinated steak with malted rice paste.
It had a double dressing room, a double shower room and this lovely large onsen. Only we found it to be rather too well lit and took care of that pronto…much nicer without a spotlight overhead, and just the garden lights left on. 
Grilled Japanese horse mackerel with fish sausage and wasabi.
Tuna sashimi for breakfast! How decadent.
Tamago with pickled broth sauce.
Anyway once inside, it felt kinda like the NASA centre where they display the Space Shuttle Atlantis at Cape Canaveral… all dark and the trains are lit up – whaaaa! sHiNy tRaINs!
Gotta admit they are super shiny and riding them is very cool. You don’t feel like you are going that fast at all but the landscape speeds by.
Then of course is the Maglev trains that everyone can’t wait to see roll out in some time in the next five years, as it is currently not quite expected to meet the 2027 opening date. (Though can you really ‘roll out’ a Maglev train?) 🙂 
Sleek! The first track is 296km from Tokyo to Nagoya and had a budget of 7 TRILION YEN. The extension through to Osaka is scheduled for 2037..
The museum also had plenty of interactive exhibits where you could buy tickets and use them in train station ticket machines, you could switch tracks, lift and lower cars and stuff and heaps of interactive fun stuff for kids to get amongst.
This was one of the kids play spaces upstairs above the Great Hall – all shoes off an it was hard to get a shot with no one’s kids in it. They were running around like squirrels all hyped up on catnip.
