Today we had a short drive from Takayama to Nagoya via Gero which was going to take us through the Gifu prefectures. I was hoping for a chance to spot some of Japan’s famed autumn colours and it turns out we were in luck. 
Children crossing warning signs here are slightly more fun than at home: “Be careful; jumping out!!” 
Ujo Park in Gero…
I thought this would be the highlight of the autumn colours today.
One of the things I have noticed here on Japan’s roadways is the total lack of ‘lookout’ points. In Australia there are spaces on highways and roads to pull over and see nice scenery all over the place – they are quite often marked on maps as scenic or photo-worthy stops. Here, there is rarely anything like that, even though the scenery is quite often spectacular.
This was us, and several others, all stopped in a long and somewhat precarious row on a stretch of highway that followed this gorge… it really needs a handful of places where people can stop and take in the view of the beautiful trees, the still river and the mountain as. 
The autumn colours were simply stunning against the deep blue/green of this lake/river.
The sun is shining, the birds are singing… how’s the serenity*?
*if we ignore the fact that I’m standing on the side of a highway and cars are flying past us at breakneck speed. 
Just beautiful… 
Made it safely to Nagoya without any navigation mishaps. Checked into our hotel, did some prep for work stuff, and went for a quick grill/sushi dinner that turned out to be quite the most ordinary meal we have had since we got here.
On the way back after dinner we stopped in briefly at ‘Liquor Mountain’… I sent these pics to the Whisky Wankers group at home. Just to taunt everyone with the selection and the prices – omg the prices! Australians really are getting reamed on island tax, and WET tax. :/
When I was making arrangements for this trip back in April, I had originally intended to stay a couple of nights in a more Western style hotel closer to the old part of Takayama where the transport issues are – until I saw a Japanese video posted by someone who had stayed at this ryokan. It just looked amazing and I have been looking forward to it for six months. 
The entrance to the hotel is fairly unassuming – perfectly manicured gardens are ‘de rigeur’ here and seem quite common everywhere. 
But just on the other side of those shrubberies is a world all of its own… a large koi pond featuring equally large koi. A cute little walkway over the pond which leads to and onsen foot bath (fresh hot mineral waters piped into a knee deep bath where you can remove your socks and shoes and soak your weary feets). 
An outdoor lounging area that wasn’t seeing much use given it was max temps of 10-11C while we were here and lows of 4C and 2C overnight.
We were welcomed by a lovely young lady named Kyaka, who checked us in, brought us some drinks, hot towels and showed us through the quiet and dimly lit hallway to our room.
The decor was very traditional, except for the slightly elevated futon beds. In the room waiting for us was some snacks, and green tea and an explanation of where to find things in the room – yukata and jinbei (Japanese style pyjamas) to wear, a bunch of amenities for us, and an opportunity to specify what time we would like to have dinner and breakfast etc. 
The bathroom was neat and all panelled in fresh cypress – it smelled amazing! 
But the best bit… omg! So excited – was the stonking huge granite onsen bath in our own private garden. <3 I couldn’t wait for Kyaka to finish her introduction so we could have a shower, scrub up and then slide into this amazingly beautiful bath in this cute little garden space. 
The bath was a steady 40-41C and was just bliss. The water at this particular onsen comes from 1200 feet below ground and is particularly high in minerals which make the water so soft it feels kinda slippery… it was so steamy as the ambient temperature was only about 8C or so.
In what is now become quite our usual habit, we shared some saké acquired on our way to the ryokan and had a good soak. Love it!
The ryokan has some lovely open spaces that guests can use if they wish, but we hardly saw anyone – in fact with the private onsen in our little garden, and having a meal in a private dining room, we could swear for most of our visit that there was hardly anyone else staying at the inn. The only give away was the shoes all lined up in the morning as people were getting ready to check out or go to town for the day. There are no shoes worn on the tatami mats here, only tabi socks. Even the staff are silently walking up and down the hallways in socks.
Dinner was a multiple course kaiseki meal – starters consisted of:
Matsutake mushroom soup with shrimp, pike and eel.
Sashimi – roasted Hida beef with plum flavoured onion sauce. 
Sashimi – amberjack and mackerel.
Local saké. 
Steam turnip with mushrooms and lily root, stuffed with ginkgo nut.
Hida beef steak with vegetables.
Grilled freshwater sweetfish stuffed with roe.
Whipped pumpkin topped with abalone.
Local steamed rice, miso soup with mushrooms, tofu and pickles.
Sweet potato cake and seasonal fruits… I love the little maples leaves they are decorating our meals with seeing as it is autumn. You just know someone in the kitchen is tasked with finding the prettiest leaves for the job.
After such an amazing meal, we let our dinner settle and then it was back into the onsen again… I could really get used to this. You can just feel the tension draining away from all your muscles, and even though the air temperature was quite cold, the water was so inviting that you barely noticed it.
Breakfast was another lavish affair of itty bitty dishes filled with very tasty things!
The menu was rather more casual for breakfast, which was excellent. 🙂 
When we returned from doing transport stuff in the city, I had an opportunity to pop into the ladies public onsen in the hotel. Not all rooms here have a private bath like we have booked and there is a men’s and ladies onsen baths that swap over day to day so you can try the different bathing spaces. There were dressing tables for about six people, all full of amenities – soaps, lotions, shampoos, conditioners etc. 
A space for dressing and changing and to store your clothing while you bathed.
A post-onsen relaxation space where you could have complimentary cold beverages and even try out a massage chair.
And, as the onsen was unoccupied I was able to take a photograph of the baths here. The Japanese are very ritualistic about their baths – which I love, but one of their customs is that tattooed peoples re not allowed in public onsens. Some ryokan will make exceptions for their Western guests (as we are highly unlikely to be connected to local organised crime gangs) but others are very strict and ask you to cover your ink. I have no idea what the policy is here – I didn’t ask… but it was the primarily motivator for booking a room with a private bath. That and bathing with strange people who you don’t share a common language with gets pretty boring pretty fast. 
So we didn’t make use of the public onsen and made use of our private garden bath again! I’m so enamoured of this little garden oasis – I took so many photos. 
Oh more saké before dinner? Don’t mind if I do!
Prior to arriving I had requested the special Hida beef kaiseki meal on our second night. It was at a small additional cost, but given Gifu is so famous for their Hida beef, we felt it would be worth it. Kyaka kept referring to it as the ‘Too Much Beef Dinner’, which we thought was cute.
A rare selfie taken in our private dining room… the ‘glow’ is the saké, of course. 😛
Hida beef steak
Takayama’s Old Town district isn’t very big so a few hours is a goodly amount of time to spend wandering the streets here – unless you get side tracked.
There were chop stick shops, LOADS of sweets, biscuits and lollies for sale, puddings, beef stores, fans, glassware, ceramics, and cutesy as hell Japanese kitch. 
Cute little glass chopstick rests… I nearly bought a set to bring home but while the chopsticks I bought home from Kanazawa back in 2015 are probably the most used and useful souvenir I have ever bought from anywhere, we tend not to set the table too fancy when we are having Japanese at home. So they probably wouldn’t end up getting used much. 
These fans remind me of the hundreds of fan shops all over Kyoto… Takayama is sometimes called ‘Little Kyoto’, as its old town district is relatively well kept. 
Takayama is also really well known for its Hida beef… this is a Hida beef bun – the type you usually get full of pork. Mr K felt that he just *had* to get one and it I stole a bite, it was really tasty. 
This guy actually represents Daikoku who is one of the Seven Gods of Fortune. This god is said to be a fusion of the mythological creator of Japan, known as Okuninushi no Mikoto, and an Indian God…. weird combo.
This is his, ‘I’m not working for ten minutes together, and there is beer and beef!’, face.
Why hello? This is where I parked my car!
Anyway… what was Hello Kitty doing in the middle of my saké adventure, anyway? I think we accidentally wandered into saké heaven… there are so many breweries here that there are walking tours and special maps showing you which brewery is where.
Okay, so that was just one Takayama saké store – it isn’t even one of their brewery store fronts! >.> This may take longer than we anticipated… 
Oita Sake Brewery Kamisannomachi *(I think… by the time you get to the end of this you’ll see where the confusion is creeping in!)
This place was directly across the street from the Takayama Cafe…e
Funasaka Saké Brewery…
This place was great – you pay 450JPY for a little cup and you can fill it 12 times from 12 different bottles in their range that are kept in a big fridge you can access.
Matsuzaka Saké… 
So many people lining up for the token machine!
It was so easy to just hook into this… $10 later and you’re really quite toasted.
Quaffable stuff and well worth a stop!
Ummm.. Kawashiri Brewery I think? :/ 
It was about this point that we decided we should get back to our accom as we had more work to do and I was rapidly ending up in a state where I wasn’t going to useful at all!
Gorgeous little town with heaps to see. And we didn’t even touch on their weird retro museums and other offerings.
The pics that show up when you search a place are often quite handy so you know what you are looking for…
Anyway, you’d think this wouldn’t be too difficult a task… look up the brewery, find an address, type it into Google maps (and the car’s archaic GPS unit for good measure) and off you go! Oh if wishing made it so! We found the general area okay thanks to the aforementioned navigational devices, and then seemed to be stumbling around a bit lost until I saw this door – and remembered seeing it on the images that popped up on Google Maps. Awesome – we are in the right place. So I asked a guy who obviously worked there, who happened to be passing by, and he directed me slightly down the road to a doorway….
On the corner of the next block – totally not visible at all from where the ‘helpful’ worker was pointing was one of the buildings that I saw on the Google Map. 
And I can’t read a lick of kanji… when it comes to saké I know that I like ones on the dry end of the scale, not to heavy on the aroma. Definitely nothing sweet or cloying (some are downright syrupy), and I quite dislike saké that feels like it should be labeled ‘vodka’ or tastes of grain spirit. Over time I’ve learned that I like the junmai gingo or junmai daiginjo and I have been to enough breweries and tastings to have some favourites.
Oh and they had FIVE fridges this size all full of different offerings that you could try. Some of this fridge was full of vintage saké and limited edition runs which is a bit of a bitch because two of the ones I liked in this fridge aren’t even available for sale! 
I tried about nine in my 15 minutes and took some photos of some favourites. I gotta say it was a lot of fun… there were a couple of other guests there who were also talking and laughing (in English) about tasting against the clock – they turned out to be Japanese and Croatian but both living and working in Berlin at the moment. We tried to divide and conquer a little but just ended up telling each other which ones to try. 🙂 
It was good fun – I bought a nice bottle of junmai daiginjo to take away and couple of little cups as a memento. Then we ventured south in search of the next brewery – which was the Yoshino Tomo brewery. 
Thankfully a little easier to find. Definitely not as slick an operation as the Masuda brewery and we walked in and were hard pressed to find anyone to show us around or give us any information. 
This little tanuki was by the door with a big ‘Welcome’ sign but to be honest it wouldn’t have surprised me if we were trespassing again – the welcoming committee was non-existent and we couldn’t seem to get any help at all.
After poking around for a while and using Google Translate to decipher many many labels, we decided to bail out and took some notes of anything we might like to try down the track from the supermarkets. Seemed easier!
I have seen the Kisaki pink in the shops before so now we have a bit more info, it might be worth giving some of these a try. At least the labels are distinctive so we’ll be able to recognise them easily.
Oh look… there is the Masuizumi Junmain gingo at Lawson’s that I just bought at the last brewery, for JPY400 less than they charged at the tasting room! Oh well, live and learn. 🙂 
Next stop was a roadside services for lunch – and I have to say, even dodgy roadside food here is better than a lot of the cheap and cheerful Japanese restaurants that we have at home. I’d go so far as to say convenience store sushi is better than most Australian sushi trains restaurants. 😐 Disappointing but there you have it. This katsudon meal with miso soup was roughly AUD$10 – and it was delicious.
Here, I met a lovely woman who had been living in the US for a number of years and her English was exceptional. We had an in-depth discussion about the various types of saké, and she led me through some tastings. She gave me a pile of information on different varieties and practices that various different breweries were engaging in. 
Turns out, that without even realising it – I have developed a taste for ‘purest saké’ (because of course I have… champagne tastes on a beer budget my entire life!). Meaning that the sakés I have found I enjoyed the most are the ones with the least amount of additives. Anything with ‘junmai’ on the label is pure saké, made only with rice, natural waters and koji (koji being a fermentation culture). Which totally explains (for me, at least) why I dislike some saké because it’s too sweet, (likely has sugar added), or to strong in it’s alcohol taste, (likely has grain alcohol added).
This mural is called a Fusama painting and it was apparently created by Kahoolawe Ueshima, who is a well known local arts who works in the ParalymArt collective – I have no idea what that is, but it appears to be a significant art community according to our host. 
We have a cute, private little garden space; I love the rain chains and have often wondered if they would look out of place in suburban Brisbane. lol
Now to sit down to do some serious work, which of course requires – saké!!! Kanpai.
