Hakuba - Day 4 - Nature Trail

I think Neve might be somewhat embarrased by this pic, but it should be captured for posterity!

You can just about see the boardwalk in this one - all 5km of it!

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The little red flowers here are Venus Fly Traps which we'd not seem growing wild before

Today we decided to go on a slightly less strenuous trek. It was really difficult to arrange day trips, becuase there were very few Westerners, and no obvious 'days out'. However, armed with our trekking book (but not, unfortunately our 'Lonely Planet Japan' book due to packing with a hangover!) we decided on a day trip. That said, we were very chuffed with ourselves that we managed to choose seemingly teh most 'famous' routes (later discovered by doing some 'posthumous' research!)

So today's trip started up a gondola  and chair lift, and comprised walking around the Tsudaidata National Park (for the price of a small mortgage). We've noticed that the Japanese like to be told what to do, from school, work, and walks around nature parks, so there was a marked out route (on boardwalks) and a 'flower spotting' guide (with this week's flowers). Unfortunately, we couldn't find the English version (although we had seen it a few days before), so we bought the Japanese version for the kids, and they had great fun taking photos of the flowers (we did start picking them, but it became very clear that this was taboo!). So most of our photos today consisted of takign photos of flowers. The kids got really into it and, after a few 'tutorials' from Ross, they produced some lovely pics. So a most pleasant day... and importantly, we caught the last gondola home!

Once back, we showered in the river (deciding that this was more pleasant than the onsen, despite being rather cold (still from melting ice)). It was hilarious watching Ross standing naked washing his (somewhat cold-shruken) willy in the river.

In the evening, we decided to try a different restaurant (there were fewer than we though which were open) but we managed to find a really cute restaurant called 'Tomatito' which was kind of Italian-ish, but whose menu was almost all in Japanese, with a bit of Italian, so we were rather compromised on what we could eat. Fortunately, the Western-influenced dishes tend to be written in Katakana (which I can read, and which is reasonably easy to translate) with some Hiragana, (which I can also read, but which is harder to translate). We ordered what we thought was fried prawns, which turned out to be prawn crackers! We managed to order a 'ma-ga-ru-ii-ta' pizza, and some 'ta-co-su-ra-ii-su' (taco-rice = chilli-con-carne). The way Japanese restaurants tend to work is that you order a range of dishes, and then all share these - they tend to just bring them out when they're ready - you don't have 'starters' 'main dishes' and 'puddings' as we might. It's actually quite fun working out what the katakana says - e.g. 'fu-ra-ii-do-chi-ii-so' = fried cheese, 'ka-aa-ri-ra-ii-su' = curry and rice (Japanese curry, which is rather more like sweet, ever-so-slightly spicy thick brown gravy, but is quite tasty).
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Ross grew a goatee beard - after a couple more days, it looked really good - but it was all itchy so he shaved it off - still he's promised it will make another appearance on our next holiday!