Mrs. Alice was on holiday this week
(3 days - Lol @ Japanese 'holidays'! )
so we took a few trips out to the country.
One of them to this place:
http://www.takaotozan.co.jp/takaotozan_ ... /index.htm
(English page)

45mins out of Shinjuku on the Keio line
(though you can get there on the Chuo line as well)
plus a short cable-car ride to the top of Mt.Takao it's
the highest beer garden in Tokyo!

Only open in the summer months, it was busy,
but we only had to wait about 10mins for a table.
The night-view of the city is as you see in the picture,
and, at 500m, it was pleasantly cool too.

The compulsory charge for the buffet - 3300yen for guys, 3000 for wimmin -
might seem a bit steep till you realize that's for "all you can eat AND DRINK" !!!
(Food was just okay, nothing special, but tasted better than it looked on the whole.)
You have to watch the clock though as there's a two hour time limit.
- Cheers!

That sounds pretty cool.

Rats, closed in October....I'll have to settle for Kirin City again. God bless that chain of bars. ^_^

I've got to applaud their site, though. Some of the most extensive Englsh info I've seen for a Japanese resort/place of interest. Looks like it's not too far from Hakone?

Another cool Tokyo day trip is to the hotsprings at Ito. Makes a *long* day, mind you.

Any other ideas for good day trips outside of the city?

I hate/love baikingu style...even though 2 hours is truly enough, it just doesn't feel that way as you try to shove as much food down the throat as fast as possible

So very true, thats Quite an impressive english section for a mountain getaway type place thats not a megacorporation.
If you feel like taking the shinkansen , I can highly recommend the Tokai area

Lol, No! Mt. Takao is near Hachioji in Western Tokyo, not at all near Hakone
which is at the extreme S.Western tip of Kanagawa prefecture ...
in fact nearly as far as Ito!
There's a big temple at the top of the mountain, and if you walk up
there's a monkey park and some strange little restaurants
where you can eat wild pig and suchlike.

Last year we climbed Fuji-San.
That's a once-in-a-lifetime experience, I can tell you.
Never again, I swear!
My favorite area for day trips is Chichibu Tama National Park.
Great for hiking and 'getting nature', but still a couple of hours on the train.
Another 'Brainer is planning a side-trip to Kamakura while he's here.
Good idea I think. A little bit of Kyoto and Nara with added seaside thrown in.

Seaside ... Hmm, Ibaraki is gorgeous. But a day trip? I dunno ...
(Though I do know some people who love skiing so much
they will go across the country to Niigata and come back in a single day in the winter!
That's just nuts to me!)

We've recently begun to go farther afield, into Nagano and Gunma.
This already famous painting by famous Nihonga bloke Higashiyama Kaii
was recently popularised in a TVCM for Sharp Aquos TV's:

Found out it's a real place called Oshaka-Ike:

Beautiful place.
A good eight hours plus round trip by car though -
mainly thanks to all the other bastards who were on holiday too.

Well, it may not be directly on the way to Hakone, but it's not all that far away, eh?

Takao is smack dab in between Fuji and Tokyo Station, unless my sense of geography (and the massive map on my desk) is completely wacko jacko.

Chichibu Tama sounds like a nice candidate for a day trip. I haven't done much exploring of the area north of Tokyo, beyond Saitama anyway. Thanks for the tip!

Nagano - another interesting idea...but surely not for a day trip? That would be some intrepid shit!

^ Me being interpid!

I used to think Nagano was too far too,
but on a good day you can be there in a couple of hours.

And, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Hakone isn't doable in a day.
It most definitely is, as is Izu, and the Fuji Five Lakes area too.

There are good bus & rail links/trips, but it's nice to have a car ...
though I do envy the bikers sometimes:
no jams, and those mountain roads would be SO much fun.
Also, they allow two-up on the Expressways now,
which used to be strictly verboten.
There are car rental agencies of course
and there's a BIKE rental shop in Nerima,
but I've no idea what they'd say to a foreigner.
This, probably:

Can one be intrepid while wearing a pink headscarf? Ok, pastel, maybe I could see. Or maybe a nice floral pattern...

I think Hakone in a day would be nuts without a car (maybe even nuts with one!). I've been up there a couple of times. 2-3 days seems to be a pretty good timeframe.

But yeah I can see how getting to a lot of the parks/remote areas would be so much easier with a car (same in any country for that sort of thing, eh?)

I'm slowly putting together a rough itinerary from Kansai to Tokyo involving looping around to Kanazawa and maybe other coastal areas. I've never seen that part of Honshu (or any area looking out on the Sea of Japan). I could loop around and take in Nagano and maybe see a bit of Chichibu Tama on the way to Tokyo. Seems like that would be a nice route in the fall.

My attire in that pic is authentic Japanese construction workers wear.
Funny you should say, but I'm actually wearing both a pastel purple
floral-patterned headscarf AND a pink towel.
(As any hitchhiker - or, possibly, construction worker - will tell you,
a towel is the most massively useful thing you can have).

Anyway, this thread is now about DRIFTING ...
In the mountains:
http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=vkUaQIqKS ... re=related
http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=O3PF9hAtr ... re=related
On the Expressway:
http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=8QdjLwGJk ... re=related
And you thought THAT was fast?:
http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=FsNulEYQu ... re=related

MOAR!

Negative points for Douglas Adams references (that is SO 1985) but extra points for the pastel. But the next time you try to pass yourself off as an intrepid construction worker lookalikey in the woods of central Honshu, can you PLEASE upload a better pic??? Some people....

Back on topic, I have been told many times by a cool sounding person that I am an awesome drifter.

not sure if kanazawa is a required destination...a japanese version of a suburban town with little strip malls....

Book Off,,let's go!!!

CD Off,,,let's go!!!

although,,i had the tastiest ramen EVER there,,,not sure if that constitutes a visit though....

Actually, I want to get back to this Kirin City for a sec. The beers there are pretty good. The food on the other hand? Terrible. I've heard that places like this, FujiYa, and Denny's (in Japan) don't really do cooking as much as "reheating".

I've been told it has onsen + a ninja house.

Stuart, something's wrong with your pic, I can only see half of you.

I can see all of it, but there is some pixelation.

alice, the last youtube video is amazing.. they are all pretty f'n cool. Im a fast and "efficient" driver myself but would not trust someone being that close in front of me.

those were fun to watch. thx and have a good time on your holiday.

Yeah you've got that right about the food, though I think it's freshly (or semi-freshly, anyway) made, since being a vegetarian I pretty much have to special order everything. It's not super bad for what it is - standard bar restaurant type food - salad, pizza, pasta, etc. (Side note: word to the wise: Do your best to avoid Italian style pasta in Japan - sure it's everywhere, but ugh...given a choice, I'd take a plain plate of soba over a plate of Italian pasta any day...)

But yeah it wouldn't be a bad idea to eat before heading over. Kirin City is more about the 4 or 5 different kinds of Kirin on draft than it's fine cuisine.

Ok...the first 2 videos scared the shit out of me!
I speed all the time but drifting is beyond me...but even more than that, I Always drive the mountain roads at night being in the Gifu/Nagano region. Thankfully I really don't see stuff like that or even hear it...but damn that shit scared me...imagining myself on the road at that time with those "not quite" 2 lane mountain roads *shivers*

The 3rd & 4th vids...meh nothing special imo. Highway speeds in Japan are 80km/h or 100km/h (49/62mph)most places I've ever driven so its not hard to blow past most other cars specially at night when its mostly truckers following all the rules and low traffic.
Hell I go 140 in my cube³ all the time over there, and its soo easy being that most anti-speeding stuff on highways in Jpn is cameras at fixed points many miles apart.
The drivers are also pretty sheeplike too, dunno how many times I've seen long lines of cars in the left lane while the right is empty(right is the passing lane)
They follow the rules to the point of fault imo, which makes it easy to safely blow past them at crazy speed.

+1 what Gizzy said.
Japanese aren't BAD drivers, they're very careful ...
but man are they SLOW sometimes!


Cheers! It's all over now though.
Back on us little heads again this week.


Nope. That's all of me Alex.
Back in my dim & distant past some friends wrote a song about me
called "Let's Kill A Hipdude".
It went:
"Stuart is a punk. His mother was a runt.
She put him on a diet and now he's a skinny summavabitch."
Something like that anyway ...

Back to the drifting ...
This one (from a PS2 game called Tokyo Extreme)
has interviews with some of the drivers:
http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=Su6wQ4Jo_ ... re=related

Apart from the fact that some of them are, well, NERDS
(not surprising I suppose when you think how much they must spend on tyres alone),
I found it interesting that one driver says they look for roads where normal people AREN'T driving.
Kind of different from the bosozoku, who've been known to attack other road users vehicles
with baseball bats as they pass.
As for the guys who drift in the mountains, I can only think that
they must practice till they know the roads like the backs of their hands,
and maybe use cellphones to warn each other about ordinary cars/the police etc.
Apparently, they can have their cars impounded if they're caught!

BTW, Andy ... Why don't you consider going north thru Toyama
and coming down through Gunma?
Jebcrow is spot on about Kanagawa,
and Kusatsu is a great hot spring area!

I've heard hitchhiking is pretty good.
The only danger, I would think,
is that someone might mistake you for a monkey
and try to run you over.

What do you think, GUITAR WOLF? :
http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=mg03Mp_Yxrg

This thread is now about LOCK AND LOLL ...

lock and loll!!!!!!!

1,2,3,4!!!!!!!!!!!!

i saw guitar wolf at the loft in shinjuku a couple years ago,,that is all i can remember

I'll look into the optional routing, though my Japanese language exchange teacher is usually pretty sharp with her recommendations. I'll bring up the idea tomorrow after we finish discussing Urashima Taro. There's some serious Oedipal shit going on with that underseas princess....

Not wanting to becoming road kill, I've already ordered my construction worker headgear/towel set from hardhatstyle.co.jp. (I went with the Sakura Manbeast package.) I just hope I receive it before the trip.