Hakone - Day 4 - 7 Dec 2016 Mount Fuji

We have a long itinerary on Day 4 - to try to catch a glimpse of Mount Fuji! The best part is our Hakone Free passes cover all the transport for all the rides that we took this day.

Most visitors will do the following rides in this sequence:

1) Hakone Tozan Cable Car
2) Hakone Ropeway Car
3) Stopover at Owakudani
4) Hakone Sightseeing Cruise

However, we chose to do the reverse, and took a bus to Togendai (BusTerminal) first to catch the morning cruise out to Lake Ashi. It was a good choice because we realised that the queues for the cruise was so bad by early afternoon and I supposed visitors will have to wait for the next round (frequency is about 1 hour) if they can't board the cruise.

Togendai Station

The round trip of the cruise is about an hour (there are specific timings for departures at Togendai station). Given that we had almost 45 minutes to departure time, we took the opportunity to shop at the souvenir shop and also to try out one stop of the Hakone Ropeway Car to pass our time :)

a stretchable banana toy!

I took this picture before hopping onto the Ropeway car. I only took note of the current temperature for the day (which was measured at 3.4 degrees) and didn't realise that the visibility for the day was low and not possible to see Mount Fuji (they cancelled the Mount Fuij symbol).

As it was still early in the morning, we had the luxury of having the whole cabin to ourselves..although it's an enclosed area, we still felt cold inside..

The whole cabin was so clean and spacious and could take up to 16 people

We almost missed our cruise after 1 round trip on the Ropeway car, so we were one of the last few to board..

Obviously all seats in the lower enclosed decks were taken  by the time we were onboard so we went up to the highest deck. It was so windy and cold and I couldn't even bring myself to take many pictures..

taken from cruise ride, no sight of Mt Fuji :((

Still not able to spot Mt Fuji..

We didn't get to see Mount Fuji from our cruise ride because it was quite cloudy on that day. I must say that it was horrid standing out on the open deck for even 10 minutes because the wind was chilling cold and the temperature on that day was recorded to be 3 degrees!

After the Cruise, we hopped onto the Hakone Ropeway Car and stopover at Owakudani station for lunch. When we came out from the station in Owakudani, the wind was so strong and cold that we couldn't even bring ourselves to stand in the open for barely 5 minutes! It was one of the 2 coldest places we touched on in this entire trip (apart from Nagano).

The children, surprisingly didn't seem to be bothered by the cold weather and continued to have fun

I couldn't even bring myself to smile properly for photo-taking as I was shivering so badly from the strong wind and chilling weather!

We had lunch near an ice-cream store that sells good udon and don sets.. 

my fried rice set was so good

Ice-cream after lunch.. This ice-cream is really nice.. having ice cream in extreme cold weather doesn't make you feel any worse, in fact, I personally feel that it helps to lower your body temperature to blend into the weather better! None of us bought a sulphur egg to try.. I'm visual by nature, so the sight of a black egg did not help to improve my urge to lengthen my life by 7 years for eating one!

Last picture before we left Owakudani

Taking the Hakone Tozan Cable Car back (using our Hakone Free pass). This is actually a tram ride back to Gora station..

After Owakudani, we took the Hakone Tozan Cable car down to Gora station where we parted ways with Brian's family as they proceed to Open Air Museum (we could not withstand any outdoor activities). We took the local train to Odawara station to shop and have our dinner there. Little did we realise that the whole journey took us about 45 minutes and we were so tired by the time we reached Odawara... so I did not shop at all :((