Day 27 - Tazawako Lake - Hot Springs Walking Tour Of Northern Japan
Day 27 - Tazawako Lake - Hot Springs Walking Tour Of Northern Japan
I felt like I had made a mistake in booking the Tawazako Onsen hotel where we will be staying for two nights.
Years ago, we stayed in this area in a charming rural Onsen named Nyuto Onsen.
We had booked a week’s stay in that character-filled old inn, and we had a lovely and memorable time.
The Onsen was amazing, surrounded by a lush forest and mountains all around.
The food was prepared and served around the fire in a hearth (a traditional fire pit in the floor of old houses, where usually a pot of water is always simmering and food is prepared).
The meals were all locally sourced and mostly included foraged vegetables and river fish.
During the time we stayed there, we took a day trip to Tazawako lake and walked around the lake, had lunch and returned to the Onsen.
On another day, we took a day trip to the town of Kakunodate, which has one of the best preserved historic Samurai neighborhoods in all of Japan.
When I tried to book Nyuto Onsen for this pilgrimage, it was unavailable.
I could have tried to book it again by checking for availability once a week, in case someone were to cancel, but I didn’t.
So instead of a fabulous Onsen with amazing food, we were staying in an overpriced, simple Onsen with an ordinary buffet dinner featuring lots of seafood, some cooked in an uninspired French style that was inedible to us.
The weather today was cool and rainy, just as predicted.
Instead of walking the remaining 15 km that we skipped yesterday, from Tamagawa to Tawazako, we decided to walk from our hotel to the lake and then back.
We took raincoats and umbrellas and walked to the lake.
Along the way we stopped at a popular shop selling nothing but honey.
They had every kind of honey you could imagine, including some imported from Hungary, Ukraine and Poland.
When we got to the lake, we first walked around the boardwalk, taking photos of the same lake pedal-boats within swans and other graceful birds that we saw many years ago, when we first came here.
All the swans were docked at the shore, possibly because of the generally cold weather.
There were no clients waiting for rides, and today was a weekend day, so we guessed that it’s officially off-season now.
We then sat in an excellent café located on the shores.
They had soy milk lattes, which I drank, even though I forgot how badly I am affected by drinking coffee.
That night I couldn’t fall asleep for many hours, and only by 2:00 did I finally fall asleep for 4 hours, before we got up and got ready for the day.
The cafe also made small scones which we bought, but they tasted too dense and dry, and were not delicious.
They also served a dish of bear meat with udon noodles, and we saw a few men in hiking boots and hiking poles who came to eat the bear stew.
Sitting in the cafe gave me several hours to begin to catch up on my writing, while sitting in a relaxed and pleasant environment.
The weather was cloudy and it started to rain shortly after 12:30 pm.
By then we were ready to go to the local pizzeria to eat lunch.
The pizzeria had a robot serving the food to the tables.
We were served by a human, perhaps because the robot spoke only Japanese and maybe they feared that we would not understand the robot and what it was saying (it was saying: “Please be careful when removing the plates because they are hot!”).
After our lunch, we headed back to our hotel in the rain, just before the rain got more intense.
It was a very relaxing and fun day, but I still felt a small sense of loss because I knew that we were only ten kilometers from Nyuto Onsen, which is a fabulous Onsen.
In retrospect, we should have spent an extra day in Tamagawa Onsen to cover the distance to Lake Tazawako, and to enjoy that unique place, and then stay in Nyuto Onsen on a weekday, which probably would not have been fully booked.
With love and blessings,
Tali
Walked today - 9 km.
Total walked to date - 414 km.
