Hakone Hanabi

In Hakone we stayed at the Green Plaza Hotel (http://www.hgp.co.jp/language/english/sp/index.html) in an 'East meets West' room, in other words two slept in a western bed und two had the luxury of sleeping on a futon. The Green Plaza may look a bit dull

but it is far from it. It has a nice onsen section, a superb restaurant, friendly staff, all you could possibly ask for.

Adjoining to our room we had a small private onsen! Wonderful, just relaxing in the hot mineral-rich water and watching the little garden in front of you...

When we arrived they told us that there will be a firework at the lake which we could watch from a cruise ship. Hey we love fireworks and although we just saw a most beautiful hanabi in Yokohama, off we went to see the local fireworks.

beautiful, isn't it? While watching from our ship I thought that a small rowing boat had caught fire, but now looking at the photos I noticed that it is actually the figure of a standing man holding an oar in a boat that was lit up:

Hakone and Lake Ashi

Leaving Tokyo we headed for Hakone. The first obstacle was renting a car, since we didn't want all the hassle with dragging our luggage across trains and buses. None of us had an international driver's license. So we had to go to an official translator first and then, with this document in hand, we could go to the car rental. But at last we were sitting in the car and driving off to Hakone, a hot spring town not far from Mount Fuji.

3000 years ago there was a volcano, called Mount Hakone, where nowadays a beautiful lake (芦ノ湖, Ashino-ko) is situated. After its eruption a caldera lake developed. Today it is a main attraction in Hakone with tourist boats criss-crossing lake Ashi.
I wouldn’t have wanted to miss this scenic tour, so we left C in the Onsen hotel since was not feeling too well, and went off for a tour in a faux  replica of a  man-of-war pirate ship:



Pirate ship



Figure head

Enjoy some views from the tour:

Hakone rope-way heading into the fog



The famous gate from Hakone Jinja (箱根神社)