Japan; Hida-Takayama

Not as cold as we were dreading, Takayama was mostly drizzle the 2 days we were there.  The train journey to the city (town sized) was stunning with plenty of gorges, rivers lined with cherry blossom trees and the nearer we go to our destination a lot of tunnels to get through the snow topped mountains.

We’d made the trip north to a) see the mountainous side of Japan and b) get to a Sake brewing region.  Both were interesting but probably won’t be a regular feature in our lives.

On the first morning we took a bus to Shirakawa-Go – a Unesco site now due to it having the last remaining Gassho houses in the region.  They’re tall, pointy and thatched to survive the amount of snow fall the area gets.  

Very pretty but as we found out when we went inside one, also quite likely to kill you with smoke fumes.  The central fire pit heats the whole house (often 4 stories) but the air quality gets questionable the higher up the building you go.  Interesting to see how people used to live though and we were treated to as many cups of matcha tea as we wanted by the owners. (that’s 0 cups by the way.  No amount of trying matcha is going to get us the acquired taste needed not to grimace).

Shirakawa-Go is very proud of its unique blend of Sake – unlike most others, its Sake is milky coloured with big lumps of god-only-knows in it. It’s distinctive taste is akin to old sour fruit and when our host ladelled it out into sake bowls we made the expected noises of admiration and braced ourselves.  As generous as the tea-makers with offers of multiple refills, we used the ‘but it’s not yet mid-day’ excuse and stopped at one. 

As we were waiting to get the bus back, the village suddenly filled up with bus-loads from Indonesia who’d never seen snow before.  While we huddled out of the cold, they took their shoes off and jumped around on it, ineptly snow-balling each other and posing for pictures.  On reflection the amount this charmed us could’ve been down to the questionable sake contents as when we got on the bus we promptly fell asleep. Not even a 2^nd trip through Japan longest tunnel (12km if you’re interested) could keep us awake. 

Power nap done, we went in search of a couple of Takayama sake breweries.  There are 7 in total ranging from the very serious and frightening expensive through to the ‘fill your boots’ ones.  Needless to say we went for the latter where we worked out way through 15 different sakes and drew the conclusion that we didn’t really like sake.  We had however devised a scoring system which meant we came away with 2 bottles of our least disliked ones which will no doubt become the ‘end of the night’ options for messy nights.  Being Japanese though, the bottles are incredibly artful irrespective of the contents.