Narita to Yudanaka

Trip Diary Day 2 - 30 March 2019

Check out Episode 1 of our Epic Family Road Trip Across Japan.

It took us 4 trips to Japan to figure out that Narita was more than just the airport. It has one of the best coffee shops anywhere in Houei, it has temples and shrines, and Narita has the best eel, unagi, restaurant we've ever been to. Not that eel restaurants come up very often.

One thing about kids when they’re jet lagged there is no getting them to stay in bed once they wake up. Georgia woke us at 7 after we got to bed late, about 1. We decided we’d pack up and go pick up the car from budget and then go find breakfast. We had our yoghurt and snacks, showered, dressed and then took some photos of the chapel in the garden. When we booked this trip we hoped to be in Japan for the Sakura season. The cherry blossom season had been predicted to be early this year and we feared we’d miss out. But here in the hotel gardens we had some sakura. Only just budding. Hopefully by the time we got to Kanazawa or Kyoto they would be in full bloom. Photos done we checked out. The staff were preparing for a big wedding. Photos and banners of congratulating the lucky couple were being put up. I found it interesting that boring, bland airport hotels were seemingly in demand for weddings. Nothing like the roar jet engines and the smell of jet fuel to say I love you. I should mention that the rooms are mostly quiet - you can’t hear planes although you might hear lost guests talking loudly and thumping around the hallways vainly searching for their rooms. The place is a labyrinth.

We got a taxi to Budget. Lots of sakura on the way. And farms. The road between the hotel and Budget seemed very rural. Planes taking off shattered the illusion that we were way out in the countryside somewhere. Planes and sakura, and quite beautiful. Rural Japan, even close to one of the world’s largest airports is quite lovely. 1900 yen for the taxi to Budget.

Our rental car, a black Corolla Fielder station wagon, was ready for us when we arrived. A few scratches on it that were noted. I did the paperwork, watched a video on an iPad about driving in Japan. Don’t speed. Don’t park illegally. Don’t be a dick type of video. The very helpful and friendly Budget guy gave me a run through of the GPS. It is better than it used to be. We can input the address in English now. Back in the olden days, pretty much 2010 to now, an English GPS was only available from one or two companies and even then the interface was in Japanese. It would speak to you in English though. And the only easy way to input your destination was to enter the phone number of where you were going to. Amazingly enough nearly every place in Japan, including roadside rest stops, has a phone number. Unfortunately the car didn’t have cruise control. That was going to be a pain in the… ankle for the long drives.

Houei Coffee

What's the first thing you should do off the plane at Narita? Yes, absolutely correct. Find coffee.

Well, actually we went straight to the hotel in Narita, slept, got up had breakfast, photographed cherry blossoms, went to the rental car agency, picked up a car, and then found coffee. In Narita. Move over Melbourne. You have been usurped as the coffee capital of the world. Spoiler alert. The coffee in Japan nowadays is awesome.

Houei Coffee & Store, pronounced Ho ee, was the very first coffee shop we went to on this trip and will be the very last 4 weeks later. Probably had something to do with it being in Narita, right near the airport.

We had huge cups of some of the finest cappuccinos we’ve ever had made by a young woman wearing a face mask. The coffee was deep, rich, dark and delicious. The care taken in the pour was something I’ve rarely seen before. She was an artist. Meticulous attention to detail, almost sculpting a Rosetta out of micro foam. If this was the standard for third wave coffee in Japan now we were in for a treat. We ran around taking photos and videos like we’d never been in a coffee shop before. After coffee we suggested to the kids a couple of lunch options including sangers, sushi or eel. Georgia had her heart set on eel.

A Haiku

Coffee oh Coffee
Coffee Coffee oh coffee
Hey I like coffee

Kawatoyo

We drove towards the Unagi (Eel) restaurant but the road was blocked by glow stick wielding cops. We drove around trying to get closer but in the end all the roads leading to the restaurant were blocked to wheeled traffic. We decided it was going to be too hard to find the restaurant but Georgia was adamant she wanted to have eel. We thought the roads were blocked because of a festival. The big temple, Naritasan Shinshoji, was in the same street as the restaurant. Turns out it was a bit of both. A sakura festival thing was happening and the temple always attracts many tourists. A woman in a souvenir snack shop flagged us down to let us know she had parking for 800 yen for as long as we wanted. So we parked and walked. The temple was just around the corner. Huge. The restaurant was only a couple of hundred metres further up the alley going up a hill lined with tourist shops and restaurants. The smell from cooking fires of snacks being cooked in the streets was deliciously aromatic. The street was chock full of people. Kawatoyo Honten, the eel restaurant, was easy to find because it had the biggest crowd and longest queue outside.

The eel is so fresh at Kawatoyo because live eels are killed at a table outside the restaurant. Nothing like graphically slaughtering hundreds of eels in front of the tourists to draw a crowd. And draw a crowd it does. You have to get a ticket and queue. For the restaurant, not the killing. Take a number and wait to be called. We got a ticket and were told the wait was around 20 minutes.

While we waited we watched four guys killing and slicing up eels on a table out the front of the restaurant. Raw, graphic and brutal if you find killing fish live in front confronting. Fascinating for a couple of little kids from Australia. I’m not sure if it is to scare the customers off or entice them in. The knife men were like machines. They’d each reach into a bucket and pull out a live squirming eel. He would take a spike and peg the eel through the head onto the table. He’d then fillet the fish, keeping the spine and only tossing away the head. Every so often he’d wash away the blood and re-sharpen the knife.

After about 20 minutes our ticket number was called then we waited inside for a few minutes before going up steep stairs through the crowded room to a corner table. We sat on a tatami mat on the floor. To sum up. Best eel ever. Then the freshly sliced eels are grilled and basted kabayaki style and served on rice in beautiful red and black lacquer boxes. We also had delicious carp sashimi, omelette with eel, and deep fried eel spines that I mentioned earlier. They were crispy and delicious too.

After a quick look at the Naritasan Shinshoji temple we drove to the other Houei Coffee shop here in the old part of town to get takeaway coffee for our journey. It is a smaller shop than the other branch and there wasn’t any parking outside so the kids and I stayed in the car while Michelle got coffee. Hot for her and iced for me. Yes, it was as good as the morning’s coffee.

Narita is often overlooked by holidaymakers coming to Japan. They mostly just head straight into Tokyo. But we think Narita is worth a visit on its own. Great food, great coffee and great site seeing. I think we’ll do it again next time. However we’ll probably try and find a hotel or AirBnb closer to town than the airport hotel we stayed at.

Brandon at Naritasan Shinshoji Temple, Narita - Image by Michelle

A Haiku

Coffee for breakfast
Eel for lunch coffee again
Late for the next town

The drive to Yudanaka

Today’s destination was Yudanaka-Shibu Onsen in Yamanouchi, Nagano Prefecture. Yamanouchi is quite near the ski resorts of Shiga Kogen and Nozawa Onsen. A decade ago we had some the best ever skiing at Nozawa so if you’re heading to Japan for a ski holiday I couldn’t recommend Nozawa more highly. It has probably been overrun with Australian skiers since we were last there though. Aussie tourism has increased by a factor of 10 since we first started coming to Japan a decade ago. Some ski resorts are packed with Aussies these days. On one previous trip we mentioned to someone in Osaka that we were heading to Hokkaido and he said with a laugh “Lots of Australians, more than Japanese”.

Narita to Yudanaka

Having a lovely leisurely lunch in Narita meant we left later than we should and so it will probably surprise no-one we got stuck in traffic not far from Tokyo. Basically adding an extra 45 minutes to an hour to the trip. The drive was almost 400 km. Practically 5 hours. Some of it in driving rain which slowed us down a little even though I was speeding most of the way.

After a couple of hours driving we stopped at a roadhouse tourist shopping centre complex thing near Saitama (NEXCO East Miyoshi Parking Area) on the Kan-Etsu expressway. Roadside rest areas, called Michi-No-Eki, are government designated rest areas along most of Japan’s highways. They are superb. I think this will be an ongoing theme for this blog. We really truly honestly look forward to breaks at these roadside stops. Because we were running late I didn’t get any photos or video at this stop. But suffice to say it was as good as any. In a later post I’ll go into more detail, with pictures, but the food options are amazing, the souvenirs are souvenirable and the toilets, and showers, are probably cleaner and better equipped than what you have at home. Go on a long drive in Japan just so you can stop at a Michi-no-eki.

We had chicken skewers and soy flavoured dango on skewers. Dango are like mochi. Rice dumpling, sometimes served sweet, sometimes savoury and sometimes sweet and savoury. Dango are the best. This was day one of our dango / mochi hunt around Japan. It was also day one of the constant nagging from Georgia and Brandy for gachapon - vending machine plastic toys and figurines. Gachapon vary in price from around 150 yen to 800 yen. Most are around 300 yen or about AU$3.50. Some places have a dozen or more machines lined up. They’re like poker machines for the little ones.

Toilet break done we left the hundreds of fellow travellers, bus loads of them, at the Michi-no-eki and continued on to Yudanaka. I reckoned we had about 2 hours to go.

Yudanaka Yasuragi

We arrived at our Ryokan in Yudanaka, Yudanaka Yasuragi, at almost 8 pm. We were late of course. We're always late. We'd emailed them to let them know we'd been caught in traffic for hours just out of Narita, but we were even later than we expected. A lovely older innkeeper couple checked us in. They had our room prepared and they told us our meal was ready to be served. Our room was a large typical Japanese style tatami mat room. Tatami mats are a traditional floor covering made from woven rice straw. They have a particular smell which you can luxuriate in because your futon mattress is only centimetres above the mat on the floor. Tatami mats come in a standard size of about 900 cm by 180 cm so traditional ryokan rooms are usually measured by how many tatami mats are down - 8, 10, 12 etc. Our room was big enough for futons to be laid out comfortably.

We were broke, skint, insolvent, impoverished, short of funds, povo for this trip to Japan but we made the funds stretch to at least one stay in a Ryokan - a traditional Japanese Inn. By the standard of ryokan's we've stayed at in the past this was a veritable bargain but still a bit more expensive than an average AirBnb or hotel. But Yudunaka Yasuragi in Yudanaka was worth the splurge. Great food, a great room with tatami mat floors, and an onsen. Yudanaka Yasuragi is a 6 room ryokan with share facilities and a large onsen, hot spring bath, downstairs. It was a shared onsen but for all intents and purposes we had it for private use for our entire stay. For a family of four including breakfast and dinner for two nights expect to pay about 48000 yen - about AU$650. 300 bucks a night for a full on ryokan experience is quite reasonable. It would’ve been even less without the meal, but trust me if you’ve never had a ryokan experience you have to do it at least once. This was our once for this trip. Budget accommodation the whole way, mostly, for the rest of the holiday. The last time we came to Yudanaka we stayed at a more luxurious ryokan with a private balcony onsen, nowadays that is way out of our budget, and is approaching $1000 per night.

I think there was only one other family staying at Yasuragi too and they’d already finished eating by the time we got to the dining room. Dinner was a traditional style Japanese Kaiseki meal on low tables. We sat on pillows on the floor. It was a fantastic meal and the highlight was the local Shinshu beef. So very good. When we booked they said they were famous for their meals so we had to eat in the ryokan at least once. If you've never tried a ryokan meal, do it. It will be one of the finest meals you'll ever have. It was perfect to have the meal waiting for us at the end of a long road trip too.

We finished the night with a quick dip in the onsen but the water was just a little bit too hot for the kids, around 40 degrees. It was a very cold night. It was only 7 degrees or so when we went to bed.

A Haiku (by me, stolen from my Instagram)

Wet road driving rain
Traffic jam for hours and hours
Shinshu beef awaits

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Many of the pictures on this page are by Michelle. Essentially the good ones. Michelle retains full copyright and they can not be reproduced without permission. To contact her about licensing and using the photos contact her at Michelle Newnan Photography