Erica & Todd go to Japan! Day 9: Hakone / Tokyo

Slept like crap due to futon mattresses on the floor. But, had a pretty good Japanese breakfast at the ryoken. Took much less time than dinner. Had an outdoors bath (segregated) prior to checkout. The awesome guy at the top of the cable car gave us a ride to the train station, which was super nice. Overall extremely happy w/ the ryoken. Although, it turns out that Erica found the service too intrusive.

Visited the Hakone Open Air Sculpture Museum. There were some pretty interesting sculptures there. Worth the visit, but expensive.

Decided to go to Gora and catch the cable car up the mountain. Lots of standing and waiting. Transportation is not as well organized, especially for non-Japanese speakers as even Kyoto is. I guess that's due to the much smaller non-speaking population that visits than the other places. Saw Mt Fuji from the cable car, which was great. Also the great stinking sulfur pits or somesuch. Looked like Mordor! We decided not to make the whole trip around the lake and so headed back down the rope way and cable car. It was tougher to get back to Tokyo due to discrepancies between the tourist map and reality. Buses were supposed to go places they didn't as were trains. So, it took a bit longer than we would have liked, but make it we did. Checked back into the Intercontinental for our last two nights