This was one of the only tours that Lina booked for the trip. We woke up early to catch a bus, and then took a ride on the Sagano Romantic Train. It looks like it would be a very pretty train ride at night.
Then we took another bus to a staging area to get on a boat. Lina found this amazing hot dog that was actually rice covered in bacon.
We were all loaded onto a three-crew boat and set off into the water. One crew-member would push the boat by sticking a bamboo pole into the ground under the boat and walking-pushing to the back of the boat. Another rowed on one side with this fascinating technique where he naturally rolled the oar with every pull stroke. The last crewmember was posted at the stern to handle the rudder. It was a very efficient operation and they switched off every 30-40 minutes or so.
It was mostly calm waters except for a couple of light rapids we would go through. If we took this tour anywhere else, one of the crew would be the funny one with some patter narrating and joking throughout the trip, but this tour was mostly silent with a few dry one-liners tossed in every 30 minutes, or so. It was so quiet, they had to tell us to act excited as we passed through some of the fun parts.
The end of the river opened into this beautiful lakish area with traditional “romantic” boat rides and rowboats floating throughout the area navigated by Japanese/foreign tourists. There was also a vendor boat that would sell you mochi snacks, alcoholic & non-alcoholic drinks, and grill squid, etc.
They dropped us off and Lina bee-lined to the monkey park. It turns out that Lina will hike a mile straight up as long as there are monkeys at the end of the journey. We fed some monkeys and hung around for a bit watching them walk around all of the tourists.
Then we headed into town. It was incredibly busy because it was a long weekend Sunday, so everyone headed out to the country. There were quite a few people dressed in traditional kimonos, which was very cute.
It turns out that the highlight for me wasn’t monkeys. We went to the Orgel Museum of Automata and Music Boxes (https://www.orgel-hall.com). This place is incredible! They have 100+ year old pieces that look, sound, and seem to work like they are brand new. We happened to catch the tour half way through and the woman started the most exquisite automata of a doll playing a mandolin. Is was so beautiful and fleeting, I decided we were gong to wait for the next tour to see it again.
The woman running the first tour started winding the most beautiful music boxes during the breaks between tours and they all sounded incredible.
When the tour started again, the new guide was incredibly kind and accommodating to us gaijin. He explained that the full sized music boxes were from the early 1900s and were the jukeboxes of their day. The bottom cabinet stored all of the music disks and then you inserted a coin to play the disk that was installed. One of the boxes played drums, bells, and a piano. It was just amazing and a highlight of the trip for me.
We missed the bus, so we had to find the train station and catch a train back into town to make it for our reservation for Macho Bar! Lina found this place online and it is staffed by a bunch of body builders who start your visit by carrying you from the entrance to your seat. I assumed that they would balk after taking a look at me, so I followed behind Lina closely and planned to slip into my seat after they dropped her off. They weren’t having it and forced me to go back to the entrance and carried me to my seat.
This place was hilarious and kept us in stitches. All of the drinks on the menu had some kind of fresh juice that needed to be squeezed at your table by a Macho Man. All of the food also had some macho flair and you could order special items like a Macho Man ripping off his shirt and posing wrestlemania style or you could buy a Macho Man a protein Shake to get some extra attention. I decided that Lina should be one of their barbells, and that was the best $6 I ever spent.
All of the Macho Men were incredibly non-threatening and fun, which made the whole thing work.
We walked around the bar area so Lina could calm down after getting too much Macho and called a cab with the uber-esque app that you can use to call a taxi. Just like Uber, the taxi gets the location on their phone with turn-by-turn directions to your stop. Unlike Uber, if the taxi has a meter, the app charges you whatever’s on the taxi meter, which has almost always matched the quote before the ride ended.
We used the app in this case specifically because the hotel is on a couple of weird one-way streets that seemed to confuse every other taxi driver so far. We hopped in the cab and I verified that the taxi-driver’s app had the right address on the map and turned the map off my phone. That turned out to be a mistake because the taxi driver started mumbling at the app and stopped following its directions. We ended up on a one-way road about a mile from the hotel on a small road headed to nowhere.
The taxi driver started asking me questions about the route like I knew where we were and I pulled up the directions on Google Maps. But he was too far along this road and Google was too confused to help…because the road narrowed down to a bike path.
He backed up like he’d never done it before and got out of the car several times to figure out how he was going to get back to a real road. Eventually he performed a 27-point turn and headed back to known roads. I was giving him directions and showing him the Google Map directions to get home, which was three more turns, but he just pushed the meter stop button, pulled off to the curb and clicked the door open button. We were just shocked and got out. Then he hit the door close button and drove off.
Luckily we were just a couple of blocks from home, so we laughed and walked the rest of the way.
Garmin says we did 5.8 miles, but it has to be longer than that.
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