Wow – Japan’s Alpine Route

Today we set off on one of Japan’s great travel experiences – the Alpine Route. This involves a succession of different modes of transportation that delivers travellers across the Japanese Alps – from Ogizawa in the southeast to Toyama in the northwest. In our case, the trip included extra sections getting to the starting point and also from Toyama to our final destination of Kanazawa. I had researched the trip on the web, but was rather confused by the description given by the Japanese transport company managing the route. It all seemed rather complicated, including surrendering our luggage at the start and magically getting it back at the end.

We had to set off early on the 07.48 local train from Matsumoto to Omachi. The weather was cloudy and I worried about the complexity of the trip, whether we would actually see anything up in the mountains, and how cold it would be on top (the weather forecast for Murodo, the highest point of the route, was 0°C). A physical discomfort was soon added to our mental ones; our backsides started to get uncomfortably hot. Although it was a basic local train, the seats were heated when they detected that they were occupied by passengers. The intensity of the heating suggested that they were designed for the depths of the Japanese winter, when temperatures in this area can drop to -15 °C – and not for autumn. We found the only way to survive was to continually change seats, moving on when our new places got too hot to endure. The few other passengers in the train – all Japanese – looked at us with puzzlement. They seemed not to mind having their posteriors roasted.

We arrived at the small, uninteresting town of Otomachi about an hour later and were glad of the exposure to cold mountain air. We found the office offering bag forwarding and handed over our luggage, wondering if we would see it again, and waited for a local bus to a place called Ogizawa, which marked the beginning of our ascent into the mountains. This turned out to be another unremarkable small settlement. To get this far we had spent three hours on mundane local trains and buses, under heavy clouds, and were thinking that the Alpine Route had better be good to justify all this effort. Next, an electric bus took us through a long tunnel to the first stop on the Alpine Route proper. As the bus slowed down to stop at its destination, we could see brilliant sunlight streaming in from outside and hurried off to admire the first of a series of amazing sights – the Kurobe dam. From this point on, words cannot do justice to the scenery and I will let our photos tell most of the story of an amazing trip.

From the Kurobe dam there was a cable car to Kurobedaira, where there was a small botanical garden and yet more stunning views.

From Kurobedaira the Tateyama ropeway took us to Daikanbo….

….from where an electric trolleybus took us through the mountain to the highest point of the trip, Murodo (2450m), where the scenery markedly changed and where we made a short hike.

From Murodo, there was a regular bus down to Midagahara. On the way we saw, and then entered, the magical “sea of cloud”.

After we had entered the “sea of cloud” the weather was, unsurprisingly, cloudy and there was not much more to see. We still had to take a cable car down to Tateyama (where our luggage was magically waiting for us), then a painfully slow local train to Toyama, and then an express “shinkansen” to Kanazawa, and then a taxi to our house. We finally arrived at around seven, after 11 hours of travelling – half of which had been magical. We dumped our bags and headed out to the nearest restaurant. They only had a menu in Japanese, written with such a highly stylised script that Google Translate could only decipher the words “conger eel”, “egg” and “today’s horse” amongst a sea of hieroglyphics. We asked the waiter to choose for us, setting a budget of 7,000 yen, and were served a real feast with six courses including – sashimi, tempura, omlet and miso – all of very high quality. We ate so well that it was a relief when tea arrived to signal the end of the meal. It was a fitting end to an exceptional day.

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