Adventures in Japan

Day Seventeen and the Last Part of Day Sixteen: Takayama

The first part of this post should really go at the end of the last post but there was such a difference between Nagoya and Takayama that I thought it best to separate their respective posts.

We arrived in Takayama in the evening and almost immediately set out exploring our surrounds. We were surrounded by good stuff. There was a statue of a golfer.

This view might not be safe for work.

Don't mind the Ed Woods-ian lack of night in those photos. We walked down their main shopping street and saw all sorts of shops that we wanted to go into. They were all closed for the day you see. After an hour or so of wandering, fueled partly by two big bottles of their local brew, we found a nice place to eat.

I swear: I would love to come back to this country and tour the whole dang thing, from tip to tip, eating nothing but ramen. Every area seems to have its own variation. Takayama's is delicious. The stock... man! SO good! And it came with deep fried gyoza. And Carla's pizza was 8 slices of nice.

We slept well, but not for all that long.


Takayama has a daily market. Starting from six. We weren't there from the beginning, but we weren't all that late. It was mainly fresh produce, farmers from up in the hills and mountains come down every day to sell their wares. And a lot of woodwork-y type stuff. And tonnes of Sarubobos. Sarubobo means monkey baby. They are star shaped dolls that the mothers around this area have been making for their children for some amount of time that I have forgotten.


This area is known for its Sarubobo, its beef (more on that later), its beer (ditto), its woodworking (ditto ditto) and its twice yearly festival. Twice a year, big elaborate floats are paraded throughout the town. The visitors during these festivals outnumber the townsfolk by about four to one. I'm glad we got here at a less busy time of year.

I'm also glad we went and saw a display of some of the floats used during the festivals. They are quite elaborate and quite old and quite expensive.







The ticket for the float museum also got us into another exhibit. A miniature recreation of all sorts of famous shrines and temples and buildings and such. This one room exhibit, about the size of a school gymnasium, took fifteen years to make. Fifteen years. And it shows. The attention to detail is astonishing. We haven't been to any of the buildings depicted in miniature, but now we feel no need to. It would be hard to be more impressive. We could have spent all day there, just taking photos.


Amazing.


Also amazing were the clockwork robots and puppets also on display a bit further down the road. These puppets could do it all; tumble, shoot arrows, serve tea, do calligraphy, have sword fights, swing from pole to pole, everything. Some of it looked smoother than other bits, but it was all a hoot to watch.

We were a trifle hungry after all this culture, so we grabbed a few bites to eat. Almost all the bites were of meat. Delicious, expensive meat. Hida beef (the beef from this area) is a lot like Kobe beef, in that it is beyond marbled with fat. The meat, when raw, often looks pink, so shot through with fat is it. Eating it is like eating meat flavoured butter.


Put that buttery beef on top of some rice so its juices seep down into it... Sign me up!

We still had some time left and more sights to see so we saw what we could. There is an old farm village on the outskirts of town. Kinda. These old farms used to be somewhere else, but then a dam got built and they would have been lost forever. Instead they got moved to Takayama. They are quite picturesque, with the right light. The light wasn't right, so we didn't go.

We went to a museum instead. A museum full of glass and Art Deco stuff. Carla likes glass and I like Art Deco, so how could we loose?

Well, neither the deco nor the glass were anything near approaching world class. It was a small diversion, and somewhat pleasant but still disappointing in the main.

But as we were on the bus to the Deco/glass museum we saw us two things: a big shiny shrine type thing and a beer restaurant.

The shiny shrine was who knows how far away and the beer was but a two minute walk. They brewed their own beer on the premises and their sausages felt and tasted right.


If you like meat and you like beer, then you will like Takayama.

I would like to write more on the subject of Takayama, but I don't have the words. And we didn't have the time to see as much of the town as we would have liked. Once again we were off on a bus.