Weekendtrip to Takayama - Sunday

Takayama is a city located in the mountainous Hida region north of Nagoya. It is known for its old town which retained a traditional touch like few other cities in Japan. In addition, the Takayama spring festival which is held on the 14th and 15th of april every year is ranked as one of Japan's three most beautiful. No question - that was were I was going!!

Since both days of the festival were on a weekend this year, it was impossible to get a hotel on saturday, but I did find a room in the Hida Plaza on sunday. I have never really had an aversion for a little bit of luxury, so I booked the room. In order to see most of the festival I decided to take the earliest possible buss from Nagoya to Takayama which takes about 2 hours and 45 minutes. Unfortunately, when I arrived at the station at 6:45, the first bus at 7:30 was already fully booked! I was quite surprised - I mean, who (besides me) is insane enough to get up this early on a Sunday?? Well, ok, I should have guessed that you can reserve seats in the bus the day before... ;-) There was a seat available in the 8:30 buss though. Anyways - I was really proud about myself since I figured out that there is a buss and when it leaves... the train trip would have cost me twice as much and was no faster :-)

I arrived at Takayama buss station at 12:00 and headed for the old town which was only a ten minutes walk from the station just on the other side of the Miyagawa river.

Even though the weather report had forcastet rain and clouds, it was a wonderful and warm summerday. I guess japanese meteorologist just are no better than ours :-)

A lot of houses and some entire streets in Takayama's old town are beautifully preserved, and many of them date from the Edo Period (1600-1868), when Takayama was a wealthy merchant town.

The Spring Festival (also called Sanno Festival) is the festival of the Hie Shrine in the southern half of the old town. This part of the old town, especially the Sannomachi Street, is particularly beautiful. There are a lot of old homes, shops, coffee houses and sake breweries :D

I started my sightseeing by wondereing through Sannomachi street with thousands of other tourists.

The old houses, shops and the nice smell of delicious japanese food from the restaurants, .... Charming!

When crossing Sannmachi street, I saw the festival floats (yatai) lined up! During the year, the heavily decorated floats are stored in storehouses, which are located all over the old town.

Only from morning to late afternoon on the festival days they are pulled out and displayed in the streets. If it is raining however, they stay in their storehouses. However in that case, the doors of the storehouses are opened so that tourist can see the floats.

All of the floats are beatifully decoreated with traditional artwork.

After I had inspected the floats carefully, I continued to walk along Sannomachi street until I ran into two old sake breweries...

They are very typical for Takayama, and can easily be recognized by so called sugidama (balls made of cedar branches) which hang over the entraces. Inside, everyone was busy tasting good sake.

They drink the sake out of special square wooden glasses, and put salt on one corner the corners. This obviously had to be tried... and turned out to be quite delicious! The salt really enhanced the taste of the sake. I need to remember this for the next time I drink sake! Of course I bought a bottle of real Takayama sake from one of the breweries as a souvenir.

After my sake-stop I continued to walk into the northern part of the old town to visit the Hachiman Shrine. On my way, I came across the Kusakabe Heritage House (Kusakabe Mingeikan). This is one of the oldest homes in Takayama that are still preserved and open to the public. The Kusakabe family used to be successful merchants in the money lending business.

I decided to enter and have a look around. It was very interesting to see a typical old japanese house from the inside.

At the end of my visit I was kindly offered some green tea and a rice cracker in the garden.

After the visit of the heritage I continued my way to the Shrine still in incredible warm sunny weather, and passed a wonderful cheery tree.

Since Takayama is located further north than Nagoya and in the mountains, the cherry blossoms are at their peak later than in Nagoya. I saw a lot of Japanese White-eyes (Zosterops japonicus) in the cherry tree, drinking nectar. They were so cute!!!

Finally, I made it to the norteastern area of Takayama where the Hachiman Shrine (Sakurayama Hachimangu) is located. This is however not the Shrine that is celebrated during the Spring festival - its festival is the Takayama Autumn Festival, equally popular and held annually on October 9-10.

The Shrine was located in the forest, and there were a lot of papers with prayers written on them lined up outside the Srine.

I returned to Sannomachi Street to see how a portable Shrine (Mikoshi) was carried through the old town starting and ending at the Spring Festival Shrine. The Mikoshi contains the shrines kami (Shinto deity), and it is only carried around during the festival days!

For once I got the prime view because I was taller than the rest of the crowd - not usual for someone of my height in europe... :-)

In one of the streets I spotted this young beautifully dressed lady. She was wearing a traditional kimono. However, seeing her eating reminded me of the fact that I myself was quite hungry after a lot of walking and sightseeing, so I decided to look for some food.

The stores had a lot to offer, but for some reason I did not recognize anything... They were mostly selling local specialities, and I did not know what was eatable right away and what needed further preparation before beeing enjoyable, so I decided to look for street kitchens instead. The weather was just too nice to enter a restaurant just yet...

However, not all of the food looked equally delicious for my european mouth... this fish (above) smelled terrible...

These "Riceballs" however looked really good - and tasted even better :-)

It was getting late afternoon, and as I had finished my snack the festival floats were pulled back to their storehouses in the old town.

The streets are however very narrow - and the floats quite big, so they had to be pulled slowly and with extreme caution...

Suddently I became aware of the fact that my feet were killing me after a whole day walking with my fully loaded backpack on my back. Since check-in time at my nobel residence for the night was not before 3 pm, I had decided to carry my stuff with me during the day. Anyways, around six I was exhausted, the festival had come to its end, it was getting dark (yes, the sun "falls" quickly down very early here, since we are at around 35 degrees latitude - which means the same latitude as somewhere in africa...) so I decided to ckeck in and call it a night. My hotel was great, with spa, swimming pool, a nice large bed... So I did not lack anything to reload my batteries for the next day :-)