I’m up early on Saturday for a weekend trip to Takayama and Shirakawa in the mountains about 200 km north of Okazaki. 

Takayama is a town some of which looks much like it did in the 18th century during the Edo period.  It has several sake breweries where you can taste the wares. There are also shrines, temples, museums and other historic sites. It sounds like sort of a Japanese version of Upper Canada Village. It should be fun.

Shirakawa is a Japanese alpine village that has been designated as a Unesco world heritage site. I have seen pictures of it on the Internet and have been looking forward to seeing it in person. There is also a 2 day festival the Doburoku Matsuri that starts on Sunday to celebrate the harvest.  Doburoku is a sort of homebrew unfiltered sake. It is cloudy, sweeter and has a lower alcohol content than regular sake. One of the things the festival celebrates is that this is the first day that the doburoku is drunk. I’m looking forward to trying some.

I cycled to Yamasa, parked my bike and then walked a few blocks to the JR station. It is getting cooler and was nice while cycling in a T shirt probably about 15C. At the station I was directed to the JR ticket office where I managed to convey where I wanted to go and how I wanted to get there. I had picked what I thought was a fairly direct route but it seemed to take a lot of typing to get a ticket produced. I think the guy was trying to make the price of the ticket exactly match the price that I had written down. Anyway I got the ticket and found the right track and got underway. I was on an earlier train than expected but I don’t think that it mattered that I took a different one. My route was Okazaki to Gifu, transfer and then on to Takayama. The earlier train was a local instead of an express and stopped at every station. As I had the time I didn’t mind as I got to see more and the people watching was interesting.

The scenery changed soon after we left Okazaki. While there no really open spaces along the track the city gives way to houses that are farther apart surrounded by small fields and green houses. It’s an interesting mix of rural, suburb and industrial all mixed together with none of the zoning that Canada has. I saw a lot of what looks like immature rice growing and wonder if it grows right through the winter. There were a lot of mature fields too some of which I saw being harvested.

When I got to Gifu I had no trouble finding the track for the Takayama train. The station was not busy and I had arrived early so I had some time to kill. My Suica card for the Tokyo trains still works for all of the vending machines and kiosks in the stations which is pretty convenient. I had been given 2 tickets, one for the train fare and another for my reserved seat. The train from Okazaki to Gifu did not have reserved seats but from Gifu to Takayama it was required. I had a moment of confusion when the train arrived as the seat assignment that I had was for a car that did not exist. I entered another car and asked the woman selling bentos for help. She explained that JR would be coupling another train to this one and that my car was on the part of the train that had not yet arrived which proved to be true.

The train to Takayama is the first diesel that I have been on in Japan. All of the other trains have been electric. You can hear the diesel working harder as the train climbs the mountain slope. I had planned to study on this train as it is a 2 hour trip but the scenery was just too beautiful to ignore. The train also makes announcements about significant landmarks and other sights along the way. It was a beautiful sunny day and had the feel of early September in Canada.  The track runs along side a beautiful river part day up the slope so the view is very nice. There are tunnels along the route some of them quite long. In many ways it reminds me of BC and the train from the North Vancouver station north toward Prince George. If you got off in Lilloet you could catch another train coming south back to Vancouver for a nice long inexpensive day trip through the mountains. It was particularly beautiful in the fall with the leaves changing colours. The trip was something that my visitors loved and it is sad that the train no longer runs.

The train got into Takayama about 12:15 and I disembarked along with just about everyone else on the train.