Post-tyhpoon exploration of Izu Kogen

This morning, we woke up to some very violent rain indeed. In fact, a typhoon had hit Izu Kogen on its way towards Tokyo (you may even have seen something about it in the news). Exciting times thankfully we were safe inside the cafe, watching the impressive amounts of water fall from the sky. As a result of this, the cafe was shut for the day.

Things calmed down in the afternoon, so we decided to take the opportunity to walk around Izu Kogen for a bit. We started off our visit by walking to a nearby museum we managed to find on the internet - called Ayashii museum. It is, without a doubt, one of the strangest museums I have ever been to. Basically, it looks like a sort of weird nerdy retro private collection, which contains, for example: sexy novellas, movie posters, old video games, a huge collection of toys, a rather impressive collection of toys of all, and I mean ALL, kinds (real-size movie star dolls, barbie dolls, monster dolls, sexy dolls, you name it). Very weird, but rather entertaining also, it must be admitted.

We didn't have much of a plan, but decided to start strolling around aimlessly, rather than heading back to the hotel immediately. This initially aimless wondering took us through some rather pretty residential neighborhoods (where we could observe some of the damage caused by the typhoon - mostly limited to plenty of leaves on the roads, thankfully), and then, as we noticed we weren't far from the sea, we decided to walk all the way down to the seaside. The seaside looked rather splendid, even if the sun wasn't out.

We ended up finding a small fishing port at Futo, where I took my time taking plenty of pictures. It's quite interesting that there stills seems to be a rather significant flotilla of small fishermen's boats in Japan - unlike the Mediterranean for example where small-scale fishing has largely disappeared (at least on the Cote d'Azur!). Again, the views were rather fantastic.

Consulting a map, we realized we weren't far from Kadowaizaki suspension bridge (which we've already visited twice) - so we decided to take the foot path all the way there. A pretty short, but extremely scenic hike. A good thing it was short, too, as it was getting pretty late, and we still had to walk all the way back to the hotel. So after checking out the suspension bridge, again, and the light house (which was actually closed), we started the walk uphill back towards the hotel.

We were actually greeted by a pretty amazing evening sky (with the omni-present Mount Omuro seen as a silhouette) on the way back to the hotel, as night fell finally fell. Apparently the skies tend to clear up after a typhoon, so not sure whether the beautiful evening sky was a result of that, or if we just got lucky.

We had a "convini dinner" back at the hotel. Actually, a very good value for money to eat in Japan is to buy ready meals at small convini shops (Seven Eleven, Family Mart, and the like) - the food is still pretty tasty (after all, one cannot really eat badly in Japan!)