Another gondola ride down the mountain takes us to Ashi-no-ko, a beautiful lake where traditional Japanese ships ply the waters. Just kidding! The lake is fine, but the Pirates of the Caribbean ships have got to go. After the boat ride, you get to take wonderful souvenir photos like the one I'm sure Somchai is now wishing he hadn't taken, then it's a bus and a train back to Tokyo.

To get to Hakone, you take a normal train out of Tokyo, then hop aboard this superslow train that creaks up the mountain to a gondola station. You then run from the train to the gondola, because the rest of the train is trying to get on the same gondola you are, and it can take a couple of hours to get the whole train into the air. The gondola, which you can see in the mountain photo if you have really good eyes, goes quite a far distance among the mountains, and stops a few times. But be warned, if you get off on an intermediate stop, you'll never get back on since nobody else will get off so you'll never find an empty gondola to resume your journey. the gondola eventually terminates in Hell, pictured here. This area stinks of sulphur, and looks about to explode any minute. You can walk around on raised platforms to see (and smell) Hell up close, and buy eggs cooked in the inferno.

28. Hakone

We took another day trip to nearby Hakone. We really took this trip because Mt. Fuji is the world-famous symbol of Japan, a perfectly symmetrical volcano whose beauty is the subject of countless poems and paintings. But the proper way to see Mt. Fuji is to hike up it starting around midnight, so that you can arrive at the summit in time to see the sunrise, then hike yourself back down. While that sounded very unappealing, the fact that you're sharing the hiking trail with thousands of other people in the middle of the night so it feels like you're going up an escalator in a department store at Christmas really clinched the deal: Hakone, here we come. The virtue of Hakone is it's near Fuji so you can see it and write a haiku about it if the spirit moves you, but you don't have to do anything else but look. The downside is that a trip to Hakone is about as tacky kitsch as Japan can get. That's Mt. Fuji behind Somchai. Since looking at Mt. Fuji would only occupy about five minutes, the Hakone tourist bureau has dreamed up a whole circuit of fun for the rest of your visit.