Day 2 (Part 3): Goodbye, Fuji. Hello, City.

It was nearing 3pm, and we had a bus to catch at around 4. So we headed back to the Kawaguchi-ko station.

Back at the station!

It's not called a station for nothing... The train's too colorful..

We (actually it's zxx and me) still had a little bit of time left to explore the areas near the station.

You can finally see how the retro bus looks like!

It's starting to get very "cloudy"...

We found this gigantic leafy plant that's bigger than xzz's palm! Oh, yes, we enjoy finding such stuffs..

We also found this odd statue... Had no idea why they stacked these 4 animals.. Perhaps this was the birth of the 四不像 when they somehow combined by magic...

We even found the direction to the doggy park!

That's it for our little exploration and it's time to pack our bags and return to Shinjuku. And it's quite a tiring bus ride for we're caught in the jam. Sigh. We're supposed to reach Shinjuku just before 6pm, but thanks to the rush hour, we only got to get our aching butts off the seat more than half an hour later.. (which was actually not too bad.. as compared to the 4-hour M'sian jam during the Berjaya Hills trip)

Looked like it'd been raining in Shinjuku for almost the whole day too.. The ground was wet and the temperature's a 10 (haha, there're "giant thermometers" everywhere!). We quickly entered the underground walkway to beat the cold. Someone's tummy was growling badly (not mine), so we tried to find a place for dinner. And we had...

Soba! I was sooooo happy! Soba is my favorite among all Japanese staples..

The guys had katsu don + soba set meal each.

After satisfying our hunger, we made our way to Takashimaya Time Square. On our way there, I took this blurry photo of the Christmas light-up:

We didn't shop around Takashimaya though.. The first thing we did was to go to Tokyu hands. Hahaha... The sad thing was shops closed at around 8 or 830pm, which meant we had only about 1 hour plus to look and shop around.. Which was obviously not enough.. Funny YC requested if he could return to this place in the next few days, which I gladly agreed since I myself needed more time there (as well as Kinokuniya).

More last minute changing of plans and more discussions I had to have with my fellow travel mates when we returned to our hotel.

Day 2 (Part 2): The magnificent beauty can never be dampened..

After our lunch, we bought these "Free coupon" tickets which warranted us unlimited rides on the Retro bus around Kawaguchi-ko areas. And yes, it's kinda troublesome to bring around our "loot" from the souvenir shop while touring around the area.. hahaha..

Retro bus boarding area~~ We'd be taking the kawaguchi-ko retro route (yellow colored).

I randomly chose a stop to alight and here are some photos we've taken!

Autumn colors at Kawaguchi-ko.

Drizzling at Kawaguchi-ko.. This is the actual lake.

Cottage-looking resort

Fallen maple leaves...

I was wearing Glacier! Finally had a use for it...

Can see the lake from here~

Maple close up~

It's weed... But a pretty one..

Anyone knows what this green lump of stuff is?!?!

Hey! We stayed around this area for a night the last time we're here! (Last year's Hokkaido tour... Which I only stopped at Day 2 in the blog... HAAHAAA.. I procrastinated too much..)

Anyway.. the magnificent beauty was the autumn colors. In case you think I'm that thick-skinned...

Day 2 (Part 1): Where's Fuji-san???

I think Fuji-san and I are not fated to meet each other... 3rd time in a row, I was met with unfavorable weather. In fact, I was already feeling disappointed when looking at the weather forecast the few days before the flight to Tokyo.

Well, tickets were already booked, so we still made our way down to Shinjuku (while getting a little lost again and spending an extra 130yen coz we went out of the wrong exit and couldn't find the right exit from outside and went back into the station to find the correct exit...) to take a highway bus from the Keio bus terminal (west exit!!!). I was really glad that they've a "bus-stop guide system" that displayed and announced the next stop (in Japanese, English, Chinese/Mandarin and Korean! Good job!).

Chinese & Korean!

After an hour plus ride, we reached Kawaguchiko station.

The weather was cold, with temperatures hovering just below 6 degrees celsius.. A heatpack always comes in handy in such situation..

It was colder in the morning...

We had initially planned to take a Fujikyuu bus up to the 5th station; but since it's already so cold at Kawaguchi-ko areas, we figured it would be much colder (sub-zero temps) up in Fuji-san, so we dropped the idea of going up. We ended up hanging around at the souvenir store quite a bit, and bought bags of omiyage... Which wasn't a very good idea (you'll find out in a bit) We also had an early lunch at the cafe just beside to the souvenir store.

In fact, the cafe and the souvenir store are joined together!

My lunch! Curry houtou (a speciality in Kawaguchi-ko area)

XB had curry rice, Fuji-san style..

xzz had udon, which looked equally yummy! Slurp!