Category
G
The Nakabashi bridge, which you will cross about nine times.
Markets at seven, the old town before the coaches, farmhouses the next morning, and an outdoor bath both evenings.
The opening scene
It is about half past five and still dark, and I am sitting outside in a bath cut into the rock on the roof of a ryokan with my shoulders under the water and my breath going up in front of me. It is close to freezing. Somewhere below, the river is loud. There are yellow ginkgo leaves floating on the surface because the tree above the bath has been dropping them all week and nobody skims them off, which I think is deliberate. In about an hour the markets open. This is the best twenty minutes of the entire Japan trip and it costs nothing extra.
The ask
This is the leg people are least sure about. They have Tokyo and Kyoto booked, somebody has told them to add the Alps, and they want to know whether two nights in a town of eighty-five thousand people justifies four hours on a train. It absolutely does – and here is how to spend them so that it is obvious within the first evening.
You’ve reached the quiet door.
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