Sean and I rented a car last weekend and traveled to the Noto Peninsula for two nights of camping on the beach. Noto Peninsula is the large finger of land that juts out into the Sea of Japan to the west of Nagano. Because it’s so expensive to travel on expressways here (there are no “free”ways), we made the trip on secondary highways, over the mountains and then up to the upper-west coast of Noto.
Pictures from the trip are here.
The drive there took about eight hours, which was most of the day Saturday. We arrived after dark, and set up the tent on Kotogahama beach, near the small town of Monzen. The weather was cloudy, and we saw lots of rain during the drive. But when we arrived, there was no rain and the temperature was fairly mild.
We spent Sunday exploring the coast north of Monzen, and did a great hike along a trail carved into the sea cliffs. As we drove further north along the west coast of Noto, we took some small back roads that curved up into the hills along the coast. The scenery was amazing and the roads were crazy narrow. At many places on one road, vegetation on both sides of the road brushed the sides of our (very small) car. And every once in a while, we would come upon a tiny village tucked into the hills, usually no more than a dozen or so buildings.
After having a dinner of ramen in the town of Wajima, we headed back south for a bath at a public resort near our campsite. For about $4 each, we soaked in the hot baths, including an outside bath perched on a hillside balcony.
By the time we returned to the tent on Sunday night, it had started to rain.
The rain continued through our departure the next morning. When we woke up Monday morning, we hauled all our stuff up to the car and then carried the tent to a picnic shelter nearby. So we were able to have coffee and breakfast out of the rain, and were able to take the tent apart in a dry, non-sandy area.
We drove back to Nagano along the Sea of Japan coast, which turned out to be a fairly ugly drive through miles of urban/industrial blight. It wasn’t until we turned away from the coast and headed south to Nagano that we got back into some relative nature.
At one point on the drive home (in the mountains north of Nagano), we spotted a monkey sitting calmly on the edge of a tunnel, just as we passed underneath.
For about an hour in this part of the drive, it seemed like we spent the majority of our time in tunnels. There is such an amazing amount of concrete in Japan. And at times it felt like we would never get out of the tunnels.
The highlight of this trip was being able to explore back roads with the car. Most of the time I’m stuck on the well-traveled train and bus routes, so this was a nice change.