Hakone was only one day in our itinerary but I spent an inordinate amount of time planning it. It was a place I was really excited to visit and it felt oddly complicated and important to get the plans right.
The first decision point was whether we should spend the night or visit as a day trip from Tokyo. There were pros and cons to both options. Staying overnight would give us more time there and allow us to see it when it was less crowded after all the day trippers left, but the logistics (travel, where to stay, luggage, etc) were way more complicated with an overnight. A day trip would make it easier to move around and see all the sights but would also mean maximum crowds. Ultimately we decided to do an overnight and forward our luggage from Tokyo to Osaka (our next stop) so we wouldn’t have to lug our bags around part of the Hakone loop.
The next decision point was where to stay. Hakone has several distinct areas offering lodging. Yumoto is the main town where you will arrive by train. Gora is in the mountains and convenient to the railway and cablecar. Motohakone is located along the lake, as is the Togendai port area. We were ultimately swayed by the beautiful pictures of Lake Ashi with Mount Fuji in the distance and opted to stay at The Prince Hakone Lake Ashinoko.
Yet another decision point was the transportation to get there. You can take a Shinkansen from Tokyo to Odawara Station and then a local train to Yumoto Station, or you can take the Romancecar direct from Shinjuku Station in Tokyo to Yumoto Station in Hakone. Within Hakone, you can purchase the Hakone Free Pass, which gives you unlimited rides on the various modes of transportation included in the Hakone Loop. This can be purchased for the Hakone area only or to include a roundtrip ticket from Shinjuku Station. Price and time were very similar for both options so there was no clear-cut best option. Hoping to simplify logistics and maximize the scenery on the train, we opted to take the Romancecar. Romancecar tickets go on sale exactly one month in advance at 10am Japanese time and we were able to get seats on the right hand (Mout Fuji) side of the train in the front observation car.
And finally, and perhaps most importantly, was the decision about which way to follow the loop – clockwise or counterclockwise. The most common route is counterclockwise but clockwise seemed to make more sense for us. That would allow us to drop off our backpacks at the hotel first and to go against the flow and hopefully not have to wait on too many lines for the ship, ropeway, cablecar, etc.
So our final Hakone itinerary was an overnight trip, arriving via Romancecar, staying on Lake Ashi and following the loop clockwise. Even after we settled on this, I revisited these decisions over and over again. For some reason I just felt unsettled about the whole thing. Perhaps I should have taken that as an omen since our Hakone day ended up being a complete bomb. It is easy to blame its lack of success on the weather and the impending double typhoon but the truth is, in retrospect I can see that this plan would never have worked. I’m not sure I’ve ever had a travel plan that was a complete and total failure (usually you can salvage something even when things don’t go well) but this one was. Read the trip report for full details…
