Day 8: Travel Day - Tokyo to Mount Naeba
Nau mai
Yesterday we drove from Tokyo to the site of Fuji Rock Festival at the Naeba Ski Resort.
I chose sleep over breakfast, staying asleep until just before lobby call and instantly waking myself up and rushing downstairs. I was lucky enough to be gifted a rice triangle that Liz had bought from the convenience store. It was filled with Tuna Mayonnaise and it was exactly what I needed to kickstart my morning.
We loaded everything onto a different small bus for our trip to Naeba, and this bus, the Fuji Location Service didn’t have a makeup mirror. It still had a tiny fridge though and we would use it to store our lunches later in the day.
The drive began and remained in the seemingly endless urban sprawl of Tokyo for a while but gradually things began to thin out and there were patches of green and broad waterways that separated the towns and cities. Our route criss-crossed the Shinkansen line and at one point we were easily overhauled by one of these bullet trains as it sped on to the next city.
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There is a chain of second hand stores in Japan called Hard Off. They sell (and buy) second hand electronics and musical instruments and they do it with incredibly efficiency. From cameras, TVs, DVD players, vintage gaming consoles, saxophones, and guitar amps, to power tools and appliances, everything is tested, sorted, and neatly arranged on the shelves of this picker’s paradise. We convinced our festival chaperone to take us to a Hard Off and although it added another two hours to our travel time it was worth it.
You can try out any of the instruments if you are brave enough to enter the tiny, soundproof room. Congratulations to Tristan who came away very happy from this Hard Off visit with a new cymbal and to Liz who bought herself a Nintendo Switch Lite.
We stopped for lunch at a rest area off the highway. This is how you get yourself a cup of water.
The roads became more windy and the scenery became more beautiful as we began our climb into the mountains. Each of the tiny villages we passed was charming and inviting and we wished we could stop and explore. It was late in the day when we finally reached our destination. We pulled into a black, asphalt carpark that sprawled across the floor of an otherwise green mountain valley. Tall, rectangular buildings had grown on the side of these mountains and stood defiantly against the natural roll and flow of the terrain. This was the Naeba Ski Resort, home to Fuji Rock.
The Naeba Ski resort is not on the slopes of Mount Fuji. In fact it is no where near Mount Fuji, as I discovered after arriving at this location around 100km to the northwest of Tokyo. The first Fuji Rock in 1997 was held at the base of the famous stratovolcano but in 1999 the festival settled at this very fine ski resort, which is easily one of the nicest outdoor music settings we’ve ever been to.
The bus was unloaded and we put our equipment into storage before checking into one of the tall, white filing cabinet hotels that were tasked with housing the many artists and festival staff for the weekend. The rooms were cute and tiny and featured a state of the art control panel that gave you everything from dimmable lights to climate control with the simple tap of a button.
The sun was setting and the twilight was struggling to find its way over the mountains as we walked down towards the festival grounds. Already a group of spotlight beams were battling it out in the sky and we could see exactly the direction we needed to head in. We had not gone far before we reached the festival gates, passing a through a security check that was so painless it didn’t even make me second guess my decision to attend the festival.
The stages are all laid out on the valley floor and they take advantage various natural features to create a different character for each. The main stage is a natural amphitheatre that has room for 40,000 with a gentle slope running up towards the back to a thickly wooded hillside. On the flat area next to the food court is a red marquee on that holds 5000 people and we checked it out as this is where we would be playing the next day. There are a pair of tiny, intimate stages set amongst a thin stand of trees transport you into a forest with disco balls hung amongst the branches and lights illuminating the foliage.
I was sad that I missed out on riding (and coming up with the name for) Dragondola, the longest gondola lift in the world which carries riders up to the top of the mountain overlooking the festival site.
After an extremely pleasant evening in this beautiful festival setting we headed back to the hotel and enjoyed some of the skillful pedestrian traffic management and neatly demarcated walking lanes that are provided for the egress of some thousands of people at the end of each night. We stopped along the way to watch a street performer with his fire sticks and Gabe was tricked into blowing fire into the man’s face.
Back at the hotel were kept from our beds after noticing a curious bank of lockers in the corridor on the way to the elevator. Super Yami Gacha is an excellent game. For the bargain price of ¥2000 (around $20 NZD) the player can win something as exciting as a bottle of whiskey or a gaming console – or you could go home empty handed. Tristan played hard, feeding his money confidently into the machine and retrieving his small plastic ball from the mouth of the chute, opening it to find a set of keys to one of these lockers that contained a brand new Zippo lighter. Gabe gave a poor performance and his plastic ball contained only a few guitar picks and stickers. Jon fed his money in and played a very skilful game, retrieving his plastic ball and finding a key inside that opened the locker with a pair of brand new Onitsuka Tigers inside. You might think that the chances of winning a pair of sneakers that fit you perfectly in this game is a low one, and you would be right because they were too small. Gabe had the magic foot for these glass pumps however and Jon was good enough to gift them to him, an act that earns him a very solid BOTHEW point.
Other points awarded throughout the day:
