We were going to do better today.
Almost every day so far we’d been running behind schedule. We were traveling between cities often, and while the original plan was to travel in the mornings, explore in the daytime & be ready to leave the next morning, in reality we were lagging half a day behind and were traveling mostly in the evenings (which meant we again couldn’t travel the next morning because we’d barely seen anything in the day’s city so far).
We’d recently had 3 days in Tokyo though, and having covered most of what we wanted to by the third day, we took the opportunity to move to Kamakura — where we were yesterday — on the morning of the last day and, in turn, to Odawara this morning.
We actually meant to visit Hakone, which is an adjacent city to Odawara — something we didn’t realise when booking the hostel. Still, our accommodation was in a prime location very close to the main Odawara train station and with a bit of research we found plenty we could explore there too.
We had two nights booked here, and upon arriving at the hostel, the boy at the reception, Ray, explained that the best way to see Hakone was the Hakone loop itinerary — a circular path consisting of trains, buses, cable cars, ropeways and even ships that takes you to the best sights in the area (including volcanic sulfur springs with views of Mt Fuji!). Given that it gets completely dark around 5pm and that the Hakone loop itself takes 5-6 hours to complete, we decided it would be better to begin the loop the next morning and explore Odawara in the meantime.
Ray told us about a few attractions we could see locally, like Odawara castle and Miyuki beach.
It had just begun to rain, however, and with my family having faced the horror of hairdrying their smelly, wet shoes once already, it was a mutual decision to wait for it to stop, as the weather app indicated it soon would.
As time passed, though, the app’s prediction for the rain stopping moved forward too, hour by hour, and outside, the rain only seemed to get stronger.
We were sitting in the hostel’s common area when suddenly our phones buzzed all at once and we got a notification that was written in Japanese but with the title ‘Emergency Alert’. We quickly translated it and found that it was a ‘Level 4 Evacuation Order’ for Odawara City, due to the risk of a landslide.
Ray was as unfazed as we were startled. He told us to chill because apparently we ‘were in the city and not in the mountains’. I was obviously still sceptical, but the other hostellers around us seemed calm and soon, I was too.
Mama and Eva and I eventually got tired of waiting and went out to get dinner because rainy as it was, there were hungry mouths to feed. Soon after we got back and began eating, though, another similar alert buzzed and the weather app began showing flood alerts.
This was all somewhat normal for the Japanese and we didn’t have to take any extraordinary measures. During my last trip, we even experienced a moderate earthquake and the locals around us were cool as cucumbers.
Sightseeing was out of the question, though, and although Mama had gone out on a walk around Odawara castle earlier when the rain was just a drizzle, the rest of us were confined to our hostel for the rest of the night.
We finished dinner. We drank a bit. Mom and Eva drew pictures in the hostel’s guest book. Mom and I studied some Japanese with a textbook we found there too. We socialised with a German tourist, Paul, who also planned to do the Hakone loop the next day (the weather app promised it’d be sunny and we clung to that hope). Being a fellow (but more experienced) computer scientist, he gave me some career advice too.
We had an early night and for once, after surviving on 4 hours a night on average so far, I got a relatively normal amount of sleep.
Sometimes, even putting in the effort to be on time and stick to plans doesn’t reap the fruits you expect. We’d been helpless in front of the elements, and no amount of punctuality could’ve prevented that.
What matters isn’t that we didn’t get to see everything we wanted. It’s that we made the most out of what we had and found ways to have fun regardless.
We made friends. We learned things. We feared for our lives at a point, which in hindsight was rather exhilarating. We escaped wet shoes. And we got some much needed rest. What else can one ask for?