Day #7 Odawara and Hakone

Firstly I’d like to commend the boys, we have now been here for over a week and their manners and behaviour have been impeccable. We haven’t had much trouble at all and they have listen to all instructions and thoroughly enjoyed assimilating into the culture here in Japan. It’s wonderful to see.

Another part of this trip has been the billeting and each boy gets quite excited now about the opportunity of meeting new families and going back to their places. Last night the billeting was excellent and we had no problems with all family is very grateful that our boys could stay with them for an evening. Our boys were treated once again very very well, and greeted us with heaps of stories about their night away.

After collecting all the boys this morning from their billets at Kugayama HS, we traveled south down around the Tokyo bay to an area called Odawara.

How to many years ago was the one of the capital of Japan being the gateway to Tokyo for many of the international shipping routes they brought goods and spices to the country. Today we visited at Odawara castle which was an outstanding example of traditional Japanese temple and palace for the original royal families here in this country. We spent a good couple of hours strolling around the grounds and looking at what was a wonderful structure. Finally enough it was the base for the Wallabies as well over the past week prior to them moving up to Sapporo to play the game last weekend. They now have moved into an area in Tokyo which we hope to visit them this coming weekend before the game.

For lunch we went to a local shopping centre and the boys enjoyed a good hour so just wondering around and looking at all of the different specialty shops there and also grabbing some of the local delicacies. Many of them tried ramen which is a noodle and broth mixture, that comes with light vegetables and beef or chicken. Delicious....

Following lunch we hopped on the bus once again and travel for about an hour and a half up to an area called Hakone. This area is it the foothills of Mount Fuji which we will visit tomorrow. We had the wonderful pleasure of being able to take all the boys today to a waterpark nothing similar to what we have in Australia. The boys had an absolute ball for over two hours running down slides and visiting all the different and unusual pools. One of these pools was the coffee pool. The guy there every couple of hours gets the guests to go to the pool and sit as he explains about coffee and then he sprays it on all of the gas within the pool. Another one of the great features at this waterpark was a small pool where you put your feet in and fish come and nibble on your skin. Just about every boy enjoyed or tried this as it was very unique and certainly quite an unusual feeling. Personally I didn’t really enjoy it as much, as most of the fish in the tank seemed to be eating something  on one of my feet and the sensation was quite unusual.

Our time in the waterpark ended and we hop back on the bus and headed up the hill to our location for the evening. A wonderful resort where once again we were spoiled by an incredible dinner in a buff a where the boys thoroughly enjoyed trying many of the different delicacies on offer. Have a look on Flickr to see what I mean.

Another highlight today was having all the boys "DRESS" for dinner. In each room here (Tatami rooms again), the boys had a traditional robe, and we all wore this to bed. Photos again are on Flickr.

tomorrow we head over to Mount Fuji and hopefully will get somewhere near one of the base camps to be able to look out over the area. It has been off and on quite cloudy but fingers crossed tomorrow it will be a clear day. Just another note the area that we are in now is very volcanic and has many springs but also there is a warning at the moment for a live volcano. This will pose any problem problems for us as we are quite safe but it’s actually quite interesting that the boys got excited by the fact that they may see a volcano explode... which is unlikely to happen.