Directions please

Most of my local sightseeing destinations come from the Japan National Tourist Organization, which does a great job of listing all places of any possible interest. However, they don’t really give many of the useful details – like how interesting the sight is, or even what we would consider real directions. Instead you get things like “this joyous park is 40 min from the X exit on the Y expressway.” So, assuming you feel like going to a joyous park, you have no direction, no road names, no nothing – all you know is that it’s within a 40 minute radius around the exit. If you remember that you can’t really ask for directions, it can be a little daunting. I generally do ok with a combination of their little stylized maps, the road atlas, and the GPS map, but it can make for some interesting detours along the way.

Tsukuba Science City itself is easy to find since it’s actually a city. It’s one of the largest concentrations of high tech in Japan, with a large university and enough foreigners to justify a very nice English-language website. So we had assumed that getting around would be fairly easy. Sadly, we were wrong. Very few of the museums had any more than a large welcome sign at their entrance (which is really only visible if you happen to be driving by the entrance and simultaneously looking in that direction). And once you get into the museums you realize the dreadful truth – this is a city that decided it ought to have museums, not a city that had anything to put into the museums. Like the “extensive collection of maps and geographical survey instruments” that turned out to be about what any decent university collection would have. Even the NASDA gift shop sold more NASA paraphernalia than anything else.

The local volcano (second only to Fuji-san) was deemed a better afternoon destination (we also figured that it had to be cooler at altitude because it couldn’t possibly be any hotter). As an added bonus, you can drive almost all the way to the top, and then take a ropeway the rest of the way. This is the kind of mountain climbing I can handle.

Unfortunately, the road to Tsukuba-san isn’t really well marked. There’s a sign where you get off the main highway, but we saw nothing at the base of the mountain. Well, this is what the GPS map is good for – according to it, the right turn we were at was the only way up for miles. So off we went into the wild blue yonder. And noticed that the road was getting really steep (had to turn off the AC to get the required engine power out of the little rental car, which was most unfortunate). And really narrow. And really deserted (the one person we saw was out walking his dog and looked shocked to see a car). And then the pavement gave way to base rock. And then the base rock stopped being well groomed. At this point, we finally figured out we had done something wrong. We’re dense, but not total idiots. I mean, can you honestly see a Japanese tourist voluntarily driving his car over roads like this? No way. But there was no way to turn around and the road was too rough to back out, so we continued forward (“always going forward because we cannot find reverse”). Only to eventually come out onto a large, paved highway (with lots of signs for Tsukuba-san) that just doesn’t happen to be on the GPS map. sigh.

At the top of the road is the promised temple complex (several of the buildings are older and more ornate than usual too) and a rather steep ropeway to the summit. The car itself is built with a 30deg slope in the floor and there are signs along the way whenever the slope changes – the lowest was 23% while the highest was 38.5%. But we didn’t have to hike, the view from the top was pretty despite the haze, and, best of all, it WAS cooler up there. We stayed until the last car back down.