Today is our day trip to Shirakawa-go.
We bought a bus tour from Nohi Bus at Takayama bus terminal. You can click here to see the package we bought. The tour is quite basic, the tour bus will just take us to view Ainokura (pictured above), then Shirakawa-go and lastly to a viewing deck to view all of Shirakawa-go. The guide will only talk to us on the bus (in Japanese unfortunately) and hand us brochures, then tell us how much time we have at each stop and where to board the bus again. Just the kind of tour I like.
So according to my research and some of what the guide said, this region. the “gassho-zukuri” farmhouses are UNESCO World Heritage Site called Gokayama and Shirakawa-go. They are villages that settled along the Sho river. The iconic houses has steep thatched-roof to shed the heavy snow fall in this region. Historically the villagers used to cultivate silkworms in the houses. So Gokayama has small villages with lesser tourist facilities whereas Shirakawa-go is the larger, more developed and thus very crowded village in comparison.
Gokayama: Ainokura
The bus drove us up the scenic mountain road, the ride itself is worth the money already. They deposited us in a bus-park at Ainokura first where we get to trudge in the snow to get to a high vantage point. It was fun for us first timers in snow country. Or at least, I thought it was fun.
That’s all we did in Ainokura, it was really early in the morning and nothing was open anyways, so we didn’t really walk into the village itself. Soon, the 1 hour is up and we have to board the bus to our next stop.
Shirakawa-go
This is the highlight of the bus tour, we also had a much longer time here so we made sure to explore the village.
The bus guide brought us across a bridge from the bus park to the main street of the village. This is a picturesque village set within the mountains of the Japanese Alps. We really need to explore more of the alps from all different angles, what a beautiful place! I wanna hike up all the hike-able mountains! When we are free to roam around, the first thing we ate was soft-serve.. Such irony, the soft-serve doesn’t melt, as expected, so we took awhile to finish it. I read somewhere that it is frown upon to walk an eat at the same time. So we tried our best to finish it at the side before continuing on our exploration. We pretty much covered the touristy part of the village and I took many pictures to show for:
The last stop before we head back to Takayama was the viewing point called “Tenshukaku Observation Deck”. It was now when I’m writing this post that I realized why the view point is called “Tenshikaku”. It was the site of a samurai era castle. Talk about a failure…
And here’s the view. The snowfall got heavier and partially obscured what would have been an awesome view. Bummer. We were only here for round 15mins so Claire and I got onto the bus and headed back to Takayama.
Bye Shirakawa-go. You were beautiful.
– Simon
