Mount Fuji Hakone Japan trip

I recently travelled to Japan from India using my credit card points and the highlight of the trip for me was the travel to Hakone. So, if you are travelling to Japan, specifically Tokyo, then this is a must visit trip for you.

During this trip, you can enjoy the beauty of Mount Fuji, if its not a cloudy day. For us, it was a cloudy day so couldnot see Mount Fuji but the cloudy weather was also a great opportunity to enjoy the city.

Options to Travel

1. Guided tour with a group

These tours will pick you up from the Tokyo city via bus in a group and it will be a guided tour for you & in the evening they drop you back at the city. There can be some exclusions and some inclusions depending upon the package you choose. This is a popular way of travelling for a lot of people and these tours are suitable for you if you donot want to go through the hassle of planning or incase you are planning for someone else. As an example if your parents are going & you are planning for them, then I will recommend these tours for the ease of travel for them.

Some of the popular tours are
– Mt. Fuji and Hakone Day Trip from Tokyo
– Mount Fuji Magnificent Day Tour from Tokyo
– Mount Fuji Popular Instagrammable sightseeing tour

2. Self guided trip

This tour is for someone who wants to explore the place at his own speed and as per his wish. This means that you can decide as per your wish when you want to start and decide your stops based upon your preference. Here you will need to book the trains & all sightseeing yourself.

What Trip method I choose

I opted for the self guided trip since I prefer to explore the places at my own pace and since I was travelling with the baby, I prefer to avoid exact times since you can get delayed sometimes. Second reason is that doing a self guided tour means that you can save some cost for your next trip.

Now, on this trip as you will read there are many stops and many tickets will be needed so to avoid, so much wastage of time, I opted to take the Hakone Freepass. This is a travel pass giving you unlimited access to the local transport for Hakone region.

The pass will mean that you can show this pass at all locations and just join the queue and no need to buy individual tickets with inbuilt savings in the pass if you are looking to complete the full Hakone golden round course trip. This full trip I undertook and will explain below.

You can opt for 2/3 day pass. Pls note minimum 2 day freepass is there. This pass gives you 1 way round trip from Tokyo One round-trip ticket on the Odakyu Lines (between Shinjuku station and Odawara Station). However, there are no restrictions on stopovers.
This 2nd day will work for you if you are staying in Hakone region or you will need to buy train tickets from Tokyo to Odawara but for any other trips within the Hakone region, those will be free. You can also activate your JR Pass on 2nd day if you want to reach Hakone region and for first day, use Hakone free pass

Now, I travelled for 1 day only to the region and even then this pass was worth it.

The cost of the Hakone Freepass is Rs 3350 and you can buy it by clicking here.

Pls note that the prices can increase/decrease based upon currency fluctuations.

My Trip

I was staying at Tokyo Ginza area and I used the Tokyo Subway pass to reach Shinjuku Station. The 72 hour subway pass cost is around Rs 800 which is a value for money deal.

Shinjuku to Hakone-Yumoto Station

From Shinjuku station, I reached the Odakyu line area within the Shinjuku station and took the physical ticket of Hakone Freepass.

This pass gives free journey ahead so you can use this pass to

• Take the Rapid express from Platform 4/5 for the journey to Odawara station.
• From Odawara station, you can take the Hakonetozan line to reach Hakone-Yumoto station.

You can also use the Romancecar from platform 2/3 but you will need to buy an additional ticket at station or an e-ticket at Odakyu website.
You will need pay extra 1200 yen one way if you have the Hakone freepass and 2470 yen one way if you dont have Hakonefree pass. This saves around 30 mins for you one way & it can give very nice views of Mount Fuji if you are able to get the 1st coach and right window when going from Shinjuku to Hakone.

You can also use your JR pass to reach Odawara and then use your Hakone freepass.

We opted to take the Rapid express to Odawara Station and then reached Hakone-Yumoto station without any extra costs.

Hakone-Yumoto to Motohakone-Ko Bus Ride

Next stop was that we took the Hakone-Tozan bus from Stop Number 2. This bus goes through the scenic route in the mountains and as you can see it was a cloudy day and we got very nice views. This was also covered by our Hakone Freepass.

The bus had 2 stops. The first stop was near the Hakone-Jinja shrine. Here you can visit the shrine and also see the Lake Ashi Torii for your Instagram photos. But please note that if you are not here early morning, then there is a queue of around 30-60 mins expected for your Instagram photo.

Once done, and from here either you can take this bus again or walk for some time and reach Motohakone ko. We had opted to skip the shrine and directly reached the Motohakone-Ko stop.

Cross Lake Ashi through Pirate ship

From Motohakone to Togendai, the best part of the trip came. We crossed Lake Ashi on Hakone Sightseeing cruise. This cruise looks like a Pirate ship and goes to Togendai. This cruise regular ticket is also covered by the Hakone freepass.

But we opted for the first class by paying additional 500 JPY/person since we had the freepass. Incase we didnt have the freepass, then the first class cabin ticket cost would have been much higher.

They will give this special band for entry to first class.

To someone who is visiting this place, I will recommend that you take the first class cabin since the views that you get from here are extremely great and you are right in front of the cruise ship & this is less crowded as well. If you are lucky with the weather, you can see Mount Fuji from here however the weather was cloudy however with the cloudy weather, it was an extremely great experience for us.

You can check some photos that we clicked from the cruise ship.

Togendai to Owakudani through Hakone Ropeway

Once you finish the cruise ship, you can wait at the restaurant and enjoy the lake views while eating your food. After you finish, you can take the Hakone ropeway to reach Owakudani.

Owakudani is known as the volcanic valley and is famous for the black eggs. Its said that if you have 1 of these eggs, then your life increases by 7 years. But it doesnot mean that you should eat 10 black eggs here.

The black eggs are black in color from outside but inside they are regular white eggs. The black colour is owing to the boiling done in mineral rich natural hot springs of the valley which has high sulphur content.

You can also visit the Owakudani museum but its ticket is not covered in Hakone freepass. On the first floor of the museum, there is a big shop where you can eat the black eggs for 500 yen. And do some shopping and buy some memorabilia. We also did some shopping here.

Owakudani to Sounzan

Once you have done shopping and finished here, you can take the Hakone ropeway till Sounzan.

Sounzan to Gora Station

From Sounzan, you can take the Hakone Tozan cable car till Gora. This cable car is also covered under the Hakone freepass.

There are few stations mainly Sounzan-Koen Kami, Gora Park and Gora station.

You can opt to get down on any of these and walk a bit, explore the Gora park & get back on the train. Since the weather was cold with rain, we opted to skip Gora park.

Gora to Hakone-Yumoto Station / Odawara

You can take Hakone Tozan train to reach our initial destination of Hakone-Yumoto station and from there reach Odawara.

Odawara to Shinjuku

Now, we opted to go back on rapid express train, the same train we took in the morning to reach back to Shinjuku, explored Shinjuku in evening and went back to hotel via subway line.

Few additional notes

This full journey you can do in reverse after reaching Hakone-Yumoto station.

You can also opt to return back from Lake Ashi or Owakudani or any other place but I will strongly recommend that you follow the full round trip from either direction to enjoy the full trip. In this way, you explore all the modes – Train, Bus, cruise, ropeway, cable car.

All this gets covered under a single Hakone Freepass priced at Rs 3350.

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