When we got in last night, everything was dark. All we had time for was check into our hotel.
This morning we open up our hotel room shades to discover a wonderful and beautiful sight of nature. Mount Fuji was a sight to be seen!
We had a wonderful hotel buffet breakfast and then did a private onsen session in front of Mount Fuji for an hour. The bath was hot at 41ºC and it was hot. I had to get out of it every 10 minutes or so to cool down. After the bath, you just feel like jello, super relaxing and a great time for a nap! Carol loved it so much, she went back for another session in the evening. One session was good enough for me.
Below has a wonderful picture of the view we had from our room and the private bath. Click on the individual pictures to see it in its full resolution.
The hotel buffet breakfast was okay, and we really did not have much choice because no place was open until 10am or 11am. We had ramen for lunch at the outlet mall’s food court. The ramen was good, but I had an issue with Pasmo. This is a cashless payment card (one of many called IC cards in Japan). The idea is to have it top up with some cash, and you can use the cards with transit, vending machines, and retail shops. Our TD Visa card fail to validate with Pasmo, but our AMEX card worked okay.
Long story short, I ended up paying twice the amount for the ramen. The merchant says it was cancelled but the amount was already deducted from my phone. Not a very good experience. I suspect there is some incompatibility with its functionality and me having my iPhone on the VPN. With the language barrier I decided not to argue the point. Subsequent transactions worked flawlessly. I hope it is just an isolated scenario, but still quite worrisome.
Overall today was a good experience around the outlet mall with the Fuji Mountain constantly within our views. Carol of course did a much better job of capturing the day with the following video: