You will hike about 4km in this trip and visit Amasake Tea House, part of the old Tokkaido Highway, Lake Ashi, and Hakone Checkpoint. The transport between the sites is either on foot, by local bus or shared taxi. The hike is for beginners and mostly on gentle slopes or cobbled paths.
In this tour, you will traverse the Hakone Mountains like Edo period travellers and understand the history of Japan using your own feet. You will see Mt Fuji when we get to Lake Ashi if weather permits. This hike can be for the beginners.
Hakone Hachiri is a Japan Heritage where you can experience how people travelled between Kyoto and Edo (today Tokyo) during Edo period (17-19th century). It is a part of the Old Tokaido Highway including going through the steep slope of Hakone mountains. These days, Kyoto and Tokyo are linked by bullet trains and buses but walking this path can make you understand the history of Japan from a new perspective.
'Hachi' in Japanese means 'eight' and 'ri' is a measurement of approximately 4km these days. Therefore Hachiri means the difficult 32km of mountain path which travellers in the past need to walk in order to travel between Kyoto and Edo. In this tour, we will walk some parts of this 32 kilometre pathway and skip the steepest parts by buses.
Our Hakone Hachiri tour starts from Hakone Yumoto. We take a taxi together to reach the trailhead and then we walk to Hatajuku where the Amazake Tea House locates. After some Japanese snacks and a cup of energising amasake, we walk on the cobble stone path along the old Tokaido Highway to reach Lake Ashi where we will have a break admiring the lake, Mt Fuji and the Torii gate of Hakone Shrine which is always seen in the postcards of Hakone. Then we walk along the lake and through the famous cedar avenue with trees over 400 hundred years old. After this, we reach the Hakone Checkpoint - the gate where the Edo government controlled the traffic of travellers.
The tour will finish at Hakone Checkpoint by Lake Ashi around 12:30pm. In this area, you can find a restaurant for lunch and explore other features around the lake in the afternoon, like the historical Hakone Shrine and Pirate ship on the lake.
This tour is suitable for people who want to understand the history of Japan and who enjoy hiking in nature.
