Japan (Cherry Blossom): Tateyama Kurobe Alpine Route and Last Night :(

We spent our night in Dormy Inn Toyama, to prepare for the next day's highlight - Tateyama Kurobe Alpine Route where we can see the famous snow corridor!

Dormy Inn never disappoints, it's clean and comfy, with onsen facilities and also free supper! A bowl of pipping hot ramen!

We bought the Tateyama Kurobe Option Ticket at Toyama JR ticket office. Baggage forwarding service is also available for a fee while you enjoy the alpine route from Toyama to Nagano (or vice versa). Do note the latest timing you can deposit the baggage in order for the baggage to reach the destination on the same day. You can refer to the details on the Tateyama Kurobe alpine route website. Do also note the opening period of this route. It does not operate all year round, usually opens only from mid April to November.

Lets start our Alpine route journey! There are so many different transport to take! Even taking the different transports excites us hahaha.

From Dentetsu Toyama, we took the Toyama Chiho Railway to Tateyama station.

From Tateyama station, we took a Tateyama cable car to Bijodaira.

From Bijodaira, we took the Tateyama highland bus to Murodo where the famous snow corridor is! Along the way in the bus, we already felt colder and colder and started to see tall snow surrounding us! We were so excited! Do note that private cars cannot enter so it is not possible to self drive to the snow corridor.

The views along the bus journey! I love snow mountains!

Woo Hoo! We are here! The Murodo station was packed with people!! Let's go and explore my favourite, snow mountains and the amazing corridors!

Look at how much taller the snow is than the bus!

Silly things we did when we see heaps of snow hahaha

Pipping hot soup soba is perfect for such cold weather

Continuing on our journey, from Murodo, we gonna take Tateyama Tunnel Trolley bus to Daikanbo and then the Tateyama Ropeway to Kurobedaira. It's totally scenic!

Next up, we took the Kurobe cable car to Kurobeko and a short walk to the Kurobe Dam.

Kurobe cable car to Kurobeko

From Kurobeko, we just walk to Kurobe Dam

After that we took the Kanden Tunnel Electric Bus to Ogizawa, where we took a bus to Nagano.

That sums up our Tateyama Alpine route experience! We collected our luggage at Nagano station and took the Shinkansen with our JR pass to Tokyo. The alpine route is a two way route. Meaning, you can either be like us travel from Toyama to Nagano or you can also choose to start at Nagano and end at Toyama.

The highlight of the alpine route is really at Murodo to see the snow corridor and walk around in the snowy mountains and to enjoy the spectacular views. It is also crazily packed at Murodo. We went in April when the Alpine route just opened for a few days, hence, the snow corridor was really high. The snow corridor will slowly melt away and becomes shorter and shorter as the weather gets hotter. The other stations do offer nice views and it's definitely enjoyable to try so many different kinds of transport in a route! But things can get irritable and frustrating when it's so crowded with people. It's squeezy in the ropeway, couldn't get a seat on the bus, and the crazy long queues. It is advisable to start the route early to cater for sufficient time to finish the whole route before it closes.

On our last night in Tokyo, we stayed in Tokyo Nihonbashi Bay Hotel, a capsule hotel, it's less than 10 mins was from the Tokyo station. Male and female are on separate floors. It's clean, cozy and comfy. The shared toilet and bathrooms are clean and have all the facilities required. Although the capsule is small, it felt comfortable inside doing my own things. But as with any other capsule hotel, you will be disturbed by the alarms of your neighbours and when they climb up and down the capsules.

On our last night, we had a super satisfying sushi and sashimi dinner! It's actually a random shop that we walked in and for that quality, it's not expensive at all! It's very near our hotel, somewhere between the hotel and Tokyo station.

The sashimi were all very fresh and yummy!

Sushi yummy and so so fresh!

I super love uni and the uni here was super duper yummy and fresh, I think I had 5 that night hahaha.

Our chef that night. Despite our language barrier, he was friendly! We ate and ordered some more, ate and ordered some more. The advantage of sitting at the counter.

The first time I have eaten such fluffy and sweet tamago!

We were offered some free desserts by the chefs haha. Yumzzz.. We liked this more than Shiroi Koibito biscuit.

Menu's on the wall.

Cheers!

Will definitely come back when I visit Tokyo again!

Sob sob, last day in Japan, preparing to head home. We saw this and we had to satisfy our Belgian waffle craving before leaving!