Hello! The Japan adventures are slowly continuing. What a truly amazing day this was. Our hotel in the morning was Hotel Route Inn Kamisuwa, right near the beautiful Suwa Lake. It was freezing beyond anything in the morning, waking and rising at 4am to explore, and even colder by the water.
Most of our food for today was bought from Lawson and 7eleven for vegan options.
Takayama-Jinya, however, was AMAZING. Basically a small heavily-tourist based village, we found the cutest little souvenir shops and best of all... a VEGAN RESTAURANT! Apart from eating all the soy sauce dango (awesome vegan snack), we stumbled upon a little hidden gem called Noguchiya Tofu Restaurant. The staff were SO super friendly and with my tiny vocabulary of Japanese I managed to check that what we ordered was vegan, and because one dish (the soup) contained dashi, which is fish stock, they replaced the soup in the banquet set we ordered with an extra tofu dish. How kind!
Next stop was Shirakawa-go, unlike anything I've ever seen before! The Gassho-style houses and amazing river rapids mark this place as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and it's sometimes hard to believe places like this exist.
Without talking too much, if you'd like to get a full day's tour, watch the video linked below! Stay tuned for more adventures!