Travelling at breakneck speed: part 6

Friday, October 26th.
Off to Hakone. The exact route is lost in the mists of time. I am adept at sneaking onto trains behind Dad and Ishbel. They have JR passes. I, as a resident (not a tourist) do not. But two JR passes flashed at the gate by two parental-looking types followed by a scruffy younger type seem to satisfy the guards that I too am a tourist, and I too have a JR pass. I will probably burn in hell. Ho hum, twas ever thus. Perhaps merely a light plague of boils for defrauding the Japanese public transport system. Tell you this though: I reckon I've saved at least £300 in the past week.
Main line train, local train, funicular, cable car. I've been on more obscure stretches of the Japanese transportation network in the past week than I would ever have suspected possible. In the cable car we are theoretically passing over a vast valley, lined with trees just starting to show their autumn colours. We should be able to see Fuji-San. It is so misty we can't see the cable ten feet in front of us. Darnit. The cable car stops, the door opens, we all make faces. It stinks of sulphur. This is a volcanic region; well, pretty much all of Japan is volcanic (or on a fault line, or about to drop into the ocean - makes you wonder why early settlers bothered, they could've just stayed in China and admired the fireworks from a distance) but this a particularly unstable part. Hot gasses steam from the ground. Pools bubble. It makes me think of the Bog of Eternal Stench in the film Labyrinth. We buy hard-boiled eggs cooked in the sulphur pools. The shells are black. They're pretty tasty.
We optimistically wait for Fuji-San to emerge from the mist, but it isn't happening. It's baltic. I buy hot chocolate and wait for Dad to accept that he isn't going to see Mount Fuji. We go back down the cable car, funicular and local train, hop on the Shinkansen, and head for Tokyo. I have a pocket full of tickets. I've been buying the shortest ticket possible to get onto the train and coming out of the station sneaking behind Dad and Ishbel. My caution has paid off - as we come into Tokyo the more vigilant Tokyo train guards look at the JR passes. I turn off to find a fare adjust machine and pay for the full ticket from Hakone to Tokyo. A pretty short trip.
We head for the Government metropolitan building for a good view of Tokyo at night. Cities always look good from this angle, at night, from above, and Tokyo doesn't fail the test. After that we wander around for a while and end up in an izakaya in Shinjuku a stone's throw away from an Irish pub I remember from my visit last year. I make a mental note of its location (Dubliners, turn left, the alley opposite Wendy's) to come back here at new year. It's tiny, and we are practically nose-to-nose with the chefs behind the counter. This makes it difficult to avoid eating the mysterious root and raw quail egg salad we are presented with. The bacon and asparagus skewers more than make up for it.