Tour #2!
Trip Start
Jun 24, 2009
1
8
11
Trip End
Jul 10, 2009
Kakegawa,
Chubu,
Japan
Saturday, July 4, 2009
It took over 2 hours to get down to the factory. The area is rich in green tea and apparently the people in that area have very low occurrences of stomach cancer. We took a tour of the factory to see the process of making the leaves into ones that we brew for drinking tea, which involved reducing the water content to 3%. The total amount of time from when they're picked to when they're ready takes a day. They also have a storage area that holds 337 tons of processed tea for customers until they're ready for delivery. After that we donned our traditional tea picking jackets and headed out to the fields to pick tea. Chrystal & I both picked a fair amount but haven't decided how we want to enjoy it
Picking green tea leaves
. Although I'm thinking frying it up in tempura may be my method of choice.After that we headed to Lake Hamana for lunch. It was a Japanese rest stop! We found a restaurant that served pork cutlet curry and then later found a place that sold crepe's and gelato. Yum! I had a crepe with gelato in it, sooooo yummy! It also satisfied my need to stop at the Starbucks that was there too.
After lunch we headed to the Dragon Rock Cave, which is a 1,000 meter deep cave but only 400 meters is open to the public. There were lots of neat things to look at in the cave. A small turtle waterfall, a rock formation that looked like an alligator, a mirror pond and a 30 meter waterfall were just a few of the things to look at! There was also a coooooold spring that you could put your feet in to relax them. I would have but I wore sneakers that day and didn't bring anything to dry my feet with.
After the cave we headed to Kakegawa Castle which had been re-built and was re-opened in 1994. It is the first fully restored wood construction of its kind in Japan. There were a ton of steps up to the tower and once in the tower the steps up to the upper areas were really steep and we had to do them without out our shoes on
Greenpia factory
! I would estimate that each step was about a foot high and 6 inches deep. Not easy to maneuver at ALL! I was worried about slipping and falling the whole time.... especially with as klutzy as I've been on this trip.After we went through there we headed to the actual palace which had turned into the government center. Following that we were able to participate in a traditional tea ceremony. Which was something I had looked forward to since signing up for this tour. It was very interesting and precise. Before they gave us the tea they gave us each a sweet treat. This was because the tea itself was bitter and so you eat the sweet first to sweeten the taste of the tea. Once you had the tea there was a precise manner in which to approach drinking it and how to drink it.
After that we headed back to the bus because we were all hoping to get on the bus early enough to head back to base and catch the fireworks show. Luckily for us the traffic was on our side and we arrived back not more than 10 minutes before the show started. In fact, Chrystal & I were headed back to the car to put our bags away before the show started when immediately to our right fireworks started going off! We moved a little bit away when we noticed that some others were going off in another area of base. So we got 2 shows for the price of one! It was really cool and it was neat to see the families that were left on base enjoying the show. Most of the Navymen are out on summer cruise and they're in port in Australia so a lot of the families had gone to meet them.
Comments
Circles
I like the droplet circles in the Turtle Waterfall picture -- and the Mirror Pond!