There’s this morning I used to meditate on, when we were in the thick of the lockdowns. I wake up with the sunlight piercing a paper-thin blind. Still bleary with sleep, I pull on a crisp cotton robe over crisp cotton pyjamas, scooping slider-like slippers onto each foot. With not another soul in sight, I pad down a series of steps cut into hefty rocks, slivers of bamboo tickling me as I go, the sunrise just peeking above the horizon. I can hear the waves below. Reaching the bottom of the boulder-steps, I can see it: a sculpted, sunken pine tub filled with water, its puff of thick steam forming a luminous halo in the amber first light.
Don’t you feel better already? And this was no Covid fever dream – it was a memory. The steps led from a chic little ryokan (a traditional inn) in Atami, on the east of Japan’s Izu Peninsula. Taking the hour-and-a-half train from Tokyo, I’d visited in 2016, relishing the opportunity to shrug off all plans, decisions and day-to-day stresses and submit to the way of the ryokan. At these hyper-traditional, fully-catered boarding houses – which date back to the 1600s – you switch your holiday clothes for soft tunics and kimonos, take off your shoes and sleep on tatami mats. At dinnertime, you’re served whatever multi-course creation the chef is making that day. Many have hot spring baths where you participate in Japan’s ancient onsen bathing ritual; mine had a delightful women-only, seaview tub, where little Japanese girls giggled at my pinkness as the heat warmed my bloodstream.
I had fully intended to go back to Japan in 2020 – but the pandemic had other plans. Having visited during crisp, cold, sunny January the first time, I had fallen for blue skies reflected in Tokyo skyscrapers, restaurants that do one thing and do it really, really well, and the gleaming efficiency of its bullet trains. For my second trip I was eyeing autumn, when the country’s ornamental maple trees turn a fiery red and the hiking trails are ripe and cool for exploration. As we waited out those early Covid weeks, I vowed I’d go just as soon as the pandemic finished, in autumn 2020. Autumn 2021. Autumn 2022?
Bamboo forests like Arashiyama are the stuff of Alice in Wonderland fantasies
(Getty Images/iStockphoto)
Following a strict travel shutdown and borders sealed to nearly all for over two years, Britons were finally allowed back in early June – but only if they visit on a guided, group tour with a pre-approved operator. I want to do…
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