We spent almost 4 hours at Lake Yamanaka, then took the loop bus to our last stop for the day – Nagaike Water Park – that’s situated on the opposite bank of the lake. The Nagaike side of the lake though is very quiet and sedate, and most visitors to this area seem to to go only to take pictures of Mt. Fuji from its vantage point. We arrived just after sunset was already well underway, so had to make do with pictures where the sun had already ducked behind Mt. Fuji.
There’s also a lovely cafe opposite Nagaike Water Park: they close early at 5PM, but we managed to squeeze in a quick early dinner and were the last guests of the day for the cafe.
Funny story there: we couldn’t find the bus-stop where we needed to get onboard the last loop bus to return us back to Kawaguchiko Station, and it was to depart at 5:26PM. And if we’d indeed miss it, the next bus would be… the next morning haha. The area was fairly pitch dark too excepting headlights from vehicles on the road. We gave up trying to find the Nagaike Water Park bus-stop on Google Maps, and walked another 20 minutes down the road in near dark to what we thought was the spot for the next bus-stop. Fortunately, the loop bus showed up and we felt greatly relieved that we wouldn’t have to spend the night in the open at Lake Yamanaka haha!
That’s a wrap for Day 03. We’d be leaving Kawaguchiko tomorrow morning and making our way back to Tokyo for the next lengthy segment of our stay!