From Tokyo we went to the little old town of Takayama, in the mountains at 4 hours from Tokyo. It was so nice! After several days in crowded metros we finally arrived in a place where we could do just walk around. The city is very charming, with its houses typically Japanese made of dark wood in the old center and the view to the mountains with snow. In the morning we went to the local market where we could taste all the weird little things, almost a free breakfast … And at night we went to a restaurant to celebrate four years anniversary. How romantic!

There we stayed in a hostel with traditional Japanese rooms and it was one of the best places we stayed so far, super clean and pretty organized. We didn’t want to leave.

We were lucky to be in the region on the day of a really important festival, which happened in the town of Furukawa, 15 minutes by train. During the day we could see the Yatai parade, a parade of wooden cars decorated with lanterns lit and Japanese drawings that were pulled by a rope by locals dressed in traditional clothes.

At 9 pm the long-awaited moment of Okoshi Daiko started (also known as Naked Festival), where groups of shirtless men with only shorts and a white band at their waist begin a race to reach the central drum of the parade, all of them heated with many doses of sake to bare the cold. It’s crazy and you can go through the whole parade being pushed by the groups that are fighting to reach their goal. Super cool!

It was the second event we saw in Japan and it was an awesome experience!