Day 1 of the Nakasendo Trail: Getting Lost
After a simple, hearty breakfast buffet in Matsumoto, we shipped our luggage to Kyoto, donned our warmest clothing, and set out for (what we thought was) the Nakasendo trail.


In theory, the historic Nakasendo trail goes all the way from Tokyo to Kyoto. However, in practice, the trail has been largely replaced by highway. Information is a bit sparse online about which sections of the trail are still maintained for hiking/tourism purposes, and which sections aren’t.


We took a train from Matsumoto to Kiso-Hirasawa, and from there we were meant to hike about 8km to Yabuhara. But upon exiting the train station, we soon realized that there weren’t signs for the Nakasendo trail anywhere. We pointed Google Image translate at all the nearby signage, all of which came up short.

So, we picked a sidewalk that looked to be vaguely in the right direction and started walking. For a while, this seemed to be the right choice, as the path took us along a river, and near some attractions like an old train. James pointed out a sign for an information office. “No need”, I flippantly said. “This is definitely the trail”.


Reader: it was not the trail. As things got increasingly industrial, we realized our folly. (We = me).


We had clearly missed the Nakasendo trail, if there even was a maintained trail nearby. Google suggested that we could continue along the road and eventually reach Miyanokoshi, which had another train station. So that’s what we opted to do. On the plus side, we did get to see some pretty stunning winter vistas.


On the other hand, we also “hiked” through two kilometers of tunnel.


Briefly we found ourselves in a forest, on what felt like an actual trail. But google revealed that we had gone the wrong way again. Back to the highway for us.


At long last, we reached a train station that took us the rest of the way to Kiso-Fukushima, where our next hotel awaited.

And here we are in the pretty town of Kiso-Fukushima! In total we hiked about 25km, which was 3x our intended distance. We deemed it to be an interesting detour that makes for a funny travel story. But also, we grabbed every subsequent hiking brochure and map we could find.

