A dreamy weekend in the mountains.

Yes. It was very cold.

Hattoji is a tiny village in the mountains of Okayama. It really does feel like the middle of nowhere. To get there, you have to take one of the two daily buses. The bus crawls up the hill, giving you plenty of time to check out the scenery. During the journey, two young kids got on and we tried to imagine what it would be like to grow up in such a remote area and have to get the bus down a mountain each day in order to go to school. As you get higher, you pass over an impressive dam, squeeze between rocks on both sides and generally get a stronger and stronger sense that you are heading to the end of the world.

These posts were scattered along the hiking trail

After getting briefly lost, we bumped into the villa’s friendly caretaker. She had seen us wander off in the wrong direction but clearly thought that we were just taking a leisurely route to the villa. In sub-zero conditions. Since there’s only a few buses each day, she keeps an eye out from her window for lost looking tourists. Inside, it was every inch the traditional Japanese farmhouse that the website had sold it as.

We had the place all to ourselves as no-one else had been foolish enough to book it during the coldest weekend of the year. This meant we could stretch out under the kotatsu ( a sort of heated table) and take things easy without worrying about being polite to anybody other than each other. One of the house’s selling points was that it contained a “traditional cauldron bath”. I was hoping that I had finally found a Japanese bath big enough for me to stretch out in. As it turned out, it was rather uncomfortable. I ended up having to contort myself into various unattractive positions simply so that I could fit in it. Still, I want one. You can probably cook soup in it too, if you choose to.

The cauldron bath. Too small for me, sadly.

K-Chan and I have reflected more than once that we are lucky to both enjoy the same types of holidays. Sure, we like arty-farty city breaks, but we’ve also gotten into the habit of trips into the deep countryside for walks and self-catering silliness. In the past this has involved some memorable trips to the south of Wales and an incredible road trip on the island of Shikoku. Even though I’m not even slightly healthy, I really enjoy wilderness hikes and cooking up good food. I find that cooking on holiday never seems like work in the way it sometimes does at home. The Hattoji International Villa was perfect for this. Aside from our visit to a restaurant, the greeting from the caretaker and three cars, we didn’t see another soul for the whole of our time in the village.

The Wild West themed restaurant. Highly recommended.

If I were planning a village for 100 people and there was space for two restaurants, I’d probably choose something accessible and mainstream that would appeal to as wide a range of people as possible. Hattoji however, contained a wild west themed restaurant that specialised in duck nabe. The owner was very friendly and taught us how to cook a nabe dish properly. It seems that the key is to put the hard vegetables in fast, the meat somewhere in the middle and the beansprouts right at the end. We somehow managed to consume the massive pile of food and then moved on to the risotto stage. The owner showed us his collection of wild-west DVDs and it turns out that they have monthly Indian-style dancing bands! The journey home was a challenge as we were so full and it was pitch black outside.

This made me think of Fawlty Towers.

Was Marilyn ever in a western?

This is what the old west was like.

The villa also contained a charcoal fire, so you could put your lower half under the kotatsu whilst your upper half got warmed from the flame. Meanwhile, I taught K-chan how to play chess (she had forgotten.) and then whipped her arse. In saying that, I’m pretty poor at chess myself and my checkmate was actually done accidentally in a case of “Check. Oh no, hang on, that’s actually check-mate. Sorry”. Which is something that Bobby Fischer never did. She was surprisingly good about it given how angry she gets when I beat her at backgammon. Warmed sake and birthday champagne added to the general mood of decadence. I liked how our very English “let’s play board games and cook fried eggs on toast” attitude mixed with the traditional Japanese setting.

If I’m honest, I often have trouble with things that are traditionally considered to be romantic. I don’t think, for example, that I’ve ever been for a restaurant meal that I would put in that category. But there’s no doubting that, the playing of board games aside (which, in my head, is actually a bit romantic but probably wouldn’t feature in a Jane Austen novel or Charlotte from Sex and the City’s definition…) a visit to Hattoji International Villa is a genuinely dreamy experience.

It was a very, very special weekend.

The charcoal fire kept us going....

...but this weekend would have been doomed without the kotatsu.

We stopped off in Wake for pizza on the way home at the much-hyped Pizza King. Best pizza I’ve had in Japan so far. In saying that, there isn’t a lot of competition as one of the next best restaurants served me a ham and cold lettuce pizza once. I wasn’t thrilled about that.