Getting Around Hakone: The Free Pass, the Round Course, and How the Loop Actually Works

Hakone's transport is not a network so much as a single designed circuit. Because the region sits inside a collapsed caldera, with a steep wall on the Odawara side and a lake in the middle, the route in was built as a sequence of increasingly specialised vehicles: a mountain railway that switchbacks up a slope too steep for a normal train, a funicular where even that gives up, a ropeway over an active sulphur field where no ground transport is possible at all, boats across the crater lake, and a bus back around the rim.

That sequence is marketed as the Hakone Round Course, and it is the standard way people see the region. It is not a tourist gimmick bolted onto ordinary transport; each leg exists because the terrain made the previous mode impossible. Understanding this makes the day make sense, and makes it obvious why nobody drives the loop.

The ticket that ties it together is the Hakone Free Pass, sold by Odakyu, which covers the whole circuit plus most of the local bus network for a fixed price over two or three days. Almost every visitor should buy one. The exceptions are narrow: if you are going straight to one ryokan in Hakone-Yumoto, soaking, and coming home, the pass will not pay for itself.

The conventional direction starts at Hakone-Yumoto, the gateway town at the bottom of the valley, and runs clockwise. The Hakone Tozan Railway climbs from Yumoto to Gora, gaining several hundred metres on a gradient steep enough that the line uses three switchbacks: the train stops, the driver and conductor swap ends, and it reverses up the next section. It is Japan's oldest mountain railway of its kind and the ride takes around forty minutes for a very short distance on the map. In June and early July the banks alongside are dense with hydrangeas.

From Gora, the Hakone Tozan Cable Car, a funicular hauled on a cable rather than an aerial gondola, climbs a straight steep line to Sounzan in about ten minutes, with several stops along the way that serve residential Gora and a couple of museums. At Sounzan the ground genuinely runs out and the Hakone Ropeway takes over, running in two sections: up over the ridge and down into Owakudani, then on across to Togendai on the shore of Lake Ashi. The Owakudani leg is the one people remember, passing directly over the steaming vents.

At Togendai you board a Lake Ashi sightseeing boat, built as a mock galleon with a figurehead and gilded stern, to Hakone-machi or Moto-Hakone at the southern end. Those two ports are a walk apart along the shore and both sit near the historical sites: the reconstructed checkpoint, the cedar avenue, and the shrine with its torii in the water. From there a Hakone Tozan bus runs back down the old Tokaido road to Hakone-Yumoto in about forty minutes, closing the circle.

The loop works in both directions and the pass does not care. The argument for clockwise, starting with the railway, is that the sequence builds; you finish at the lake and the historical sites in the afternoon light and return by bus, which is the least interesting leg and therefore the right one to do when you are tired.

The argument for anticlockwise is crowd management. On a busy day the great majority of visitors arrive at Hakone-Yumoto in mid-morning and set off clockwise together, which means the ropeway and the boats develop long queues in the middle of the day at the exact points where you would reach them. Running the loop backwards, by taking the bus straight from Yumoto to the lake first, puts you out of phase with that wave.

The other variable is Fuji. The best views on the circuit are from the ropeway between Owakudani and Togendai and from the lake looking north, and both are more likely to deliver early in the day. If the mountain is the priority, go anticlockwise and get to the lake in the morning. If the museums are the priority, go clockwise; they cluster around Gora and Miyanoshita on the railway side.

For anyone doing the loop, yes, comfortably. Buying the ropeway, cable car, railway, boat and buses separately costs substantially more than the two-day pass, and the pass also removes the friction of buying six tickets at six counters, which on a busy day is worth something in itself. It comes as a two-day or three-day version and can be bought from Shinjuku, including the outbound and return journey on the Odakyu line, or from Odawara at a lower price if you are arriving by Shinkansen.

The pass does not include the Romancecar surcharge. The Romancecar is Odakyu's limited express, fully reserved, and the extra charge buys you a specific seat and a direct run to Hakone-Yumoto without changing. It is worth paying for on a weekend or holiday. If you skip it, the pass still covers ordinary Odakyu express trains, which require a change at Odawara and take somewhat longer.

The pass also carries discounts at a long list of local attractions, including the major museums and several day-use onsen. They are individually small but add up over two days, and the discount list is printed with the pass. A Japan Rail Pass, by contrast, is close to useless inside Hakone: the Odakyu line and the entire loop are private railways and are not covered. A JR pass gets you to Odawara and no further.

The Hakone Ropeway is the most weather-sensitive link in the chain. High wind suspends it, and it can go down at short notice. Separately, Owakudani sits on an active geothermal field, and when volcanic gas levels rise or the alert level is raised, the Owakudani station and the walking trails there close; in 2015 the ropeway was suspended for an extended period and access was restricted for months.

When this happens the operators run substitute buses along the road between Sounzan or Gora and Togendai, and the Free Pass covers them. You still complete the loop, you just do a section on tarmac instead of in the air, and you may not be able to stop at Owakudani for the eggs. This is not a disaster and it is not a reason to cancel a trip, but it is a reason to check the ropeway's operating status on the morning you travel rather than discovering it at Sounzan.

If Owakudani is closed and eating a black egg was on your list, kuro-tamago are usually sold at other points around the region, including at Togendai and some shops in Hakone-Yumoto, though buying one at the vent where it was boiled is the entire point of it.

The loop covers the famous sights, but several of the best things in Hakone sit off it and are reached by bus. The Pola Museum of Art and the Hakone Venetian Glass Museum are in the Sengokuhara area, north of the ropeway line. The susuki grassland is the same direction. Various day-use onsen and the more secluded ryokan are scattered through valleys the loop does not enter.

Two main bus operators run in the area, Hakone Tozan Bus and Odakyu Hakone Highway Bus, and the Free Pass covers both within the designated zone. Routes are numbered and signed in English at the main stops, and the key hubs are Hakone-Yumoto, Gora, Togendai and Hakone-machi. Buses on the mountain roads are slower than the map suggests and can bunch in traffic on busy weekends, so allow more time than the timetable implies for any leg that involves the road between Yumoto and the lake.

Luggage is the other thing worth planning. The Tozan railway carriages are small, the cable car and ropeway cabins more so, and hauling large suitcases around the circuit is genuinely unpleasant. Hakone-Yumoto station has coin lockers, which fill early on weekends, and there is a well-used luggage delivery service that will take your bags from the station to a participating ryokan in the region for an afternoon delivery, and back again. Use it.

Generally, no. The loop is designed around the fact that its most interesting sections have no road, so driving means you cannot do the railway, the cable car, the ropeway or the boat as a circuit; you would have to park, do an out-and-back on each, and return to the car. The roads through Hakone are narrow and winding, parking at the popular sites is limited and fills on weekends, and traffic through Hakone-Yumoto backs up badly in peak season.

Driving does make sense in two situations. One is if you are combining Hakone with the Fuji Five Lakes on the same trip, since the connection between the two regions is much more flexible by road than by public transport, which requires a bus and offers limited departures. The other is if you are staying at a remote ryokan on a poorly served bus route with several people and a lot of luggage.

If you do drive, park at your accommodation and do the loop on the pass anyway, buying it at Odawara rather than Shinjuku. The pass without the Tokyo travel legs is inexpensive and it is still the cheapest way to ride the circuit.