Kumano Kodo Part 1: Minshuku

Sorry, still catching up on my summer vacation. It's busy during second semester at this school, apparently...

The last adventure I had during my summer break was the second week of September, hiking on some World Heritage trails called Kumano Kodo in the Kii Mountain Range, a couple hours outside of Osaka. The trails are pilgrimage routes and along them are some sacred sites, where temples and shrines are located. I went with my teacher friend Misaki, and she planned the whole trip, so I just had to tag along, thankfully.

We stayed in two different places, one inland, and one on a small island. In the first place, we stayed at a minshuku, a traditional Japanese guesthouse. It's pretty simple stuff. You get a small room, and as many as can reasonably fit are allowed to stay in it. However, the price doesn't change depending on how many people stay there (or rather, it does). In Japan, guests are charged per person, not per room, which is partly why Japan is so expensive for tourists, I imagine.

In a minshuku, there are no beds. You are greeted in the bare room with the correct number of neatly folded futons, complete with bedding and a small pillow, plus the correct number of yukata (light kimono), one per person per night. Ha.

Basically the only furniture in there was this little table that had our tea set and electric kettle, and some tourist info.

I didn't get a shot of that fourth corner for some reason, but to the left of this frame is a safe with a little tv on top. I guess you could consider the safe furniture if it's holding the tv.

I believe in the past, toilets were shared among rooms, but in more modern setups, each room gets its own toilet. To save water, there is a little faucet on the back of the toilet, as you can see. The water that refills the basin comes out of there, and you can use it to rinse your hands off. But you probably can't use soap for toilet water, so I don't see what the point is. There are so many things about Japan that just boggle me. Also, there's not proper sink to go with this toilet, so I have to go out of the room down the hall to the shared sink to wash my stupid hands, anyway, and to do other sink-related things like brush my teeth. On the up side, when toilets aren't primitive porcelain holes in the floor, they're these new-fangled "washlets" that have functions like seat-warming and bidet. It's funny.

In Japan, all bathrooms seem to have special bathroom slippers. They had this in Korea, too, but usually just in people's home bathrooms, because Korean bathrooms are just a big wetroom, and the shower gets the whole floor wet for half the day. But in Japan, it's because bathrooms (and by "bathroom" I of course mean "toilet room") used to be outside, and were considered dirty. When they eventually got moved inside the house, they were still considered dirty, even though at this point they're probably no dirtier than any other floor.

This minshuku toilet is no different, even though it's just this tiny, tiny room. When I first went in there, I was like, why are the bathroom slippers Holmes and Watson??!!

But upon closer inspection, it's Lady and Gentleman. Sorry, Holmes.

So let's have a gander at the rest of the minshuku. This is the exterior:

 

This is the cluttered-ass lobby, where you can get some free tea and coffee and just hang out.

 And connected to the lobby are the bathrooms. I think it wouldn't quite be a proper minshuku if they didn't have a public bathroom for each gender. No private showers like in Western hotels. I didn't take a picture of the inside, but for each one, you go through the curtain and open a sliding door that goes into what I guess you would call a powder room. It has a couple sinks and a big mirror, with hair dryers and grooming products, plus towels and such. Then another sliding door leads into the bath area, where there are three shower stations along the wall, and one bath, much like the onsen in Ibusuki, except a quarter the size. The bath is filled with hot spring water, and consequently I couldn't take a bath in it, because it was scalding hot. There is a cold tap available to cool it off, but in a tub that deep, it would take forever to get it down to a reasonable temperature. So I just took showers. Misaki said the bath temp was just right for her, but I guess being Japanese, she's used to scalding hot onsen baths.

 At a minshuku, you also typically get breakfast and dinner included in your price. Our dinner was beef, famous in the area, with tofu soup, some pickled vegetables (meh), rice NATURALLY, and some other fresh vegetables.

The soup stays hot via a little candle beneath it, and the same type of candle heats the mini-grill for the meat and vegetables.

 By this time in the year, it had become the off-season, so the only other guests were a bunch of guys that Misaki joked looked like they were from the Yakuza, the Japanese mafia. But then we joked that Yakuza guys could probably afford a more expensive place to stay. Anyway, here's a shot of their meal. I think it was the premium option, where we just had the ol' standard.

 Breakfast was a mix of Japanese and Western style. The Japanese have started to adopt toast as thing, but they haven't really figured out whole grain toast yet, just white. I have to pay about $1.50 for three slices of what I HOPE is whole grain brown rice bread out here, so I'm not POISONING my body with inferior white bread. I'm not sure if the fried egg is a Western influence, or if they've been doing that. Pile of cabbage in the morning is not the best, though.

Our second night we were sent next door to a restaurant for dinner, because apparently they needed our dining room for setup of some major lunch boxes for the next day or something. We had what I remember to be an almost identical meal as the night before, except they gave us some sake, I think, and I hated it of course. They also gave us water with a charcoal filter in it. That was kind of a strange thing.

 This minshuku was located on a little river, which made for some nice scenery. There were also some cool hawks swooping and screeching around.

In this river there were a lot of hot springs scattered about in the water. On the right of this picture, where the rocks are, are a couple of private baths constructed by the residents of the house that's just out of frame. At one point I was out snapping shots of the area, and realized that there were a bunch of naked people in the baths. So I had to stop taking photos in that direction.

Unfortunately, question mark?, the river was running pretty low.

 But that may have made the hot springs more accessible. Here you can see a little outline where there were some rocks built up under water to make a bath. It captures the hot water from the several tiny springs inside, so if you go in there, it's nice and warm, but if you try to swim outside it in the river, the water gets pretty cold, pretty fast. Even though it was still quite hot out, the unspringy water was too cold for me to swim in.

Along the bank, guests from all the minshukus along the river made their own little baths. I tried some of them, including the one above, and it was pretty neat. I wished I'd brought my bathing suit, but I just wore some shorts and a tank top, and no one seemed to care so much that I was either scantily clad, or not wearing a proper bathing suit. The Japanese are so sensitive about such things usually.

I don't think this photo has any significance.

While we stayed at this place, we went hiking at one of the Kumano Kodo trails, but this has already been a lot of pictures and writing, so I'll do that next time. It's even more pictures.

Ibusuki

Onsens, hot springs, are pretty common around Japan, but they're especially common in this area, because of the active volcano nearby. However, there is a town not too far away from Kagoshima called Ibusuki which is one of the few places in Japan where you can go to a sand onsen. It's supposed to be a cool (but hot) thing to do and good for your health. Asians think everything they do is good for your health, though. Also famous in Ibusuki are floating noodles, an interesting way of eating somen noodles (I think it was somen...).

I had been hoping to get down to Ibusuki at some point during my time here, and luckily over summer break, one of my Japanese teacher friends had to drive down to check up on one of our students who was doing an internship at a hotel there. So she invited me to go along.

On the way, we stopped at a rest stop and I took some pictures of Mt. Sakurajima from afar. It looks much smaller when it's not a swimmable distance away.

Here are a views from a couple other directions at the rest stop.

When we got to Ibusuki, if I remember right, we first stopped at the hotel, got a tour from the manager (it was a pretty cool hotel), and then sat down with our student for about 20 minutes. They were speaking all in Japanese, except for occasionally saying something in English to me, so I didn't understand much. Apparently the student didn't have a single good thing to say about the experience, and felt like every day was excruciatingly long (although she'd only been working there ten days at that point, in a two-week gig). I guess she won't be going into the hotel business.

After that, we went to a nice floating noodle restaurant, one side of which was a big stone wall with waterfalls and a little crick with fish.

It's a water mill.

Each table has a little circular river apparatus, with a trap door. When you lift up the flap, everything drains into the center and goes down a drain to the trash.

Then when you close it, cool water rushes around endlessly.

Then the waitress brings a basket of noodles, which you can toss into the water. Then you just grab a bite's worth of noodles with your chopsticks.

We also ordered some other stuff, which was okay. I'm not too keen on onigiri (rice triangles), but I had some, and we also had some sweet potato things, which were good.

 After lunch, we went over to the sand onsen. It's a bit pricey, 800 yen compared to around 360 for a regular onsen bathhouse, but it's novel, so they can charge more. The deal is, you put on a yukata, which is a light robe, and some slippers, and you get covered in wicked hot sand by old people.

 Under the canopy is a line of people, side by side, covered in sand, and the old people are hanging around there with shovels, working up and down the line as people come and go.

Actually, there were only maybe three other people there when we got there. You are only supposed to stay in for ten minutes, fifteen tops, so people come and go pretty quickly.

The deal is, the onsen provides the yukata and slippers, but you have to bring your own small towel. An old person wraps it around your head/neck and you have to hold the corners with your teeth. I guess this is so you don't get sand in your hair. Once they cover you up at the top, you can let go, and the towel stays where it is, because of the sand all around. Then they take your picture if you've brought a camera.

The sand is quite hot, heated by the hot water below the surface, and you have to wriggle around in there sometimes to make sure you don't get burned. I actually did get burned a little bit in one spot, but nothing major. We stayed under for about 12 minutes. I probably could have gone a little longer, but that was enough for Misaki, so I figured I'd get up, too. Apparently some people find the experience like really profound and the heat affects them and they get all zen or something. But it's just sand, man. I just felt like I was covered in hot sand.

After the sand-covering, you're all covered in sand, so you can go to the little bathhouse to clean off. It's a thing. First there's a little tub with buckets and scoops, and you have to take off the yukata and put it in a special basket, then dump water on yourself to get all the sand off. Then you can rinse off in the shower and get into the bath to soak. In these types of baths, you can't use soap in the shower, because the water is all recycled and they don't want it contaminated. So you're not exactly clean when you leave, but good enough. We were fortunate enough to be alone at this point, so I took advantage of the situation and snapped a couple shots of the bathroom, never having been able to do that before due to privacy issues. Unfortunately this bath isn't anything to write home about.

Outside the building is a view of Mt. Kaimon, which is called the Fuji of the South, because it has a very similar shape. You can see all the steam rising from the hot water below. Crazy, man.

They use the water to boil eggs, which you can buy for 50 yen apiece. Ha.

 After this, it was time to go home. We stopped at another rest stop by the famous Lake Ikeda, which has the Japanese version of the Loch Ness monster, Issie. Here's a statue of Issie. The lake also has these giant eels. Screeching eels. So you can't go swimming in there, although some people fish.

Tankuki village. Scary.

Here are some more shots of Mt. Kaimon and Lake Ikeda.

It looks like a nice lake.

The End.