From the first of March (Friday) until Tuesday the 5th of March I went on trip to Kyushu with my fiancée and two very good Japanese friends.
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| GPS tracking of our first two days. (1) Our hotel, (2) Shinto Shrine, (3) mountain museum. The smoke from Sakurajima is visible too! |
It was a kind of trip I haven't done before in Japan. In order to travel as cheap as possible to Kagoshima, I booked a bus to Kansai Int. Airport close to Osaka (~ 4.000 Yen) and met the other three there who came from Kanazawa. We flew with a flight from Peach Union to Kagoshima and arrived at the airport after about one hour flight at 1 p.m. (~8.000 Yen).
Right after we landed, we borrowed a car and drove in direction of Kirishima (霧島). It was raining like hell, but we didn't care at all. It was just great to be outside, in spring Kyushu, with lots and lots of Onsen waiting for us.
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| Short stop in rain on the way to Kirishima |
Since Kirishima means literally "Island of fog", I was indeed expecting an Island, but instead we drove higher and higher into the mountains and vanished in the fog. I should have done my homework before and read more about where we are going, but I have to admit than my part of the travel organisation goes towards zero.
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| So much smelly fog! |
This fog was partly made of clouds and partly from steam, rising from the numerous hotsprings. It smelled wonderful like sulphur when we arrived in the little town of Kirishima (霧島). We tried some local products, such as sulphuric steamed eggs (intensified), sausages or (of course) sweet potatoes, since the old district of Satsuma is famous for these.
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| Rain can be pretty positive when you visit a waterfall, because it will have much more water! |
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| Sulphur steamed eggs. Taste still like normal eggs, just look yellow after you've peeled them. |
After a short hike in the hills around the city and a short stop at a waterfall, we checked in our hotel-like Ryokan (a Ryokan is a traditional Japanese guest house), where we were really happy to put all our luggage down in our Tatami room. It felt like on a school trip, as we four were going to sleep on the ground in Futons in one room, looking forward to playing cards before falling asleep.
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| First room, first night! |
After the check-in we made a brief stop in one of the big shrines (Shintoism) in Kirishima. It was an amazingly huge ground, devoted to at least three goddess. Among them "Tengu", a long nosed daemon-like creature with incredible sword skills. Apparently it taught sword fighting to Miyamoto Musashi. I talked a lot with Bito-san about Bushido and it's origin and he recommended the book "Bushido" from Nitobe Inazo, which I'm currently reading. You can download it for free from the Gutenberg-Projekt homepage.
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| Kirishima Jinsha, entrance stone! |
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| The shrine and rain! Was still very pretty to look at! |
Overall, I was confronted with so many unconnected historical facts (for me, as uneducated being) during our travel that I decided to study much more about Japanese history and especially about the time before, during and after the Meiji-Restauration, as well as about the history of Christanity in Japan, as soon as I'm back in Okayama. Kyushu was a main base for the first Christians in Japan, which got later extinct during a revolt. But more about this later.
We spent the evening in the Ryokan with its three building and confusing floor numbering, as the building had different elevations and hence the floor number changed according to the buildings basement. (Sorry I forgot to take a picture). We had a great Japanese dinner, green tea in our room, a table tennis match, and two hot bathes in the hotel Onsen.
Furthermore I was able to motivate three new player for the game wizard (^.^)/.
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| Dinner! There was still soup, rice and some extra meat served. |
The
next day we left early in the morning. The sun was shining and we
decided to visit a museum in the mountains, almost 800 m above sea
level, before going to Kagoshima. The museum offered some interesting
but also quite disturbing art, but we enjoyed much more the outside area
with its sculptures.
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| View from the museum. |
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| No one really wanted to go there on Saturday morning, as it seems! |
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| Race to the ring! Who do you think has lost? |
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| Three friends finished their Bachelor degree! |
From there we drove down to Kagoshima to visit Sakurajima and the city itself.
More about this next time!
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