We stop at two more places:

Miyajima
There’s got to be a better word than Portmeirion-esque to describe this dainty island outside of Hiroshima, but if there is, I can’t think of it. Miyajima is a playground, it has shrines and a park, monkeys on top of a mountain, there are hardly any cars here, it’s just charming. Japanese guidebooks boast that the island is home to the floating Torii gate of the Itsukushima Shrine, which is one of Japan’s top three sights. Who knew that beauty could be so tightly categorised? The main street is a place to buy maple leaf-shaped cakes and rice paddles, or to have your picture taken with the largest rice paddle in the world, which I have to admit is pretty big.

We share the island with countless school groups posing for pictures by the Torii, yet more free-roaming deer, and a trio of obnoxious American men who ride around the town on bicycles, wearing creepy masks, bullying people and stinking up the place.

Shinko Yamamatu looks after us at her ryokan in Miyajima. We stay in a couple of these traditional Japanese inns, they have tatami mats on the floors, we sleep on futons and roll everything away during the day, there are paper screens and sliding doors, and a niche with a flower arrangement. We eat sitting on cushions on the floor and, stiff westerners that we are, we develop new ways of moving in this chair-free environment: shuffling, flopping, sliding, crawling, rolling. We are inelegant, though happy.

Beppu
Our last stop-off is one that we pick because of its reputation as the Las Vegas of Japanese spa towns When we get there we realise that this description is far from the truth because Beppu’s a bit of a dump. The seafront is a mess of run-down industrial machinery and grotty concrete walkways, the main drag offers greasy cafes and ugly pachinko parlours, we discover that the town is majorly invested in its sex trade, so there are plenty of sleazy westerners out on the streets and, because it’s in a tropical zone, the whole place is plagued by mutant, blood-sucking mosquitoes. If this isn’t too much of a downer, there’s an A Bomb Survivor’s Treatment Centre up on the mountainside too.

Nevertheless, Beppu’s hot springs are worth the visit. Perhaps you’d like to read about the day Kay and I got buried up to our necks in hot sand, or about our trip to the mud baths?

Water is everything here. There are street shrines with glasses of water amongst the offerings. Our ryokan boasts its own onsen, a faux rock pool on the ground floor where you can loaf and bob and bathe for free. The tub in the room is also fed by a natural hot spring. At the Blue Hell there is a Leg Onsen, a hot pool where you can take a dip after rolling up your trousers.

Perhaps because it sits atop so much seismic activity, or perhaps for another reason, Beppu is a strangely intense place to be. The mountainside steams, and if you stand and look at it you will see vapour trails rising out of the ground. Local people use the natural steam power to heat their houses and provide energy. Once a year there is a festival where the side of the mountain is set alight – a mountainside on fire! Horrendous! Fantastic! Beppu!

And then there are the Hells. These are pleasure gardens that feature hot springs of various kinds. There’s a muddy hell, and a hell that has a pool of blue water, there’s a red hell too, which looks like a pool of boiling blood. Some of the hells sell eggs that have been hard boiled in the sulphurous water, or crème caramel that has been set in the volcanic steam. The blue hell has giant waterlily leaves, you can scare your kids to death when the leaves are big and ripe, if you want to stand your offspring on one and snap a souvenir photograph, it’s allowed. If you want to look at plants growing like crazy in a volcanic steam powered greenhouse, that’s here too. Beppu’s not so bad.

This is what Miyajima and Beppu were like, a bit (.mov, 5.8mb)

Back