Snow Monkeys

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Ok, so we took an 1 hour bus ride from Nagano to Jigokudani and hiked, in the rain, for around 40 minutes up a mountain with our backpacks, and finally we reached Kourokan Ryokan, where we will bath with the snow monkeys... as soon as the rain stops.
The rain didn't stop, so we said "screw it, let's bathe in the Onsen in the rain. As Amit so aptly put it "we will warm up and cool off at the same time, without having to move."
The ryokan is locate in the mountains, standing alone like a small fort at the bank of a river. Right across the river is a geyser, with a jet of steam and water shooting out of the ground. All around us are trees standing straight and tall, fading in and out of the misty mountain air and the vapor of the hot springs. The whole setting is quite picturesque, and with the snow monkeys joining us in the hot spring, this was going to be an amazing experience...
only there were no snow monkeys in the hot spring, or anywhere for that matter. There were lots of crickets though, which we ate for dinner, crunchy and sweet and really quite tasty. The dinner (quite a feast actually), in addition to the crickets, consisted of sukiyaki with a reasonable portion of meat, and leaf tempura. The leaves in fact, looked like the ones from the trees just outside of our ryokan, fresh off of the branches. Oh yeah, there was no shower either, just a small faucet with buckets which you can use to collect water from the faucet and pour down your head to rinse off the sulfur smell of the hotspring.
We definitely saw some questionable white material floating around in the hot spring, which at the time Amit dismissed with a convincing "it's just minerals." Not wanting to think of what else it can be, I decided that I will believe him. Though now thinking back at the lack of monkeys there, I can confidently say it was probably not monkey shit, and that's reassuring.
So anyway the whole experience was quite rugged and makes us feel like we were in the old wild japan. All things considered, it was an interesting experience and though we didn't see any monkeys, we almost lived like monkeys (eating crickets and leaves, washing ourselves with buckets of water).
We took the bus back to Nagano the following day, and then took the train from Nagano to Nagoya, where we await for Susan's arrival.

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