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Published: November 28th 2008
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Mount Aso / Aso San, 4th - 5th August 2008
We took the 1443 train from Beppu to Aso san and arrived a few hours later, in the most desolate town I’ve ever been to. Aso town pretty much consists of a train station, an information centre, a Lawsons convenience store and a few grocery stores that looked more like a jumble of random goods in a cramped little spaces than actual shops. We found our hostel for the night after a 20 minute uphill walk and although it was a little different from previous hostels, it had clean beds and hot running water and we were just glad to put our heavy bags down and rest up after the long journey there. The hostel was run by 2 little old ladies who were very sweet and helpful, if a little random in their behaviour. It seemed that their home was the hostel and we were quite amused at the piles of random junk found around the place, for example a bunch of old binoculars on the landing at the top of the stairs. The main living space had a bunch of tables and chairs, some of which held information
Mount Aso
those aren't clouds atop of mt aso, its sulphur smoke... papers and food, but we weren’t too sure whether this was for sale, or for the ladies own personal use!
The morning after our first, and only, night at the Aso San Youth Hostel, we packed up our stuff and headed back to the train station to leave our belongings in lockers and waited for the bus to Aso San. It took just under an hour to get to the cable car station on Mount Aso, which we took to the top. Mount Aso is the collective name for the 5 mountains in the area, the highest being Naka-daka, which is also the only active volcano in Japan. Our plan was to take the cable car up to the top of Naka-daka, walk around the ridge of the active volcano and then do a hike back down the other side to the train station. However our plan was somewhat foiled by the fact that the active volcano was spitting out quite large amounts of sulphur gas that day, a slight health hazard! We just managed to make it to the crater edge and have a brief glimpse over the edge before we were ushered back to the cable car
station and told to go back down. Alas, no pictures of Aso San were taken, which we were gutted about, but at least we actually got to see it for ourselves. Wasn’t quite expecting it to be vivid blue and quite calm looking inside, I was expecting red hot bubbling, angry looking lava, but I guess that shows you how much I know about inactive volcanoes!
Once we’d got over the fact that we probably wouldn’t be able to get back up to the crater edge again any time within the next hour, we decided to climb some of the nearby mountains instead. We headed to Kijima-daka, a non active volcano next to Naka-daka and it took us about 30 minutes to get to the top, where we got to see Naka-daka in all its glory, puffing out huge clouds of sulphur gas. After a quick lunch at the top of Kijima-daka it started to rain so we quickly headed back down the other side, ditched the idea of climbing one of the other mountains and checked out the Aso museum instead. The museum was actually pretty good, learnt quite a lot about volcanoes (although don’t test me on
it, I think I’ve forgotten quite a lot of what I read!), watched a documentary about Aso San and we had a play around with the live video feed camera that was hooked up to the inside of the Naka-daka crater. It almost made up for the fact that we didn’t get to see Naka-daka properly and take pictures because we got to control the camera of the live video feed and we took a few pictures of inside the crater from the big screen the video feed was projected onto. I know, highly ingenious!
After our adventures at Aso san we headed back to the station to wait for our train to Hakata. A slight detour from the south island tour but Amy was due to leave us the next day to fly back to London from Tokyo and we decided to accompany her as far as possible so that she didn’t have to do too much travelling alone.
Hakata, 5th - 6th August 2008
We were collected from the station by the B&B where we’d booked to stay that night, our first Japanese styled accommodation - a small table in the middle of the room
and space around it for our 3 tatami sleeping mats. We did dinner at a 100yen revolving sushi restaurant just around the corner from where we were staying and we had a great last night together at the B&B, playing pranks on each other, drinking sake from cartons and trying to convince Amy not to leave us!
We sampled our first Japanese breakfast which was a little different from what we’re used to - a boiled egg, mashed potato salad, soup and toast. Different but tasty nonetheless.
We had a few hours to kill at Hakata station, so we picked up a few snacks for our train ride to Ibusuki later that afternoon, as well as helping Amy to find all sorts of weird and wacky Japanese sweets to bring back home. It was a sad moment when we put Amy on her train bound for Tokyo, our group of 3 was soon to be 2 and we weren’t ready for that just yet, it was too soon and we still had so much of Japan and the rest of the world to see together. Alas, Amy had to go back to England and after waving goodbye to
her for ages from the platform, myself and Stacy had a tearful hugging moment halfway down the stairs at the station before we went to find our own train to Ibusuki.
Ibusuki, 6th - 8th August 2008
We got to Ibusuki after a train change at Kagoshima and we find our hostel after a fairly long walk from the train station, thankfully no hills this time though! Ibusuki was highly reminiscent of Aso town, pretty quiet with not much going on. Our hostel this time was run by 2 rather odd guys and I’m sure they must have been related to the little old ladies who ran the Aso san hostel! The one good thing about where we were staying was that it was right across the road from the famous outdoor sand bath on the beach, which of course we sampled… twice! Our first time was quite late at night and it was really relaxing being covered in hot sand in the dark, listening to the waves crashing along the shore. The second time we went was at sunset and we stayed in the hot sand for our longest yet, a good 25 minutes while we watched
the most gorgeous beach sunset, they sky going from blue through to shades of pink, red, purple and finally black. The onsen baths that the sandbath was attached to was great, it had a huge hotspring pool with a Jacuzzi area, as well as a cold pool and a sauna, all of which we had a little play in!
We did a day trip over to the nearby town of Chiran to check out the Samurai Gardens. For some strange reason I keep getting Samurai and Ninjas mixed up, I couldn’t imagine huge samurai’s in all their armour in those beautiful delicate gardens and houses, but I could definitely picture black clad agile ninjas there though! There were 7 samurai gardens in total, each of which were totally different from each other but they all used the natural backdrop of the mountains as part of their garden design.
Chiran is a much nicer looking town than Ibusuki (which was a little like a ghost town - a main shopping street with no people walking down it, weird music playing from speakers outside the shops and paper lanterns swinging eerily in the wind) that had fish swimming in the
sidewalk (see the pics, they really were swimming in the sidewalk!), adorable shops and fancy little streetlamps. That said, Chiran was still pretty quiet, but definately not to the same extent as Ibusuki or even Aso. We've certainly been picking the happening places lately!
After all these quiet little towns with no people down south it was time to move to a new, more vibrant place, with people, noise, shops and restaurants and what better place to head to than... Kyoto!
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