This morning we started the day with a breakfast provided by the hotel in a buffet style. They had mostly Japanese breakfast foods, but I think I saw some cocoa puffs among the cereal selection. Naturally, Jeff and I enjoyed some Japanese selections like grilled fish (no salmon, but the mackerel was still tasty), rice with dashi broth, some tempura pea thing that tasted like a latke to me, croissants, white grape (muscat) juice, salad, coffee with a tea bag in it. LOL, that last thing was Jeff accidentally thinking the machine would deposit hot water for tea but it was coffee! I don't think he drank it, or maybe he did and then zoomed around so fast to burn it off I didn't even see him move!
While we have been enjoying the Family Mart across the street, we had to walk a few blocks to the nearest 7-Eleven where us foreigners can withdraw money from the ATM with our cards. Apparently there is hardly any ATMs on the island we will be going to tomorrow. Gotta be prepared! We also prepared by getting snacks in case there is also no good vending machines to go along with the few to none conbini available on the island. I finally found some Lion foot patches to put on my soon to be very achey feet at the end of the day!
But I digress, today was all about taking the train to Ibusuki, a small city about an hour and a half (or 50 minutes express) from Kagoshima where we were staying now. This is about as south as you can get on the main part of southern Japan (Kyushu). This is where the sands are hot from volcanic activity and the original weighted blanket was invented. We arrived in town around 12:30 and it was DEAD. Not even the bus we were going to take to the sand baths was running yet, so we walked the 20 minute route that would take us to the baths. It was a ghost town. Paint is flaking, metal is rusting, and if a tumbleweed blew across a silent street I wouldn't have thought it strange! Are we just really early to the party? Do people not show up until late? No one visits until the weekend? Is the town suffering from decline because of COVID? Has it always been like this? Really, we have no idea why it was so SO quiet. The only soul we really saw was a Chinese lady who asked if we were looking for the sand baths (we were doing just fine with our Google maps) and she pointed out a slightly quicker route. We complimented her English and thanked her and were on our way. In fact, we arrived right as the facility opened at 1:00.
The Saraku Sandbath Hall is a three story facility right along the beach. They are tattoo friendly and the sand part you are covered up for and there's no separating of the genders like in a hot spring. You strip in the mens or women's locker room, putting your stuff in a locker and wearing the key on your wrist, as well as wearing a long yukata robe and carry a small towel with you. You exit the changing rooms and everyone meets up by a ramp that takes you down toward the beach where roofed sand pits are. The employees wrap your small towel around your head, you lay down on a spot and then the employees shovel hot (but really not too bad) volcanic sand on top of you so that you're just a head sticking out! LOL, I didn't get any pictures since they don't allow cameras, but there's YouTube videos you can watch.
You can totally feel your feet go WUB WUB and pulse to your heartbeat. It's like a nice weighted blanket on you and quite relaxing! It's not too hot, but my face was starting to sweat near the end of it. For health reasons, they only let you stay buried for 10 minutes. The family buried nearby Jeff and I kept talking about how hot it was and how much time was left and at some point there was a bug that a girl near me was doing her best not to freak out and ruin her sand blanket trying to run away LOL. Same girl, same!
Then, after 10 minutes you exit the sand baths and you are light as a feather! Your stresses have melted away (or at least until you walk too much later that evening and your hips and feet start to hurt again)! It's back in the separated rooms to shower and soak in the onsen. I soaked but Jeff just showered and enjoyed a drink on the rooftop of the building. I think my favorite thing is that the weather was PERFECT today! It wasn't very hot at all, so the hot sands and the hot bath felt fantastic and I didn't overheat from too much hot weather!
We had planned to try and visit Lake Ikeda as I had heard they have a Nessie-like cryptid named Isshi-kun who may or may not be just one of the large eels that live in the lake, but we felt that it would be best to try and get back to Kagoshima-chuo station to catch the last shuttle bus to our hotel (which is free!). We also got to the Ibusuki train station just in time to get the last two tickets to the scenic train Ibutama! The train's theme is that it is the jeweled box (tamatebako) given to Urashima-taro as a gift when he parted the princess in the underwater Dragon Palace. It follows along the ocean coast and sprays mist when parked in the station. We didn't have much time to ogle and geek out over the train as it was leaving in less than 5 minutes! But it certainly got us back to Kagoshima-chuo station a lot faster than our morning train! It was very creaky though. I thought it was going to just break in half!
Back at the station we decided to check out the restaurants there for Linner. I had been wanting to try the area's local specialty kurobuta (black-haired pig) and this place did katsu. Oh man, it was AMAZING! The restaurant, Ooyama, has you make your own sauce by grinding sesame seeds with a mortar and pestle, and then you add your katsu sauce (like a barbeque) to the ground seeds. Lastly, they give you salad dressing for the shredded cabbage. Jeff got the menchi-katsu and I got the kurobuta katsu (tonkatsu) and it was so delicious! It didn't need any sauce since the pork flavor was so good on its own! I thought Jeff's menchi katsu tasted a little like meatloaf! Not bad but I really was happy with my choice! We both were happy with our meals and give it 5/5 stars!
Oh! That's what I wanted to mention! If you are in Japan and are looking for something to eat, search for the food in Japanese. So don't search "sushi near me" search 寿司 or スシ. And if things don't have 5 stars and you're finding mostly 3s or 3.5s, don't worry! For some reason they don't like handing out 5 star reviews at all. So a 3 is pretty darn good and a 4 means its amazing! Meanwhile, over in America, we see 3 stars as not that great and 5 as good. LOL
We meandered around the mall's Bic Camera store where Jeff bought some Magic cards and fawned over the new Zelda game (which we found out would work on our Switch, but we wouldn't be able to install any DLC later, due to weird region locking of the Switch store itself) and we both went crazy at the gatchapon machines. They had a good selection!
Finally we returned back to our hotel, arranged a taxi to take us to the port for our ferry trip to Yakushima, and checked out the arcade down the street. We did some purikura and I won two adorable borb keychains! SO CUTE! I can't do big UFO catcher games, but the little ones (probably aimed for kids) I can do okay! :) Never mind the fact I think I spent over $10 trying to get these two keychains. >_>
And now it's late and we gotta get up early tomorrow. Jeff, what have you to say?
Angie's covered basically everything I had thought about today apart from this: Kagoshima and Ibusuki are both very rural, when compared to any of the cities of Japan. That being said, most other rural areas we've visited over the years have been rife with friendly people. I think having three years with no foreigners (apart from the band, Foreigner, which has always been allowed) has reverted them back to "gaijin ga kowai desu~!". It's kinda said, but I get it.
Bye~
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