The Oshogatsu Trip
...written on 01.29.03, @ 12:46 a.m.
Tue January 28, 2003
Almost a month has passed since my trip to the southern tip of Japan and beyond. I hooked up with a fellow language student, Veronica from Australia, and we bought a ju hachi kippu which was good for 5 days of regular (not the speedy ones) train travel. Our plan was to head for the island of Yakushima, which was designated a world heritage site in 1993 and is the place where Jomon Sugi, the oldest tree in the world has sat for 7,600 years. This trip would mean being on a train for long stretches at a time for a total of 60 hours.
I took about 300 pictures and have had a hard time whittling them down to the most representative, first 50 and then finally to 19, so as not to overwhelm you or my Diaryland image storage. This is at least a two parter.
On December 28th, we left Okazaki at 7:40 in the morning. Our first destination was seven hours and two train transfers away in the town of Onomichi. We picked it not because of any apparent must-see factor, but rather because our travel schedule was quite unwieldy and we were trying to avoid 13 hour train rides. Onomichi halved such a day and we got there in the early afternoon after enjoying much seaside scenery. P>
We climbed the lolling hills covered with houses and at least 25 temples and browsed the twist and turns of the narrow alleyways of the "literary path". There was an intriguing looking cafe, prayer offerings buttressed against large gray boulders, and polished slabs of marble engraved with spidery kanji recording the words of writers and poets of times past. A local director, Obayashi Nobuhiko, had also done a few movies there.
Onomichi is famous as a ramen mecca, so our dinner was a big bowl of pork noodle ramen soup replete with globules of pork fat floating in the broth. That helping was enough to sate our appetites for ramen for the rest of the trip. Now, I'm not saying that it was bad, it was just . . . just . . . very powerful.
We spent the night in a rather lackluster hotel and I fell asleep to the wail of the trains echoing through the mountains. I had enjoyed Onomichi very much. We were on the rails again by 8 am the next morning for an eight hour ride with three transfers to the town of Hakata.
Hakata/Fukuoka sits on the northern tip of the island of Kyushu. It was lively with shopping galore! We rode the subway a couple of times and found it to be practically deserted, like something out of the Twilight Zone, but upon emerging from the concrete depths, found the Hakatonians out in full force on the streets and in the shops. Hakata was very clean, cool and we found the best cheesecake and coffee there. We spent the night in the "Petit Lady Capsule Hotel" and partook of their very relaxing pastel pink public bath. We liked the stay so much that we booked it for our return trip.
We left Hakata at 7:23 a.m. for a nine hour ride with three transfers for the port city of Kagoshima. The boxy cities of Honshu melted into rustic fishing villages and fruit orchards as Veronica and I passed our many hours on the train talking about school, past lives and loves and future plans. Our layovers between transfers were up to 90 minutes, but sometimes we only had two minutes to catch our connecting train. We ran up and down stairs, bought box lunches and drinks from station vendors and machines, strategized seating arrangements and did it all with much finesse.
We arrived in Kagoshima in the late afternoon and went to scope out the port where we would take a speed foil to take us past Sakurajima, the huffing and puffing volcano, and on to Yakushima. The ride would be 85 minutes in length unlike the 4 hour ferry that we planned on taking on the return leg of our journey.
At this point we were beginning to feel a little worn around the edges, so we pretty much chilled out that night in Kagoshima. We walked around a city park all decked out for the holidays and found a Kentucky Fried Chicken to raid for dinner. We stayed in a little ryokan hotel (part western-part tatami rooms) and slept well in the futons on the tatami floor.
The next morning we headed for Yakushima.
To be continued . . .