Tag: onsen

Huis Ten Bosch and Ōmura Bay: The weird and the wonderful

It goes without saying that a name like Huis Ten Bosch doesn’t exactly scream Japanese. Although, given the Dutch’s historic presence in Nagasaki Prefecture, especially on their trading post of Dejima in Nagasaki, it seems to fit in bizarrely well on the shores of Ōmura Bay. A life-scale recreation of the Netherlands, the streets are lined with Amsterdam-esque buildings and churches and canals. It’s an oddity in any case.

This wasn’t really why I came here though, it’s easy enough for to see the real thing for itself, and a £50 entry ticket to a mock Dutch city theme park didn’t sound too appealing. My real quest was to go to the beach, to quote Mr Bean. And what better place to do it than here, in Ōmura Bay where the inland sea dotted with islands would give Thai resorts a run for their scenic money.

In Beppu, and in Nagasaki, and even in Fukuoka, I was disappointed to find that going to the beach doesn’t really seem like much of a thing here. All these locations are seaside, yet as I mentioned yesterday, the sea fronts are laden with concrete walls and car parks. I was greeted at Huis Ten Bosch station by the charming Michi, whose house I am staying in tonight. I have an adorable little Japanese-style room to myself. His house is a little outside of HTB, but he drove me and my rucksack to a small peninsula in the bay where there was a bathhouse, and lo and behold, a beach. An actual sand beach. Sure, it was enclosed, with safety buoys and an ugly sea wall, but there was sand and there was seawater. Don’t get me wrong, I like pools and hot springs, but at heart I’m an ocean kind of guy.

After a brief conversation with the workers, they let me come down onto the beach which they were “preparing” (???) in order so that I could have a swim. I was then left by Michi to my own devices. To clarify, to me beaches in Japan seem to be public but also not public ? They open only after the rainy season (which happens to end next week) only for summer. It’s a bit bizarre, and kind of defeats the purpose for me but it didn’t matter because the smell of salt water on my skin and in my hair was so refreshing and rewarding that all these questions floated away on the gentle swell. It’s not every day you get a beach to yourself.

The beach being officially “closed”, there was no shower. So, I trekked up the hill to the bathhouse to basically spend the rest of the evening soaking and eating and admiring the view of the bay from the outside bath. I had a pretty good late lunch too. With vending machines and even gambling machines, you could literally spend your entire day in the bathhouse and never have to leave.

I was relaxed, drowsy, sated and clean, and I walked back towards the local station that was between the bathhouse/beach and HTB. A walk along the sea where the sun set behind soft clouds and a misty horizon as the day’s heat started to dissipate. The evenings in this kind of weather are surreal and slightly magical with their hazy light.

I met up with Michi again after having grabbed a snack at the HTB Family Mart, in a weird spot outside the theme park where music was blaring for apparently only me, under the massive hotel that looked like it had been ripped straight out of Copenhagen. Weird, to say the least. I am going to relish this night’s sleep in my own room before I head out to Kumamoto tomorrow morning.

Goodnight.

別府: Steam City

My apologies for not posting a blog last night, I needed a bit of rest. It’s been moving extremely fast since the start, and coming to the hot spring town of Beppu seemed an appropriate place to let off some steam (pun intended).


Beppu lies on the northeastern coast of Kyūshu, in a shielded bay. I got here relatively late in the day yesterday from Nagasaki, but Beppu being a spa destination for Japanese tourists, I was in no mood to rush. Beppu’s springs are historically known for their mineral-rich waters, and the sick and ailing from all over Japan were known to come to this location to benefit from the healing properties of the water. It seems like this heritage lives on, as I spied a great many wheelchairs, zimmer frames and walking sticks on my way out of the station, all with the same hopeful gleam in their eyes. 

Baggages dropped, I decided to go to the Kannawa Onsen (the centre of Beppu’s onsen activity and the most widely-known). It was a pretty long bus ride away, and I was surprised to find the streets completely empty. I wanted to visit the Jigoku Onsen, the “Five Hells”; water pools where boiling hot mineral water bubbles to the surface in a furious boil. I was annoyed, and disappointed, to find them closed… However, I did benefit from a free “foot onsen” that is common around this area. Steam literally pours from the ground here, and the bathhouses on every street corner are not shy to advertise that their baths are the best in all the onsen.

I returned back towards where my hostel was. The Takegawara bathhouse might not be the most luxurious bathhouse in town, but it is certainly one of those with the most charm, and also the most highly recommended in Beppu. Although before, I wanted to catch the sunset on the seaside – and I did. It was beautiful, and the bay was as slick as oil, but the stern seafront with its seawalls and lack of beaches was slightly disheartening. It strikes me now that the reasons for this are the constant threat of tsunamis from the deep sea, hence Beppu’s concrete seafront.

Back to Takegawara, I’d forgotten just how hot onsen are. Scorchingly hot, and a completely different sensation to anything else, being almost completely submerged. I was used to saunas, and in my mind these were not so different – I lasted 10 minutes at most, and was in the water at 3 separate intervals broken up by splashings of cold water and a spinning head. However, it seemed that this was the trend for all the local visitors too: arrive, wash, get in the water, get out, rinse, leave. I admit the bone-deep feeling of relaxation post-onsen is unparalleled… And for a mere 100 Yen, who can say no ?

My body as limp as a drunkard’s, I found myself eating dinner first in a small Izakaya (like a pub) followed by a sushi bar, where I was bought drinks and some sushi by some nice guys at the bar… my sleep was indescribable.

My plan the next say was to rent a bike at Beppu’s Giant store, get on a local train and cycle the Kunisaki peninsula and discover the temples and shrines lost in the deep volcanic forests. I found the store to be closed only on Tuesdays, and I was very irritated. A sad McDonald’s later (comfort food), I plucked up the courage to get on a different train to Usuki, the site of the Usuki Sekibutsu – stone-carved Buddhas. I picked up a bike for free at the station, so in sum, my day wasn’t that much of a failure after all.

A sweaty bike ride through the old samurai town of Usuki later, a small museum and hillside greets me. The restored, and preserved, Buddhas sit proudly and mysteriously overlooking the countryside. Said to have been carved in the late Heian Period (794-1185), these stone Buddhas are the only ones in Japan to be bestowed the title of National Treasure. It was moving, and I would have stayed provided that I wasn’t dying for a shower and a glass of water.

My bike and I floated back towards Usuki on the breeze in the late afternoon glow. Back in Beppu, a different bathhouse awaited me, of which’s temperature was considerably more manageable. My supermarket dinner was sat happily in the fridge, and I sit here now, belly full, and the satisfaction of knowing not to have entirely wasted these two days.

A city where steam billows from the streets and hot water seeps from cracks in the rocks; one where people know the meaning of calm. A sleepy, seaside city that in my mind only has the place of rest and recuperation – Beppu, until next time.

Expect blogs every day from now.