As we climbed in elevation we started to see advertisements for onsens.
We have been to two of them in the last 24 hours.
They have had rotenburos (outdoor onsens) as well as the indoor tubs. For obvious reasons I can't show you the pools themselves, but they are very picturesque, built like rook pools, nicely landscaped, and with various temperatures, including very hot and quite cool. After having a shower (in public, gender separated) you choose a pool and join the other women there. There is very little talking, most people seeming to meditate or just relax quietly. There is something quite surreal seeing all sorts of female bodies, all ages, all with spotless skin, jet black hair (including pubes), calmly stepping in and out of the pools, in the steam.... I think it is very healthy!
This was the first time I have had to confront other women, naked, with all of my surgical scars in all their glory... Previous onsens either had no others in them, or we had a private pool as a couple. These last two days the onsens have been very busy. But there was no alternative to just doing it -and it was quite painless. There were others with scars, pregnant women, very old stooped ladies, and a achondroplastic dwarf, all quite comfortable it seemed.
In fact the Japanese seem to have a completely different attitude to nudity from us. A number of times we have seen men peeing in their rice paddies (remember urine is sterile and high in nutrients) with trousers down around their thighs, giving a full buttock view to passing motorists. Apparently the current gender separation in Onsens is a recent thing -since the Americans started influencing the area. Before that it was everyone in together.
7/5/14 we are camped in a campground (Hirayu Camping Ground, phone 0578-89-2610 ) the first time in Japan. It cost ~$60 (2 nights) including firewood (yes a fireplace -also a first) and onsen entry.
Hirayu is on highway 158 which takes you to Matsumoto from the south west.
We are at ~ 1000 m elevation and it was COLD last night. Even the fire did very little to warm us. The outside temp was about 0 degrees C when we went to bed. However we were still warm from the long soak in the Onsen!
This camp ground has no powered sites! Not that we need power, but we have also noticed the few motorhomes we have seen had compressors. Maybe power is not a usual feature of Japanese campgrounds. There is also no camp kitchen, only sinks for washing dishes. There are no showers -onsen nearby-but there is a laundromat -¥200 for a load and ¥200 for 30 mins drying.
Nearby is the Shin-Hotaka rope way, a gondola which takes you from 1000m to 2200m. At the top we were in snow, and had a magnificent view of the nearby mountains which form a caldera. There are also walking tracks across the mountains to and from here and we saw a number of young men with packs and ice picks arriving.
Also in this area is a " bear ranch"! Here they have a large number of captive bears in cement enclosures. We couldn't workout what the purpose was but given it is a ranch, and they seem to breeding them, perhaps they are being sold to China for medicines, or bile harvesting..... Anyway I didn't like the whole thing. There was a very large bear of a different species (brown bear? Grizzly bear?) showing signs of stress, pacing up and down one wall, and quite a few of the others also showing stress behaviour.
And then to make it worse they started a bear show, with a young bear dressed up in girls clothes, muzzled, doing tricks, including riding a tricycle, skipping rope. It was something I would have expected to see 50 years ago. I remember something like that at Taronga Park zoo when I was a kid -monkeys riding tricycles.
We have a problem with money. We came with two preloaded cash cards, loaded with yen. Mine (Qantas club card) didn't work, the hotel couldn't use it, and Joe's has run out and we are unable to reload it. We have had to ask Emma to go to the bank in Australia and try to transfer money into it. Anyway we have about $40 left! Only the big hotels take credit cards, and nearly everything requires cash -including fuel stations!
We visited a small onsen, which first had a "foot onsen". This is a pool where weary walkers can soak their feet in hot water.
These 2 found the water too hot! Perhaps we should have taken the warning, but we proceeded into the onsen proper. The water was far too hot! We couldn't tolerate more than a few seconds! There was one other couple there, and they left before we did, so Joe managed to get a shot of the onsen for gentlemen.
The brownness of the water is said to be medicinal. They are not all brown. Most of them are crystal clear.
We have solved the money problem temporarily -by activating another cash card which we hadn't been able to get working before -so it pays to have a back-up! So Emma can relax for awhile.
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