Melissa B. and Justine met us at Mary’s house on Saturday morning, and we left from there around 10AM. To balance our cars a little better, Ian rode with Rebeca and Yuusuke. It was actually probably a good thing because Mary, Justine, Melissa, and I all rocked out to pop music. We enjoyed dancing from our seats and throwing our hands in the air, driving by other Japanese drivers, only to see them laughing hysterically at the crazy foreigners. Kagoshima is only a little over an hour away. Mary has been there before, but the rest of us were surprised at how easy it was to get there. Instead of driving up to Kumamoto when we want to go to a city, we should go south to Kagoshima every once in a while.
I used Google maps on my phone as the navigator, and it worked pretty well. Every once in a while, it spaced out, and we had to turn around, but all-in-all, it worked out well. Our first stop of the day was the “island” of Sakurajima (I say “island” because technically it’s connected to the mainland under the surface of the water, but you most definitely CANNOT drive there). Kagoshima is known for its active volcanoes, and Sakurajima is one of the most active volcanoes in the world. It erupted in the early 1900s and has been slowly erupting ever since. It’s so active that people aren’t allowed to go to the top of it. In fact, when we went, we saw a huge cloud coming from the top. Mary said that the area around Sakurajima has an ash report everyday during the weather report…..as in “Don’t hang out your clothes or wash your car today because there’s too much ash in the air.” 
The city of Kagoshima, with some 650,000 people sits RIGHT across the bay from this monster volcanic island, but people just deal with it. There are even several towns on the island! Since people live there, and the volcano continuously erupts, the Japanese have built incredible ways to control the eruptions as much as possible. For example, they have these huge concrete trenches so that the lava will direct into there and flow out to sea instead of down Main Street. There are also concrete “damns” for the lava flows so that it won’t go out of the concrete trenches. Genius, I’m telling you, genius!
We had to take a ferry from Kagoshima City to Sakurajima. We were able to drive our car right onto it, and went to the top for pictures and to watch the island get closer. It was only a short twenty minute ferry ride, and our first stop on the island was a dinosaur/adventure park that is probably only meant for children, but……. Of course the foreigners are going to play on the huge dinosaur statues! You’re fooling yourself if you think we wouldn’t! There were also jungle gyms, a giant slide, a small zip line, balance beams, and plenty of trees to climb. As soon as we saw all of those, we reverted back to five-year-olds and went crazy, running around enjoying one thing after another. We had a ball!! 
We stopped for a quick lunch at a roadside café. Another thing that Kagoshima is famous for is its giant daikon (a big radish). Daikon aren’t really radishes, but I don’t really know what other vegetable to compare them to. In the States, I’m not a big fan of radishes, but here, I like daikon. Outside the restaurant, there was a daikon patch with some of the biggest darn radishes I’ve ever seen!! It’s funny because in the sixth grade textbook that we use, there’s a silly story about a grandfather, grandmother, and all the barnyard animals pulling up a giant turnip. Therefore, we had to make fun of that story and recreate it with the giant daikon. 
Our next stop on the tour of Sakurajima was a beautiful seaside onsen (hot spring). Normally at the onsen, the guys go one way, and the girls go the other. You shower and then sit in the communal hot spring water together naked. However, since this was a coed onsen, we all had robes to wear and went into the water with those on. It was a little tricky keeping the robe positioned like you wanted it, making sure that the top half wasn’t sliding open or that the water didn’t make the bottom half float into an inconvenient position. Despite that, it was probably the best onsen I’ve been to. The view was amazing. Literally a few steps from the onsen pool was the ocean. It had a very natural look to it by being surrounded with trees, rocks, and even cute little shrines. Plus, we could all sit and enjoy it instead of ladies on one side, guys on the other.
We took the ferry back to the city and continued out journey to Ibusuki, where we met up with the rest of our group: Amanda, Brian, Michael, and Ana. We all had dinner together at their hotel and then went back to our hostel. Mary, Justine, Melissa, Ian, and I were too cheap to pay the expensive price of the hotel, but our hostel was nice. We had an entire tatami room to ourselves. The futons were pretty flat and uncomfortable, but there were enough in the closet that we could double up for extra cushion. After a long day of playing on dinosaurs and soaking in hot water, we were all exhausted and fell asleep rather quickly.
No comments:
Post a Comment