Another Day, Another train
I wake up and get back to the travel prep. I change my mind from Kyoto and decide to head further West/South. Nagasaki looks interesting, so does Fukuoka. I think I will head over that way. I will be using the most of my Rail pass and it gives me another week or so to see some of that part of the country before meeting up with Amanda in Osaka.
I get on with the squat shower and then its straight to the JR station. I get the local line to Osaka, where I get out only to realise I was a stop away from the Shinkansen line. I head to Shin-Osaka and get on the Shinkansen, only to be rushed off by guards holding red flags. Apparently the kanji symbols meant that it was out of order. I drink a coke out of an aluminium bottle and then board the correct train. A woman and her daughter sit next to me, nodding off about forty minutes in. The lady’s head ends up rested on my shoulder and I leave her to sleep.
I watch as the landscape whizzes by, with a few moments sticking in my mind. The next thing I know, I am in Hakata, my destination since this morning. By this point had already decided to go even further south, to the extreme point that I can. I head to Kagoshima on two more trains, now I am tired. It has fallen dark and I am in serious need of food. It is hard to think that I just spent an entire day on trains.
When I get there, I find out that the youth hostel in this town is on a volcanic island, just off the main harbour. I get on a local train and am stunned of the view of the bay and island at dusk. The top of the island is shrowded by cloud and my fascnination with the landscep helps me miss my stop, meaning a good half an hour of sitting about at a dark, personless train station. With my error corrected, I stumble to the port where I board a ferry to go to Sakurajima, the volcanic island. I buy a beer and get directions from a ‘conbenie’.
Upon getting to my destination: the Sakarajima YH, I instantly regret my decision not to camp. It is a great big 1960s monolith, obviously built when the YMCA was a ‘new’ and ‘happening’ thing. The guy at the desk is cold. I fill out my paperwork and the woman comes along. She is colder. It turns out that there is nothing substantial to eat on this island after 8pm and the curfew won’t allow me to go to back to the mainland and get some real food. I pay for two nights and then leg it to a FamilyMart where I eat a myriad of snack food. As liz would say, it was a ‘snack dinner’.
I get back to the YH and then head downstairs to the onsen. The building is seriously like the one out of ‘The Shining’. It is big and there are virtually no guests (I am afraid of getting axed in the back by Jack Nicholson). The onsen is powered by the volcanic heat in the earth, meaning the water it is a browny gold colour. Kind of like bathing in a cup of tea. I rinse off and it is straight to bed. I have already decided that I am camping tomorrow night. I will be asking for half my money back first thing in the morning. This place sucks.
