Category Archives: Travel

Return of the Thermal Explorer

Mt. Aso is a collection of small towns built around growing rice and raising cattle. They’re quiet farm communities, and they’re built entirely inside the caldera of a giant volcano. Within that caldera are seven peaks, six of which are dormant. The seventh one—Nakadake—spews sulfur gas continuously, and once in a while it explodes, most recently in 1979.

This being Japan, it’s a tourist attraction, with a cable car (“ropeway”) going right up to it.*

I left my bag at the nearby hostel that the guidebook recommended, had some lunch, and took the bus up the mountain. I only had enough money for a one-way ride on the ropeway, so I opted for up. Walking down looked easy enough. (The ropeway is a four-minute ride.)

There isn’t really anything to do once you’re up there other than take pictures and smell the sulfur and maybe buy a piece of sulfur as a souvenir. So I took some pictures and walked back down to the gift shop to wait for the bus.

And now I’m back at the hostel, which may be the single cleanest and most well-appointed place I’ve ever stayed. It looks like it was built yesterday. It’s tempting to stay an extra night, just to marvel at how nice it is, but I have to see if I can get to Kyoto by tomorrow night.

* That also sounds like something New Zealand would do, except that they would put a zip line over it too.

Aso Boy!

I caught the Aso Boy! Kuro to Mt. Aso (mascot: a small cartoon dog). It wasn’t the train I thought I was getting on, but it went to the right place, if not as quickly.

It’s a family sightseeing train and was mostly packed (apparently this is a national holiday), but the last car had a bench with a desk in front of a panoramic window. It wasn’t nearly as crowded.

It was only later that I found out that I was supposed to have a reservation for that train, but no one ever checked. It’s also another ¥200 to sit where I was sitting.

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Kumamoto

I almost skipped Kumamoto Castle, thinking I wouldn’t have time. I didn’t get into Kumamoto until after noon (I missed one station and had to backtrack) and I wanted to do laundry after the pigeon incident. But I couldn’t check into the hotel until 3:00 and I couldn’t find the laundromat that was supposedly right around the corner*. So I had more than two hours to kill.

Then I saw the sign that said the castle was 440m away.

Well, hell, I walked a lot farther than that in Seoul.

It was well worth seeing. It’s even bigger than it looks, and it looks massive. Originally built in 1607, it was expanded over the years, but then partially destroyed in the civil war of 1877. Most of it is a restoration now.

There was some sort of taiko drumming competition on the castle grounds as part of a weekend festival, making everything even more crowded than it would otherwise have been. But that also meant that there were food vendors, so I just grazed on things all afternoon and evening.

* Kumamoto Laundromat would be an excellent name for a band.