Kumano Koda - Day 3 - Yunomine Onsen

Let's start with the Japanese souffle cheesecake. I am not one to eat cakes, but sometimes I will make an exception. This cake is one of them, especially after a day of toil we had yesterday. It is melt in the mouth heaven. When I got home I followed this recipe (which is also on Youtube) and got pretty close to the desired flavour and texture. The Japanese yuzu lemons are different to ours, but I was happy with our alternative.
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Japanese Souffle Cheesecake
Now for some manners regarding shoes. Our host last night loved to teach us Japanese formality even in our weary state.
Slippers
  • When entering a house, restaurant, hotel etc:
    • Outside shoes are removed and placed in a shoe rack, box or whatever is there.
    • Guest slippers (you have left your socks on..) 
    • When entering a tatami floor (made of woven rice straw) place your slippers near the entrance and walk in with your socks.
    • When going out in the yard, wear your outside slippers.
    • When going to the toilet, use the toilet slippers.
Of course we stuffed it up a few times - and some of the slipper are simply too small - but that's part of the fun !>
Slippers in toilet
Polite.  The Japanese people that we met were polite and very helpful. It was raining today and quite heavily. Our host lent us his umbrellas and allowed us to use them for our journey today. He was willing to travel to our accommodation to pick them up.  On day one, our host picked us up from the train station and dropped us off to our walk start. On day 2 the lady in the cafe / guesthouse permitted us to sit by the fire and served beverages despite being closed.  All the way on this trip we've experienced a willing kindness to assist.

I digress. There is a good reason for his 'rules'. His place was immaculate. With rain and the outdoors garb that patrons are generally wearing, it would be a challenge to keep it all clean without these rules.

Traditional room
Today was to be a short 45 minute walk to our next destination: Yunomine Onsen. That duration was a stretched piece of elastic. I'll get to the reason later.

Given that we arrived in the dark, we backtracked to Hongu Taisha to get a day time view.  With the rain our thoughts were not overly excited.  It is grand, but somehow like last night something  didn't click. Anticlimax perhaps.
Entrance stairs to Hongu Taisha
Interesting though were the monks in their outfits and some sort of sermon inside one of the buildings. I felt a bit intrusive observing and taking photos so there isn't a lot of pictures.
monks with umbrellas
Being a town of significance there is a huge structure in one of the parks. You are an insect in comparison to its size. We had fun carefully navigating round the many puddles, grateful for the elevated paths leading up to it.
path to shrine
 After our walk around the sites and lunch, we thought it was time to head on over to Yunomine Onsen and perhaps do some sight seeing. It was only 45 minutes away according to the notes so we though we'd be there in plenty of time.

Straightforward according to the map too (follow the faint red trail):
Correct trail
All well and good except the direct route between those two sets of people on the map above didn't quite turn out that way.
Wrong trail by car
10 minutes in a car is more like 2 hours walking.

How did it go so wrong ? 
  • Relying on a phone for navigation.
  • Not having a paper map in a waterproof cover.
  • Roadworks.
  • Taking the road rather than the track. 
  • Rain
 We were a bit confused coming out of our accommodation as to the location of the trail. We saw a sign to Kumano, but there are a few around.  When we got to the trail out of town there were two options but as we found later the easy option ended up terminating being wiped out by a new road structure.

The further we went, the worse it got. Instead of turning around like we should of we pressed on. The phone map used was Google, which was incorrect as it did not show the topographic detail and was set to car navigation. It was confusing because it failed to indicate clearly that we needed to go through a tunnel. 
trail options
Had we of turned right instead of left we would of had a 3.6km walk on the road instead of 6km. Both distances do not sound a lot, but we are talking mountainous terrain and ever heavier rain. Had we of gone on the proper track it was one steep up and over, all over and done.

Anyway I was in the bad books once again ! With the pouring rain, ever increasing time to destination according to Google, Steph really cracked it - 3/4 of the way there and decided to hitch. In about 2 minutes she got a lift. A kind family who also run a bed and breakfast on the coast gave us a lift. It didn't matter that we were dripping wet.

So a tip here:  laminated paper maps and a compass.  Also make sure you have a spare charging cable and charger (mine broke) as well as a battery pack. Also, use a proper off-line topographic map with routing ie pay for it ! eg. gaia

> We arrive at our accommodation early and the host wasn't happy about us being there as she wanted to clean and prepare. Seeing how wet it was outside and how wet we were she relented and invited us to use the lounge area. (J-Hoppers - recommend staying there).  We caught up with a couple of English girls that we met yesterday who hoofed it all the way from Chikatsuyu to here in one day. Needless to say they were somewhat worn out too and had an interesting time navigating with their phone torches.

The washing machine and dryer were very useful. The shoe dryer was a bit of gimic and only marginally succeeded in evaporating some of the water out.
shoe dryer
There is one very pleasurable, very Japanese pastime that is just the ticket after an ordeal in the rain: onsen. How great it is to have one at the hostel !
onsen

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