This past weekend, my friends and I decided to go on a road trip. Everything was done pretty last minute. We just decided that week that we should go somewhere and we did. We all decided on Kumamoto, which is a neighboring prefecture to us. Since the only thing I had ever seen in Kumamoto was Mt. Aso, I was excited.
Matt, Asha, Kim and I left on Friday night after work. Matt drove us to Kumamoto city. We checked into a hotel and walked around the downtown area.
The next morning, we went to Kumamoto castle. The castle looked beautiful with the cherry blossoms around it. We sat on a bench outside of the castle and ate our lunch. It was really relaxing and lovely. 
We wanted to relax some more and maybe take a nap under some cherry blossoms, so we decided to go to Suizen-ji Park. We laid down in the sun and enjoyed the sights although truthfully, we were expected more from it.
After relaxing, we went back on the road. Our next stop was Kurokawa, an onsen village in Kumamoto prefecture. Onsens are hot spring baths that have many minerals. Japan has many onsens throughout the country and you have to follow certain rules when you go to them. For example, you must wash yourself before you get in. There are usually showers & soap for people to wash themselves well before they get into the onsen. You must also go in naked. You can take a small towel, but when you are in the onsen, you must put it to the side or on top of your head.
Kurokawa is a well known onsen village, so we were really excited to go there.
Before we even reached Kurokawa, we saw an interesting sight on the road. Literally, in the middle of nowhere, there were all these shapes, like birds, bears, statue of liberty and so on cut out of plants. It was like Edward Scissorhands went there on vacation and spent a month making different pieces. It was the strangest thing ever. We had to stop and take pictures.
Kim was surprised when she noticed that this bear even had a set of…well you know.
When we finally arrived at Kurokawa, it was already almost 7 PM. We had to look for a place to stay because we didn’t make a reservation. We soon found out that although there were many ryokans, they fill up pretty fast on the weekend. There were only a couple of places that had vacancy, which we learned about at the information center. We took down their numbers and parked the car in a little alley. Kim used her Japanese skills to make the calls for us. The first number didn’t respond, but the 2nd number told us that there were rooms available and it would be 9000 yen per person. It seems like a high price but most places around there are more than 10,000 yen per person. We were extremely happy. When we went searching for the place, we realized that the car was parked right beside the ryokan. It was like fate.
We ate dinner there and then walked outside for a bit. Although it’s a touristy village, it still looks like an old, small village that you are lucky to fall upon on your travels. Because of this, everything was closed at night, except for the convenience store. We also had to be back early because the ryokan’s curfew time before they closed up was 10:30 PM.
Once we got back, we soaked in the private onsen of our ryokan and then we went to our rooms for some much needed sleep.
The next morning, I woke up and looked out the window. I felt like I was in the movie Spirited Away.
We checked out and made our way to the information center. At the information center, we were able to buy a pass for 1200 Yen that would allow us to go to 3 different onsens in the village. We also got a map with all of the different onsens, which included pictures of those onsens.
We sat down at a coffee/ ice cream shop and picked out the ones we wanted to go to. Once we picked the onsens, we began walking in the direction of the first one.
To tell you the truth, the first onsen didn’t work out that well. We were about to walk inside the ryokan that had the onsen. The map said that there was a public onsen there and it even had a picture of it. Before we even got to the door, one of the guys that worked there ran out and he said in English "No Public Bath Here". We were kind of taken by surprise. We weren’t even inside. The guy just ran outside to block us from going inside and to tell us that there was no public bath, which didn’t even make sense because the map that the information desk gave us said that there was. When we said in Japanese that we had onsen passes. The guy responded in Japanese "Oh, you speak Japanese? Uhhhh…no public bath here". We just walked away. The whole thing seemed strange and he probably did it because we were foreigners. We weren’t too happy, but we walked to the onsen next to it and it was FABULOUS! We even thanked the jerk for turning us away because we had such a great experience in the other one.
Actually, all 3 onsens we went to that day were great.
Onsen Picture:
One of my favorites was the last one we went to. It was called Yamamizuki ( 山みず木 ) . There was an only female section and a mixed gender section. Matt went to the mixed gender onsen and Asha, Kim and I went to the only female onsen. There was an indoor onsen that didn’t have a fourth wall. Because of that, we could look out to a water fall. There was also an outdoor onsen. It was so relaxing to be soaking in mineral rich water with nature all around you. The girls and I also chatted as we enjoyed our "spa" experience. We were only supposed to be there for half an hour, but we ended up staying there for an hour. I felt bad when we got out and we realized Matt had been waiting for us for over half an hour. Oopps!
All in all, our road trip was one of my favorite trips this year in Kyushu. All of us really enjoyed Kurokawa and we want to go back.
If you would like to see more pictures of Kumamoto city & Kurokawa, you can go to my Flickr
