Kagoshima is in the southernmost part of Kyushu. From Amakusa, it's about a 4 hour drive. Being from Florida, it should have been a piece of cake, but somewhere between the twilight zone tunnel (someone later told me the tunnel is actually 11 km long, and that's why I was disoriented) and waiting for the car ferry at Kagoshima, I thought I was going to die of exhaustion.
Anyway, we took a car ferry from Kagoshima city to the other part of Kagoshima, where we left the car at the port and took off with Josh as our weekend chauffer.
Josh lived in Kanoya, an area about another 1 hour drive from the port. while it seems inconvenient, it's actually a wonderfully located little place. Located between Kagoshima city and Miyazaki Prefecture, it allows for lots of travel. Case in point: we went to an awesome shrine in Miyazaki on Saturday!
This shrine is in actually located INSIDE A CAVE next to the ocean. There are lucky rocks inscribed with kanji (Japanese written characters) that people attempt to toss into a hole on a giant rock in the ocean.
This shrine is also famous for having a boob rock...basically a rock that feels like/is shaped like a boob attached to the cave wall. Of course, you have to do some groping around to find it (pun intended), and when you do it doesn't really so much resemble a boob as much as, well...a rock. This could be due to the fact that tourists and worshipers have sought it out and touched it so much over the years, or that the people who found it were entirely too desperate. I can just imagine some shrine priests and disciples groping around in the dark and saying, "hey, this kinda feels like..." They weren't celibate, but still, living in a cave...
But I digress.
It was an amazingly beautiful place, the gusts of sea breeze surrounding the shrine, protected from water by the cave. We extra lucky in that there was a special ceremony going on that day. Apparently, when a baby turns one, it's usual for people to take their child to the shrine. It was just the parents, the baby, the priest, and the priestesses who played the ceremonial music and assisted the priest (kind of like alter boys in a church). The baby was swaddled in a grand kimono bundle. Unfortunately, we didn't get any pictures, but it was indeed a sight to see!
After the shrine visit, Josh's friend was having a baby shower, so we dropped by. We were dragged into a game of "scientific fertilization pin the tail on the donkey," with sperm and ovum replacing the tail and donkey. Somehow, I won. My prize was a foam ball gun!
On Sunday, we got a late start to the day and basically did one thing: ONSEN! Except this wasn't any regular hotspring, this was Ibutsuki sand onsen! At this sand onsen, you get changed into a yukata. Then, you go behind the building to the beach, where you lay in the sand and the onsen workers use pails to cover you with hot, black sand from head to neck. After about 15 minutes, body literally pulsing from relaxation (or is it compression? That sand was heavy!), you get out of the sand and go to the actual baths, where you rinse and shower and soak (in that order).
Kyushu, like much of Japan, is highly volcanic. Kagoshima is particularly full of volcanic activity, and the geothermal activity is precisely what heats the sands at Ibutsuki. Driving into the city, we could actually SEE the steam rising from some of the water drains in the road!
Another perfect example of Kagoshima's explosive potential is Mount Sakurajima -- possibly the most active volcano in Kyushu. And by explosive, I do mean explosive! Every day, this volcano sends out plumes of an innumerable amount of ash. Unlike Mt. Aso, where you can climb to the crater and look into the caldera on days that it's not emitting too much gas, you can't climb up to look into Mt. Sakurajima.
Well, I suppose it's possible. But you'd probably die.
I was told that the lungs of people born and raised in Kagoshima are about as bad as those of a person who has smoked for 40 years. That said, the furthest we got was a volcanic lava rock overview, where we walked around older lava formations, bought some stuff from the merchants that was covered in ash (the pineapple juice also tasted ashy), and watched in a mixture of terror and amazement as the monster belched endless black streams into the sky.
I never thought I would be so impressed by a volcano, but let me just say that there really is nothing quite like it.
Last, we ate two of the must-eats from Kagoshima: Kurobuta (quite literally black pork; the bigs are black, and DELICIOUS), and Shirokuma (meaning not literally "white bear"; it's a shaved ice treat with fruit and condensced milk. It was so cold outside, but so good! (Anabel!)
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