Beppu

Today was another transferday
We had a lovely Japanese breakfast in our ryokan. (rice, soup, fish, salad and egg) which gave us a lot of energy to leave for mount Aso.

We were sad that we couldn’t take the cablecar to one of the active craters of this volcano because of the misty weather today.

Instead, we continued to the Aso Volcano Museum where we were shown some nice movies of the volcano.

Next stop was Kurokawa hotsprings for lunch. This is a small village with as much as 24 ryokan with each 1 or more onsen.

We didn’t have time to enjoy the baths, but we had a really nice walk in the village and a lovely lunch.

Beppu was still far off, so the next part of the trip was just driving.

On arrival in Beppu, we explored the city. The hotel is almost next to the station and most of the shops are in our neighborhood.
Our tourguide told us that there is a restaurant here were they serve Fugu, so we planned on visiting there.

Before dinner, we went for a new experience… a sand bath. Ten minutes under a lot of sand, which gets quite warm. Afterwards a nice shower to get all the sand away.

As said before, dinner was Fugu, where Maaike risked her life trying it.
The taste was apparently not very special, but at least she is still here with me.

After this small scale success, we tried our luck once more in the local arcade/casino on the pachinko machines. After spending a combined amount of 4000 yen on this vertical pinball, the luck was on our side once more. First Ben scored a jackpot which gave us a profit of 1500 balls. Being bored, Maaike decided to start spending the profits.

And it was a success, Maaike had a jackpot quite quickly, and another one, and again.
In the end, we doubled our intake to 8700 yen, which payed easily for the dinner we just had.

Tomorrow we have to get up at 8:30 to take the bus to our next stop. Keep an eye open for our next post.