onsen adventures

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what's the japanese word for getting together with lots of other naked men and splashing about in hot water? onsen.

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being a volcanic chain of islands, there are hundreds and hundreds of hot springs throughout japan, and visiting an onsen is a quintessential japanese cultural experience not to be missed.

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we first visited the onsen in nikko, famous for its 7-11, and our second in the mountains high above the town at a fetid 'source'. here we had a little bath all to ourselves for a few minutes, so all photos come from our second onsen.

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in nikko, after being dropped off by our servant and telling her to come back in an hour to pick us up, leaving our shoes near the door and paying our money, we were given locker keys and towels the size of a small white handkerchief. 'what's this for?' we wondered - to blow our nose? to cover a single nipple? to cover our dicks or balls but not both? i'm still not 100% sure.

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we stowed our clothes in our lockers and then proceeded into the onsen room, arranging our handkerchief discretely over various parts of our bodies as we saw fit. in the main room we found several baths and a low wall peppered with shower heads, buckets, soap, and japanese men of various ages scrubbing themselves raw before a dip. we didn't want to be the dirty white people who missed a spot, so both made a great show of scrubbing until we were lobster-red, then proceeded to the hot baths.

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i'm not a big fan of hot water, and basically it was a case of immersing oneself in progressively hotter water ranging from bath-warm to fuck-that's-hot, then cooling down outside or under cold water. the only other thing to do was hit the sauna, but we were so hot already that within a few seconds of entering each time, all the proteins in our body were threatening to denature, and we had to rush back out again.

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now though the onsen is naked except for the handkerchief, i was surprised to see what i initially thought was a japanese man entering the onsen with a small carry-bag, hanging loosely between his knees. and then reality slammed home. i will never forget for my entire life the size of those enormous balls. was he half man half cow? now i've seen some low hangers in my time but this was abnormal. they were so impractically large it was as if he'd walked straight off the page of a comic book in an akihabara manga porn store and into our onsen, and then right into my face. i couldn't look but i had to look at the same time - you know how it is. you could even see them from behind hanging off the stool that he was sitting on, so there was no need to even be discrete. somebody should have called the guinness book of records. or the police.

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our second onsen was high in the mountains near a forest lake, where the sulphuric waters of hell itself bubbled up through the mud. g came out unscathed but i had some sort of reaction and developed a bodywide rash which drove me insane for almost 2 weeks and precluded any further onsen frivolity. but not to worry - there was much more to see and do in 日本!

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Nikkō

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click for map!

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no, not my brother-in-lafacto's name in japanese, but nikkō: japanese for sunlight, and site of the UNESCO world heritage 'shrines and temples of...*yawn*

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who cares about temples i hear you cry in disgust? not us! suffice to say that only minutes after buying the bare-bones-minimum pass for 3 temple sites and passing under the first tori, we were already crawling around on our hands and knees smitten with boredom. we decided to only look at the forest behind the second site (the trees in japan are something else altogether - check out some of these pics), and skipped the third one altogether for fear of inducing boredom-seizures.

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our guest house was pretty awesome - it was our first of many tatami mat and futon related good nights' sleep, and the owner was lovely, but seemed to be addicted to servitude (at which she was admittedly a master), and sort of went on a bit about how poor she was, before taking some happy snaps of us with a $3000 camera and running back to her pad to have them printed and laminated on her very own equipment. maybe japan poor is like australian not poor.

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but the highlight of nikkō was: the 7-11. who would have thought that in the middle of the night you could cruise out to your local convenience store for a steaming hot three course meal double-wrapped in plastic casing/plastic bag/plastic staff and plastic greeting? it was enough to make us have two dinners.
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if only this pagoda could have housed a 7-11 to have made it more interesting...

there were two shock events in nikkō, both involving the camera. the first was where i somehow got my neck and foot trapped in the camera cord at the same time, resulting in "japan camera accident number one". both the camera and your correspondent survived - scratched but essentially functional - so it was ok.

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the second was where gerard took a photo of me from behind communing with the forest wearing my favourite shorts ever. when i later blew up the picture and saw the back of my arse in the aforementioned favourite shorts, my whole world came crashing down, and i was almost ready to call the whole thing quits. perhaps change my identity and start afresh. the offending article of clothing is now on the garment equivalent of death row with no chance of absolution, and has only the funky reality of easy clothes shopping in japan to thank for not being murdered on the spot in self-defence.

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oh god my eyes!

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i leave you with what g and i consider to be the best photo we took in japan. peace.
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