六甲山と有馬おんせん

ropes over a stream (photo credit to Ann Hideko)

A few weekends ago was our first day trip as a program, which was a blast! We had to get up really early on a weekend, but it was worth it. We went up into the mountains around Kobe, to Rokko-san and to Arima Onsen.

rope jungle gym (photo credit to Ann Hideko)

In Rokko-san, we all completed a 42-leg ropes course. While everyone was initially really tired from the long week, by the time we were on the 2nd or 3rd leg, everyone was really pumped up and ready to complete them all! The physical work of it was tiring, but it was a really bonding experience for everyone on our program.

forest

Rokko-san is a mountain that cascades over the Kobe and Osaka metropolitan area, and there we had lunch overlooking the vast metropolis below us. It was really beautiful (if a tad foggy).

from above

From Rokko-san, we took a cable car gondola from town to town, half way down the mountain by a 15-minute ride of forested beauty. I felt like I was a National Geographic photographer, or maybe filming for "Planet Earth." Or at least, that's what I should've been doing, because a place with that much unhampered nature deserves to be documented in that way for posterity. But it made me miss the forests at home, even though they're clearly so different.

gondola lift

We soon landed in Arima Onsen, an onsen town (meaning it has natural hotsprings that make traditional onsen, the bathhouses that I previously wrote about).

the 70% of japan that is mountain

If you've ever been to Aachen in Germany, this little town had a feel almost exactly like it. I definitely felt that, if you were to replace Arima's citizens with bulky Germans, it could convincingly stand as a replacement for Aachen.

a pro pouring batter

There was a cramped, maze-like feel to the town, with European style architecture and shops lining all the streets. They're famous for two things: the onsen and for their treats (the Arima senbei)-- (Aachen is known for its hotsprings and for its famous candies and baked goods as well). The senbei are made as shown with these pictures, and the result are thin, sweet, crunchy biscuits that are an amazingly delicious treat.

senbei roasting evenly

Lots of towns have senbei (if you remember that picture where Amber was being attacked by hungry deer in Nara, those were shika (deer) senbei that Nara is famous for), but al of them are different, and Arima's were by far the best I've tasted.

peeling the senbei off its griddle

After sampling the tasty biscuits, we moved on to the Onsen. There are two onsen in Arima: Ginsen and Kinsen. Ginsen (meaning golden onsen), a blood-colored iron bath, and the one we had been talking about going to for weeks. Alas, it was closed on the day we went. So we went to Kinsen (silver onsen), which supposedly contains radium and carbonate (or at least those were the only translations we ever found), so if I sprout an extra limb before I come back to the states, you will know why when we next meet.

tut, tut, looks like rain

I strongly considered NOT going to the onsen because I was very afraid of this "radium" bath, but everybody told me it would be alright and probably wasn't actually radium-filled anyway, since radium is such a dangerous, radioactive element. So I went, but to be honest, we didn't enjoy the bath at all. Unlike the Onsen we went to near home, there was only the main bath, and the entire bath was covered by roof, so the whole room was essentially a steam sauna. We all lasted less than 15 minutes in there before bursting out into the dressing room looking for fresh air.

the iron-rich waters of the rivers running through arima

Since there was very little left to do in Arima, we decided to make use of our day-long rail passes to explore Kobe's Chinatown by night, despite the rain drizzling down.

the gate to chinatown

I felt like a local when we got to Kobe, because it turns out I knew the city better than our Japanese counterparts from my time at the synagogue. So I got to lead the way to Chinatown, and felt really special and cool giving directions to our Japanese roommates.

a squid ink dumpling

 While the prices we experienced weren't quite as outrageously low as in San Francisco's Chinatown (if you remember that post), I ate to full stomach capacity in Kobe for 400 yen, or about 5 dollars. And it was magical walking from stand vendor to stand vendor seeing what delicious surprises they had in store.

the zodiac gazebo

The drizzling rain made it even more magical. Even though we didn't have rainboots, umbrellas, or water-proof anything, the drizzle gave a glowing quality to everything as we walked around by night.

dragon

This dragon gave stunning performances every half hour or so, to lure customers to a particular store-front down the street. Their advertising worked pretty well, as each time they ended the presentation, people would go flocking after the dragon to go eat inside.

effective advertising

We just had our street food rather than sit-down Chinese restaurant. I ended the night with this cute little donut-bite, shaped like a bunny rabbit.

donut bunny

On our way back in the general direction of home, we decided to continue to put our daily-passes to good use by stopping by Umeda on the way. And while we eventually didn't do anything in Umeda but walk around for 20 minutes before deciding to head home, had we not gone, we would never have met this old man and his wife. He was a kid who experienced the Hiroshima bombing, and whose parents were lost because of it. He then went to go live with his grandparents in Australia, so he wanted to practice his English with us, which is how we got to talking. We talked to him (mostly in Japanese) for about 20 minutes on the train, and eventually we're going to go visit him in Nara where he lives, and he'll recount more in detail.

hiroshima native

All in all, it was a very packed, fun-filled and educational day. Just reviewing the pictures makes me want to do it all again!