Pond

Shunsan, a guest from the hostel invited me to join him to the onsen town of Sakunami. I had no other plans yet and it would be nice to just take it easy after al these hectic days. At Sakunami station a free bus picked us up and brought us to Ichinobo onsen, one of the bigger onsens in the area. After all the rituals of taking of shoes, changing into a yukata and cleaning and washing it was finally time to enter the baths. The advantage of bigger onsens is that they have multiple baths with different water compositions but more importantly different temperatures. I myself like the 'colder' baths with temperatures of up to 41 degrees but there are baths of 45 degrees and up. Now four degrees might not sound as a big difference but trust me it is. :-) They have some nice inside baths but the one that won this for me was the outside ones. There were 4 outside baths together with various tempatures but the view was absolutely gorgeous. A huge rock in the middle with trees clinging on its's sides and a river with waterfalls meandering past the baths, fishes swimming in the river and crickets and birds in the background. Just awe-inspiring. After an hour or so we figured it was time to relax in the common area with a cup of tea. I noticed another bath and asked Shunsan what type of onsen this was. He said "No, this is just a pond". Woopsie! :-P
We planned to leave at one but got a message that the train had an accident and we had to wait at least two hours before it would be fixed. So we decided to do another round in the onsen. After two hours the train was still not fixed so we grabbed a bus which would take a bit longer to get back but at least we would get back. As the bus arrived in Sendai i said goodbye to Shunsan and went back to the hostel for the big farewell dinner. I met up with Natsumi and Mae again and went shopping for ingredients at the local supermarket. I let Natsumi do all the shopping since i had no idea what was what. Kanji is still a challenge for me. ;-P
Back in the hostel we started cooking and made home-style okonomiyaki and temaki sushi with salmon, egg, natto and other things. It must have looked really funny to see me pretend to know what i was doing. ;-) As we were about to eat a girl from Hong Kong, Vanessa, checked in and we invited her to join dinner. Some more guest came in and i had a great last evening at Keyaki guest house and it's awesome staff. :-D I know already i will definately be back. Definately!Read more