Minakamichō-fukuhara

Day 26

A bit of an earlier start this morning when we clambered aboard the bus with our bags at 8am and headed towards Matsue in the Shimane prefecture. Hood up and earphones in I quickly went to sleep and after 5 hours we arrived in Matsue. Feeling a bit more full of life after a nap we headed to our hostel to drop our bags except it wasn’t open and we got no answer from the doorbell. We looked up the opening times and discovered we couldn’t check in until 5pm! With a failing sense of humour we walked back to the station where we saw some luggage lockers to dump our bags in but they were all taken! Feeling almost hopeless we asked information and they pointed at an office block. We wondered in feeling like we probably shouldn’t be in there but we managed to secure two lockers to get rid of our bags - finally!

With a much lighter load we headed to Matsue castle and wondered inside. The castle had several floors connected by stairs that were almost completely vertical and very ancient as they creaked with every step! Feeling slightly uneasy we made it to the top and enjoyed the view back over the city. We spent the rest of the day exploring Matsue on foot.

When it was finally time to check in we grabbed our bags and went back to the hostel and we were greeted by a very friendly Japanese lady who didn’t speak much English, the only English she did manage to speak was to introduce us to her cats, of which she has several in the hostel. To the point that she has fitted jail like doors to stop the cats from leaving their designated room. She struggled to tell us the time of check out but managed to explain that her cat had cancer hence why it was rigged up to an IV drip!! Honestly the most bizarre experience and Jacob and I now refer to her as cat lady.

Day 27

Today we decided we wanted to visit the old abandoned Iwami Ginzan Silver Mine which was one of the most important silver mines for over 400 years producing over 1/3 of the worlds silver at its peak! We took a train and then a bus and ended up in the absolute middle of nowhere. Clambering off the bus we walked through this tiny village where there is no signal and it barely appears on the map! Small wooden houses lining the street and everyone using bikes to get around instead of cars it definitely felt like we had gone back in time!

After a 3k walk we made it to the silver mine shaft entrance! At the ticket desk the lady was thrilled to see foreign tourists and said she would give us a discount- obviously a rather unknown stop for the people outside of Japan! Set back into the mountain was the entrance to the mine, heads ducked we began walking through the tunnels winding our way through imagining what it would have been like to mine here for over 10 hours of the day! I suddenly stopped and pointed at the ceiling turning to jacob I asked “what is that”. Peering through the darkness jacob proceeded to explain to me that it was in fact a bat which only a few meters away from my face certainly made me jump!! Just when I thought the tunnel might swallow us up forever we reached the exit and began walking back through the village.

Jacob then saw a sign for refinery and got very excited so we diverted off the path and began climbing up a hill, along the way we saw the ruins of the old town where the miners used to live as well as a few other shut off tunnels. We kept climbing up until we reached a bamboo forest where we started ascending some stairs that looked like they hadn’t been used in a long time and it probably should have stayed that way from how unsafe they felt!! Hiking through the bamboo forest we enjoyed the views back over the sites below but soon realised that it wasn’t worth the rather steep incline and doubled back just in time to catch one of the last buses back to the station and then headed back for the evening.Read more