Tripping around Japan with Stuart in March - Taking the scenic route home through Mie and Wakayama

Deciding not to venture into Tokyo itself meant we had a few days up our sleeve until I had to be back at work so we took the scenic route home. Canceling our hostel and night bus tickets, I bought another seishun-18-kippu and we used local trains to travel back from Yokohama towards Nagoya where we stopped for a late lunch and then down to Taki to meet up with Donny and had a Chinese shabu-shabu tabehoudai for dinner. It was quite a pretty train ride as it was a clear day and Stuart got to check out Mount Fuji.

Saturday we took it pretty easy in the morning (while Donny went to the gym) and tried to figure out our next plan of action so spent a bit of time trawling through the Lonely Planet and online and decided to head south down towards Wakayama. But first, we were spending another night in Taki so went out to visit Ise-jingu that afternoon (and found an awesome secondhand VW dealer - very tempted!) and enjoyed Korean for dinner with the most amazing pumpkin ice-cream - served in a mini-pumkin! - and then it was time for some karaoke.

The next morning was a pretty early start as the trains only run south from Taki about every two hours on a Sunday but it took us straight to Shingu where we had an hour between trains to check out Kumano Hayatama Taisha and grab some fresh onigiri for lunch. Again we had a beautiful train ride around the coast but unfortunately when we arrived at Shirahama at 2ish it was spitting a bit. Despite the rain, we decided it was better to rent bikes for the day for Y500 rather than get a bus pass for Y1000 and try and figure it out the weekend schedule to see everything we wanted to see before our next train to Wakayama at 7pm.











However, soon after leaving the station it started raining harder and didn't really let up at all for the entire time we were outside, despite wearing ski jackets we both had jeans and skate shoes on and were absolutely drenched by the time we got back to the station at 6pm to drop the bikes back before the rental office closed. Although in the four hours we managed to cover quite a bit of ground and saw Engetsu Inlet, Shirarahama Beach, Senjojiki and Sandanbeki.

In the rain, the saving grace of the whole outing was a little gem of an onsen called Saki-no-yu which was amazing, Stuart had had a quick soak in a footspa earlier around the coast but we decided it was worthwhile getting out of our wet jeans (and back into them) to enjoy one of the top three onsens in Japan. For Y300 entry it was amazing with three tiers of bath (mens has two) with the bottom one having the waves splash slightly into it from the sea, we were pretty lucky that we were there close to closing time and on such a yucky day so mine was empty and I could take a couple of pictures, but it looks like the mens was even more impressive (although I'm not sure if people can see in from the pier/lookout thing on the left) http://okadenki.cocolog-nifty.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2008/06/22/photo_8.jpg

 

We had planned to find somewhere to stay in Wakayama for the night but being a Sunday of a three-day-weekend and considering how wet and cold we were we just headed all the way home (making good use of our Y2300 train ticket to cover almost 400kms that would have normally cost over Y6000) it was a good way to end the trip.