A new twist on the old favourites

By this stage of the game I would have thought things would be winding down, but this weekend proves that there was a charge or two left in the ol' roman candle. With a shiver of delight, I got behind the wheel of a rental car and was reminded how delicious driving is. No last trains, no "next bus not for 20 minutes", no walking up the hill in the rain - glory on four wheels. Mount Rokko, Arima Onsen and Awaji Island all awaited, the old stomping grounds that we thought we'd seen all of. It was going to be a tinkly, steamy, swirly and shaky weekend - in that order.

I had a "school visit" on Friday where I was booked to come out and do a presentation about Perth. Some of the staff and students there were terrified of the prospect of visiting within the next couple of weeks and wanted me to come out and deliver some "expert" advice. I was loaded up with brochures, directions, notes and gadgetry and limped my way from Sannomiya to the school in the outskirts of Kobe, where I was met by a very pleasant American ALT and some of the teachers. We sat sipping tea and chatting about their itinerary and before long it was time to set up and test everything. I must have been starving during the presentation because I managed to tie every slide back to food, everything from "geography" and "at the airport" to "society" and "places to visit". "Thank you very much," said one of the Japanese teachers at the end. "we are looking forward to visiting Perth and eating a lot of food." I handed out all the brochures and looked forward to a nice unencumbered walk home, but then they gave me a bag of thank-you goodies that weighed exactly the same as the first. Half of it was full of food as well - how did they know? The early finish meant that I had most of Friday afternoon to myself, so I sat contentedly in a coffee shop and surfed the net. Lisa and Mel showed up eventually and we bounced around the shops for a while then headed home early in anticipation of car time.

We got up bright and early in the morning, headed into Shin-Kobe, picked up our handsome Mazda 2 (refusing whatever insurance and other sensible but expensive extras were offered) and hit the road straight away. Having allowed lots of "getting lost" time that we didn't end up using, we decided to get drive-thru McDonalds on the way, just because we could. We picked up Mel and Adam and started up the Rokko driveway despite the GPS patiently insisting that we take the toll roads; it turned out to be extremely narrow and windy and between that and the rising altitude, everyone except me seemed to be turning a bit pale (Adam particularly so, having had a big 3-stage work party the night before). Eventually, we got to the top in one piece, paid for parking (I remember how that feels!) and headed into our first stop - the astonishingly boring-sounding Rokko Music Box Museum.

The museum starts off as you'd expect - a little gift shop with music boxes playing Harry Potter and Brahm's Lullaby and so on, but up the stairs things get surreal. What lined the walls could hardly be called music boxes at all - player pianos, organs with little choir singing dolls perched on the front of them and ornate jukebox-looking things with enormous bendy metal music discs mounted on them like LPs. We took a seat in the deserted hall (between the automatic accordions and self-playing violins) and watched a Japanese woman in a beer hall-ish skirt and apron busily wind up all the boxes at the front. People began filtering in after a while and once the woman had her microphone sorted out, she started the "concert"; each box was introduced in turn, switched on and then moved gently aside for the next demonstration. They started from makeup case-sized wooden boxes then moved up to big players that looked like wardrobes; we eventually built to a crescendo with a distressingly lifelike organ grinder puppet who banged his cymbals and turned his little lever with abandon. The finale was a wall-sized "dance hall music box" that apparently replaced live bands - it whirred into life when she switched on the power, lighting up with outrageous colours and almost drowning her out as she explained how many horns and organ pipes and lord knows what else were within. She flicked a switch and out came a merry polka complete with thumping drums, tinging triangles and what I'm sure was a trumpet. Once the show had finished we wandered around a bit and I found myself winding a huge organ playing Jingle Bells. "Can I put on the hat?" I asked the girl, motioning to a top hat perched on the side.
"Of course you can put on the hat."

Once we had had our fill of strange, we left the music box museum and headed over to the "Cheese Castle", listening to Mel fantasising about cheese fondue on the way. It turned out to be a souvenir shop and restaurant and much to Mel's delight, there were about 96 different types of fondue on the menu. We ordered a couple of serves of the herb one and before long we were eating sausages and spearing pieces of bread to dunk them in what tasted like Swiss cheese. "Cheese" was kind of the only thing Mel could say for the next half hour as we wandered around the shop marveling at the selection; I managed to find myself a cream cheese icecream which was way nicer than it should have been.

Next up, we headed down the other side of the mountain to Arima Onsen, a hot spring town near where I used to live. We went to Taikou no yu, which is the most expensive hot spring there and for good reason - it's more of a resort than a bath house. We were offered a choice of four colours of Yukata (Adam - brown, Mel and Lis - green, me - orange), then we wandered around with hundreds of other similarly appointed people, through expansive halls of restaurants, souvenir shops and massage places. It was extraordinary really, and we hadn't even made it into the baths yet. We snaked our way down into the basement and eventually found the bathing area which was similarly amazing. Inside, there was a huge herbal bath, two smaller clear ones, a sauna and an ice-cold rock pool. Outside, there was a milky, rust coloured iron bath, one that smelled like mint and an ominous "radioactive" bath that I wasn't game to try. There was also a murky room with a brazier burning something with a very strange smell, full of people lying flat on the ground with their heads braced on wooden blocks and feet dangling in the water; I didn't hang around in that one too long. The best bit was definitely a line of 3 wooden "buckets" set into the floor, with hot water dribbling into each from a bamboo pipe. They were only big enough for one person and you could either dunk yourself in completely so only your head was sticking out of the bucket, or lounge outrageously with your arms and legs hanging out over the edge; I'm pretty sure I fell asleep doing that at one point.

We spent about two hours bath-hopping and letting the stresses of the week seep out of us (I hope that was stress), before we met up again in the cafeteria. I use the term cafeteria very loosely, because it was grandly decorated with black wood, cherry blossom branches and huge murals across the wall. I felt a bit strange sitting in there in a dressing gown - normally I'd want to be in a tie it was that nice. We ordered up a few things to eat and eventually wandered back up to the main floor to the game section. Lisa and Mel had a go on taiko drum master, a percussion rhythm game, and Adam and I discovered something weirder - a shamisen (Japanese banjo) version of Guitar Hero. Playing that while wearing a yukata is possibly the most Japanese thing I've ever done. Having had our fill of Arima, we stopped back in Rokko briefly to catch the night view and have a cider, then crossed over and had a very late dinner at a family restaurant near our neck of the woods. I don't think I ate at a single place over the weekend that didn't have a drink bar.

We hopped in the car again Sunday morning (no walking down the hill for us, thank you very much) and headed out for the day's festivities - a trip across Akashi bridge to Awaji Island to see the whirlpools on the far side. The bridge itself is something that you usually only see from a distance, so it's quite weird to actually drive across it. We pulled in at "Awaji Highway Oasis", a huge airport terminal-looking building that serves as a rest stop for all the traffic heading that way. The carpark seemed to be full of biker gangs on ludicrous motorbikes, tour buses and families out on day trips. We grabbed some donuts and coffee, took some photos of the bridge from the other side (it looks much the same) and then hit the road again, bound for the other side of the island. It took us a good long while to get there and reinforced my image of Awaji as one giant expressway surrounded by a bit of land, but it was worth it in the end. We pulled up to a tiny, deserted looking harbour and nervously asked if this was where the boat left from; the lady smiled encouragingly and pointed at what looked like a little fishing boat. We had been expecting a massive tourist ferry, so the idea of being personally taken out there was a treat. We paid up, hopped on the boat and a little man in a white captain hat started getting things ready. A few more Japanese people hopped on and with that, our mini-tour had started.

Before long, we started getting close to the Naruto Bridge, the one that connects Awaji to Shikoku on its far side. Underneath that, the water swirls and churns, making big whirlpools if you manage to get out there at the right time. We certainly seemed to nail it - on one side of the bridge, the water dropped away in little falls, churning up white foam along the length of it. A bit further out than that, the currents shifted around randomly, forming huge whirlpools and occasionally setting the boat off balance. Because we were in such a small one, we managed to get way closer than the huge tourist boats - I like to imagine the jealousy on their faces from a distance. We ran from one side of the boat to the other snapping off photos whenever a pool appeared and had an awfully nice time - I can't imagine seeing something like it anywhere else. Once we had made a good few laps around the bridge (waving to the people on the viewing platform above), we turned around and headed back to the shore. Four big smiles got into the car and drove back towards the north for one final stop - the earthquake museum.

Awaji was right near the epicentre for the huge Kobe earthquake 12 years ago and the museum was built to commemorate it - it's actually built around a 100m-odd crack caused by one of the faultlines. We walked past a bunch of scary footage and photos of the quake, then saw the preserved area of the fault - cracked roads and pieces of ground split in two. For most of the length of it, there are two levels - the natural ground level and a raised 50cm "platform" of ground where the rock was driven up. It's hard to imagine how much force would be needed to shift that much stone, but the museum has an "earthquake experience hall" to help out. It's a mock-up living room that you sit in to experience what the quake would have been like, complete with flickering lights and banging furniture. "I would have been shitting," said Adam, after we walked out - I had to agree.

After all that, it was time to say goodbye to Awaji. We hopped in the car and crossed back over the bridge for the last time, then dejectedly dropped off the car and again resigned ourselves to last trains, plenty of "next bus not for 20 minutes" and frequent walks up the hill in the rain. It was an awesome trip nonetheless - a nice reminder that we don't have to go hours and hours away to see bits of Japan we haven't before. That's well and truly our last road trip for the year, but with a bit of luck, there'll be plenty more of them in 2011. Maybe on two wheels next time - I wonder if those biker gangs are hiring.