Please Refrain From Lobbing Fruit in the Bath

We had a three-day weekend a couple weeks back and that, coupled with the ridiculous Kusu-gun English Festival that I had to MC on Sunday, meant that Maia was coming down to Kusu for the weekend instead of my usual heading up there. Always an excellent occasion to kick around the local Kusu/Kokonoe/Hita area having lots of fun and get good and nostalgic. This particular weekend we left the area and headed over to the eastern coast of Oita Prefecture to visit our friend Lisa and view (in my opinion) the single most gorgeous festival in all Kyushu, but I'm getting ahead of myself.


You can't see them here, but there were oh so many bees here. And me without my bee suit...

Saturday we decided to head into Amagase, that plucky little onsen town nestled right between Kusu and Hita proper, which I discovered is more than the sum of its riverside onsen bits. No, we got away from all that and climbed the canyon walls into the highland plateaus above the river to end up at Amagase Flower Park, a delightful little flower preserve whose specialty is the Cosmos...whatever that is. Seems rather cut and dry--pretty pretty flowers, nice smells and epic vistas--but this flower park had a couple tricks up its sleeves: two rabbit pens that were microcosms of Japanese society (one pen contained several identical white rabbits with one aggressive leader that chased and attacked one scarred and haggard looking rabbit, while the other pen, located well away from the first, contained three multi-colored social rabbits); and a monkey show. I had no idea that monkeys could be trained to walk on three-meter-tall stilts. Go figure.


Lyle Lanley approves. (No, I'm never going to be tired of saying that.)

After that we headed just over the border of the prefecture into Kumamoto to the hot springs resort town of Tsuetate Onsen. There are several choices here, all very interesting and flashy, but the most flashy and the one that I'd been wanting to visit since I first laid eyes on it over a year ago is a place perched on a rather steep hillside that can almost be called a cliff. Overlooking a rushing river the...uh, I didn't actually get the name of that hot springs we went to, but this place was freakin' amazing. First, the parking area is a good 30 meters above the actual onsen itself and there is a switchbacking pathway down, but more importantly there is also a motherflippin' monorail to get down also! Already dazzled by the monorail the operators of this place just had to drop some cocaine in my already quite happy fruit smoothie when we discovered that our onsen had whole yuzu fruits floating in it! Whoa! In addition to coming out smelling citrus fresh you can chuck fruit at people in the bath. Nothing says fun like a nice Nolan Ryan pitch of sour/sweet fruit in the eye!


Maia: "I'll never be satisfied taking a bath ever again with anything less than fruit floating in it."

Sunday, after the Lovecraftian horror that is the annual English Festival for JHS students, we fled east to Tsukumi first to meet up with Lisa and then went via train to Usuki for the decidedly less horrible annual bamboo festival. I've ranted about it before and I really have nothing more to say other than there is nothing like it on that side of the pond that I can remotely draw a parallel to. You have to see it to believe it.


They got creative with what they did with the unused cuttings from bamboo lamps this year, turning them into chains hanging off this shrine foundation's wall. Well played.

--Matt