Today we still had the car so Shinya drove us to Tottori, a place we had been wanting to go for a long time! Tottori is famous for its sand dunes which stretch for 16km. It was an amazing sight to see the sand dunes against the blue sky and sea but the photos just don’t show how huge they really were – in some parts they can be 40-90 metres high!! We climbed to the top which gave us an amazing view of the coast and the beach was beautiful. I would love to come back to swim in summer. Tina, Marie and Shinya had enough energy to run down to the beach but Steve and I took the easier option of staying at the top to take photos of them!
The amazing sand dunes!
Marie and Tina running down the sand dune!
We then headed to Yubara which is a spa town, for those people not in the know about “spas” (onsen) in Japan they are not like spas at home! Here you need to undress (no bathers allowed) wash yourself in the communal showers and then enter the bath with only a very, very small towel covering your most important bits! Needless to say I have still not tried an onsen here! However Shinya had an onsen in mind which was alongside a river, was free and we could wear our bathers – onsen had never sounded so good! So we headed there and were taking photos only to discover that as we got closer it was only older men in the onsen without bathers and some even without towels!! They had everything out for the whole world to see! It was such a beautiful setting and I really wanted to go in but the thought of only wearing a towel in a bath full of naked old men really didn’t take my fancy! I would like to go back there at nighttime as apparently more females go then and of course it is dark!! We didn’t totally miss out on the onsen experience though as we went to a foot onsen where only our feet were naked!
The river and the onsen (they are on the right hand side of the river)
The sign that tells us that bathers are not allowed - notice who is doing the wrong thing and wearing bathers in the picture (the blonde foreign girl!)
Tina, Marie and I in the foot onsen!
The beautiful river
2 comments:
I can definitely handle foot spas - real onsens on the other hand are a once in a blue moon thing for me.
I LOVED the sand dunes - I had s much fun playing in them!!
Apparently the sand is around 50°C at this time of year. Haven't been to Yubara but there's a foot onsen in nearby Kaike Town.
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