Winter Vacation Part 3: Satsuma Peninsula

After getting back from Yakushima, we had an extra day to explore in Kagoshima. We rented a car and headed south away from the city into the Satsuma Peninsula.

Map of Satsuma

Satsuma peninsula, like most of the rest of Kyushu, has a lot of volcanic activity. It's sparsely populated, except for a few small towns. The main attraction is a town called Ibusuki, where the volcanic activity manifests in the form of hot sand. Here, you can take a "sand bath."

Unlike a normal bath, you take a sand bath clothed in a thin yukata robe. We donned the provided clothing and took a chilly walk down a path to the beach. On the beach, there are eaves set up to shield from the wind and sun. In these dark pits, people lie in the coarse sand and are buried by facility employees. The more sand they pile on you, the hotter it gets!

Sand bath (not my picture)

The yukata are worn to protect you from contact burns, as the sand can feel particularly hot on bare skin. My exposed heels in particular were getting pretty scorched, so I pushed them out into the open air for relief.

After you've had your fill of warm sand, you can head back into the facility to wash off all the sand and have a soak in a real bath. As I relaxed, I marveled at the signs posted around the bathhouse, depicting a square-faced blond-haired blue-eyed man with a nose the size of a traffic cone performing acts against bathing etiquette. Overall, it was a nice bath despite the somewhat racists and degrading informatory signs.

In town, we ate lunch at a nice little restaurant which served delicious kuro-buta sukiyaki as well as yummy fried sweet potatoes. Japanese sweet potatoes, or "satsuma-imo", are named after this place after all.

Next, we drove even further south to see Kaimon-dake, the beautifully conical volcano that juts out from the southern tip of Kyushu.

What a nice cone! (also not my picture)

Besides being nice to look at, there isn't much to do here but hike. There's a small camping area halfway up where you can rent cabins or ride an extremely slow go-cart down a narrow and uneventfully straight path. There are also signs that there USED to be an exciting roller slide that thundered its way down the mountain, although I'm afraid that it is no more. We gave up on looking for things to do and headed back towards the city.

And finally, it was time to head back home. But first, we had one more stop in Tokyo for some unfinished business.