Kaemoka (Kyoto) to Yunogo Onsen
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Up fairly early to a bright sunny morning. After packing our bikes we set off towards our first waypoint, a shrine in a nearby town.
Just before the shrine we stopped at a combini for breakfast and a coffee – our standard start of the day as there’s very little else open at this time of the morning in Japan. Caffeinated up we reached the shrine, took a couple of pics, and wandered about. A rather enthusiastic monk in torn gloves welcomed us despite the early hour and gave us various bits of information. In the end we bought a couple of blessed artifacts – Ben for general good luck, and myself one for good weather and and fair sailing. The complex also had a shrine to a goddess of beauty where I stopped off at. Too late for me, but maybe it will help someone else..
After the shrine we drove past the local castle which had, unfortunately, had some major modern rework done to it. It was also surrounded on most sides by modern buildings, so wasn’t very picturesque. Anyway, onwards! We headed off on the 479 (?) which turned into a single-track forest road with a fair bit of gravel and debris after we left town, but opened up on a rather nice stretch of windy road after the pass. I guess different prefectures, different levels of maintenance?
Our next stop was a silver mine just past a rather nice dam. It was interesting touring the public part of the mine and seeing the evolution of mining techniques from hammer and chisel and narrow crawl holes to pneumatic drills to blasting and finally open-cut mining. After the tour we had a nice lunch at the mine complex as there was nothing else nearby and it was surprisingly good food despite the cafeteria-like setting.
We set off again on some nice roads and our next weypoints were a small cast-iron bridge, which we skipped, and the abandoned workings of an ore processing plant. I originally thought it was a hydroelectric power station when I planned the route, then thought it might have been a sewage works based on a (in japanese-only) information tablet on-site, but then found out the real purpose from a nearby street sign. It was quite impressive and gave me vibes of Horizon Zero Dawn.
We then had a long ride to our final destination and a lot of it was rather uninspiring. Still, the road was in great condition with very little traffic so no complaints.
Once we reached Yunogo Onsen our first stop was at a little toy museum Ben had found out about online, which had a rather esoteric collection of toys of all ages and a pretty big model train layout in N-scale. As we left the museum there was a family checking out my bike so I offered to let the kids sit on it. Cute.
Our accommodation was only a few minutes away and after a quick onsen we were off to see the animated clock which Ben had read up about. On the way we saw a matsuri ostensibly being held for the local girls soccer club.
After watching the animated clock we wandered back to the matsuri, but then decided to eat dinner in a nearby izakaya instead as we wanted to sit down. Old men are funny like that.. We had a rather standard izakaya dinner, now it’s back to the hotel for onsen and bed, Tomorrow we’re off to the tour destination – Hiroshima!
Drive: X km
Facilities: Yunogo Onsen hotel “Katsuragi”. We stayed in the annex, very modern and clean, but basic and a surprisingly long walk from the main hotel entrance. Could use facilities in main hotel, which has a nice onsen. Staff was very friendly. There was no undercover parking for the motorcycles, but they let us park in front of entrance on paving instead of the gravel parking lot.
