A fantastic day out in Beppu, Kyushu's onsen (geothermal hot spring bath) capital. The Rough Guide is down on it and dead wrong — this place is fantastic, although you'd be lost without a Japanese speaker who can read a local onsen guide.
First stop is Ichinoide Kaikan. Order lunch and then head outdoors to their pools, where you strip off, scrub yourself all over and then sit in the warm water and look down the mountainside towards the sea. There are two sets of pools, male and female, and they switch them over every day to allow all a chance at each. The sulphurous water is milky and steams, and the lower pool is quite comfortably warm, though the upper pool is too hot to get into, even for the well-seasoned Japanese onsenite already relaxing in the water. Next to the pool they've built a steam room simply by sticking a wooden hut over a fumarole and you can move in close to the steam, or out out closer to the air, which on a sunny February day is just the right temperature for relief from the warmth.
Then we grab a taxi to the Shinon-ga Hama sand baths where you don a lightweight kimono and lie down on black sand warmed by geothermal water and the staff proceed to bury you in the sand — a row of entombed tourists like casketed Egyptian mummies, heads only showing, look out past the palm trees to the horizon on the inland sea. The weight of the warm sand is all-enveloping and towards the end of your allotted twenty minutes they pile yet more onto your chest. You can feel your pulse throb through your whole body from head to toe.
The main geothermal area is divided into nine jogoku or 'hells', each themed differently. Umi Jigoku ('sea hell') is dominated by a huge bubbling cauldron of boiling water and steam; Bozu Jigoku ('monk hell') has mudpots that throb upwards like the tonsured temples of buddhist monks. Yama Jigoku ('mountain hell') is a bit sadder, with a tiny zoo and a robotic hippo who rises from his submersed depression only when tourists arrive, to thrust his open jaw close against the wall of his pitiful pit and wait for hundred-yen bundles of potatoes to be thrown down his gullet. Everywhere steam rises from the hills, from pipes sticking up into the sky, from strange structures that look like oil-derricks, and frighteningly even from cracks and slabs in the pavement. A taxi driver tells us that for five thousand pounds you can get your house connected to the source of the hot water for life. Everywhere along the winding streets of Kannawa Onsen there are tiny private and public onsen, some free, some attached to ryokan, everywhere people soaking in the hot water.
The final hot bath (you have to do at least three in a day), Hyotan Onsen ('gourd spa') features a variety of indoor baths, one gourd shaped, one with a wooden bottom; a waterfall onsen, where hot water falls in spouts to pummel your shoulders into shape; and an outdoor pool (rotemburo) surrounded by trees and a rock garden, where you can again get into the warm water or sit on a rock in the slightly nippy evening air. Afterwards, a mini-banquet of sushi, noodles, chicken and blowfish awaits you on the low tables of the self-service restaurant.
