travel: the secret onsen

Japanese Secret Hot Spring by hiokinskywalker

He told me it would be hard to get there. "This time of the year there aren't many visitors so transport is scarce". Still he help me to figure the train + two bus it would take me to get there. It wasn't difficult. Japan is a funny mix of easy and complicated. But one thing is sure: if you can find a timetable saying there will be a train and two buses, there will be a train and two buses. While waiting for the second bus, in a stop in the middle of a deserted road where the first bus driver had left me (just pointing "get out, get out") I wondered if I was about to prove that sometimes that bus doesn't come. I was walking up and down the road nervously, thinking of a possible plan B if things went wrong. I looked for houses in the distance, I mentally calculated if we had drove that much from the train station. I thought to myself "what the hell are you doing here, sara?" alone in the middle of a road in some mountain in Japan, thousands of miles from home? But then the bus came and it drove me there. The most beautiful onsen I have ever been. Where I was served tea and bathed in the unbelievable soothing japanese waters.

(and photographed!)