Onsen experience & hiking in Asuka

Hello!

No more snow days recently, just cold weather. But it is warming up ever-so-slightly.

A few weeks back, I went to Nagoya and had my first experience with a Japanese hot bath (also called an onsen). About a year ago, I had watched this YouTube video about a capsule hotel in Nagoya - I finally got around to checking it out.

The video is a bit long, but it goes through a lot of amenities at the space. It is a capsule hotel, meaning you get a small space in which to sleep. But the hotel also had a lot of other free offerings - like rice, an artificial onsen and places to relax.

Capsule hotels are quite common here, I have stayed in several different ones. They are usually cheap - around $30-50 per night.

However, some of the hotel's features have changed since the video originally came out. The extra relaxation and work areas were gone, but they still had the onsen area and free food and drinks in the lounge.

Despite the changes, this was still a good way to get my first experience with Japanese onsen. Since the hotel was in a touristy area, a lot of the instructions about how to use the bath were in both Japanese and English.

When you first go somewhere in Japan, half of the experience is getting used to the "how it works" procedure.

Like the video showed, you take off your shoes after you check in but before you go up the elevator. The hotel has slippers you can use.

You then usually stop at the locker room to store your bags and change into the hotel clothes, which are pants and a robe-like shirt. You do not have to wear the hotel clothes, but it is convenient to do so.

After hanging out in the hotel room for a bit, I went to check out the onsen. When you first walk in, there is a bathroom area and then another locker room before the hot bath area. For Japanese onsen, you always use them completely naked, so you take off all clothes and store them in the locker room.

Once you enter the bath, there are some showers to clean yourself off with. There were also a lot of regular shower stations with various soaps and mirrors that you can use for a regular cleaning. I think some people use these to clean off before going into the bath.

In this hotel's bath, they just had one big hot water pool. It was nice to relax in. They also had a cold bath and a sauna. As I would later find out, this hot bath was fairly basic and small.

I went to another onsen a few weeks later near a town called Asuka in Nara prefecture. Nara's pretty close to Kobe, but getting to the town required me to take several different trains and a bus. This area of Nara also seemed to have a lot of "limited express trains" for which you had to buy special tickets to use. You can see Asuka on the map here.

The main thing I wanted to do in Asuka was check out the local mountain - Mt Takatori. You will see a lot of pictures from the area in the album below.

Even though the hike started with no snow, by the time I reached the top, the snow grew to a few inches. It was still easy to walk around in, though.

After hiking, I rode a bike several miles to a local onsen. This one was pretty new. Going to this one is almost like going to a movie theater in the US - it is just something that people here do.

The bath did not have a hotel attached, but it did have a restaurant and areas to relax after you spend time in the hot spring water. You can see pictures of what it looks like on this website.

It was pretty busy when I got into the locker room, much busier than the hotel's bath in Nagoya. The experience was a little bit of "culture shock" the room was packed with people walking around without clothes on.

In some ways, though, the experience was similar to the Nagoya hotel. There was an area for you to take a shower but this bath had many more pools to try. There were baths with different types of jacuzzi jets, differing temperatures (hot and cold) plus a salt water bath and an outdoor bathing area.

I spent at least an hour trying the different pools before taking a shower. It was relaxing. The bath also had massage chairs that you could use afterwards.

I also tried an onsen this past weekend near my home - it is by the sea and a short walk from my closest train station. This particular bath is quite nice - it has a lot of different bath types. And it has a nice outdoor area. It is a relaxing feeling to move from the different baths to the outdoor area and be able to see the night sky.

Overall, onsens seem to be quite cheap here - a normal fee is around $8. In Chicago a few years back, I looked into a similar experience but it was much more complicated, expensive (almost $200 for only a few hours) and you had to make a reservation to go.

For Japan, you can just walk in and use the bath. Most onsens here are fed by natural hot springs which are plentiful in Japan, so you can find onsens almost everywhere.

Until next time,

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Photos from this week!