Ben Thanh Market: Destination Number One on a day of a little bit of sightseeing and a whole lotta food

We love markets. So our stay in Saigon had to include a stroll around Ben Thanh, a covered market so enormous and densely packed it’s easy to lose your bearings and find yourself wandering in circles. “That dried fish stall looks familiar… ermm… weren’t we here ten minutes ago?”

Every inch of space is filled with stalls selling everything you could ever need. Different trades occupy different sections – textiles; fresh meat and fish, jewellry, fruit and vegetables, clothes, radios, bread, dried fish and condiments, buttons, shoes, coffee… ahhh, coffee. We walked into the market past fishmongers selling eels wriggling in plastic bowls, unfamiliar looking fish flipping idly in large tanks, prawns, squid…. past butchers, their stalls hung with chickens, duck, slabs of rib…past mountains of multi-coloured fruit and vegetables and made a beeline for the coffee stalls. It was that time of day.

From all sides, voices called out for our custom. “Buy here? Good quality! Good prices! You come buy here!”

We picked a particularly colourful stall and the coffee seller pulled out a couple of plastic stools for us to sit on while they ground up some “Chon” coffee beans to make a good, strong Vietnamese-French style coffee. “Chon” is weasel coffee. What, you may ask, is weasel coffee? Chon coffee beans are called thus once they have been eaten by weasels, digested and, shall we say, passed through to the other side. Sufficiently cleaned, the beans are thereafter supposed to have had an especially deep flavour imparted to them. I’d heard of something similar – civet coffee, or some such, which is sold at ridiculous prices in Europe, which has had a similar digestive process applied to it, but this was the first time I’d tried something like this. It was rich, dark, satisfying, lovely coffee with a good kick. In Vietnam they add condensed milk to espresso coffee, just in case. It was pretty good served this way; something about drinking it from little glasses perched on plastic stools as the bustle of the market went on around us made it taste particularly good.

We wandered around and around for another hour or so. We got a bit lost in the textile section – sometimes the spaces between stalls was so narrow you had to step sideways, arms coming out of nowhere to grab you – “You come, you buy, cheap!”. I tried on a skirt that made me look like an elephant. “This makes me look like an elephant” I say. “No, no, no nooooooooo!!! You slim, looks great!”. I felt the sale was more important than the truth at this point so I declined to buy, but further on we bought two Ao Dai – the elegant slimline Vietnamese outfits that women wear – one in bright turquoise, the other sunshine yellow, for our two nieces in Sydney, aged 5 and 3. They looked great in them, by the way….

I bought some water-buffalo-horn teascoops for omiage (the all-important gifts to take back to people in Tokyo) and some delicate, dark-wood, water-buffalo-horn-topped teaspoons for me, at a dollar for six. Water buffalos are everywhere… so I hoped this was a by-product.

Once we were all marketed-out – reaching our market-wandering saturation point – we staggered out into the heat and the sun to look for a taxi. Buzzed up with coffee, we were ready for some lunch. Destination Number Two – Ban Xeo 46A. It was another one of those times of day.

 

Soggy in Saigon

May is the beginning of monsoon season for parts of Vietnam.  As Paul and I negotiated our way through the flowing traffic towards the vast train station (“ga” – in Vietnamese, as in “gâre” – a word left over from French colonialisation) the rain began to pour, a kind of massive condensation of the muggy humidity that pervaded the city.  In this kind of weather you need rubber flip flops or wellies.  We waded through puddles, observing the full colour of Vietnamese life splashing on all around us, and once at the station, booked our sleeper train journey to Nha Trang in two days’ time.

 

Our first taste of pho at a station café, a delicious steaming bowl of rice noodles in stock which you topped with fresh herbs, leaves, chillis, beansprouts and a squeeze of lime.  These noodles are eaten at breakfast, at lunch, as a snack.  I loved them. 

 

At tables nearby people lay stretched out on their seats for an afternoon nap beneath the waft of humming electric fans.  We sat at our table for a while, watching the station traffic come and go until the rain subsided.  This was how it would rain most days, especially in the south – an hour or two of heavy downpour before the sun came out and dried everything out.

 

We gave ourselves an introduction to the city by walking around some of the main sites – past the Reunification Palace, through the Cong Vien Van Hoa Park, around and into the late 19^th century main post office, with its impressive French colonial architecture, and the neo-romanesque Dame Cathedral beside it.  Most museums closed by 4pm and we made a mental log of what we wanted to see next day.

 

 

Later that evening we sat on the roof terrace of our hotel and ate hotpot, the wind occasionally blowing out the flames on our table top cooker.  Someone somewhere was singing hideously bad karaoke below us and all around the city mopeds beeped and honked.  This was a huge, vibrant, energetic city and we were going to need all the sleep we could get to make the most of the next day’s explorations.  An early bedtime was in order.

 

 

 

Healing Pools and Poisonous Soup – Cambodia Day Two

A decent breakfast in the hotel and a reasonably early start for the next round of Angkor temples to explore. Again, we headed into the monsoon forest by car, showing our passes and the first stop was the compact Banteay Srei, considered the highest achievement in the art and architecture of classic Angkor civilisation.

This temple is considered one of the most beautiful with its volcanic rock of different subtle shades of green, pink and yellow – and because of the intricate, deep carvings that are in exceptionally good condition. Bas-reliefs depicting myths and stories about Shiva, to whom the temple was dedicated, were deeply and delicately carved.

More temples and archeological sites; Pre Rup, East Mebon, Ta Som, Neak Pean, Prea Khan and Phnomh Bateng.

Of all these I loved the last three. Neak Prean is not so much a temple as a hospital built by (here he is again) the philanthropic Jayavarman VII. A place of healing, Neak Pean is an island temple within an island located in the middle of the “Sea of Victory”, Jayatataka, a vast reservoir lake, or baray, measuring 3,500 by 900 metres. Dedicated to the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, symbol of mercy, the central island rises up in the centre of four pools, each of which is fed by a different gargoyle – heads of a human, a horse, a lion and elephant. To one side, a sculpture of the mythical horse, Balan, who saves all those in need, is seen carrying desperate men to safety, toward the central island.

The lakes were empty of water – they are full only at the end of the monsoon season – and Paul and I clambered in and out of each one in an anti-clockwise direction from south to east as those coming to be healed used to do 900 years ago, finally ending up on the central island. It’s said that pilgrims took the waters at each pool, picking the herbs and plants that grew around each of them and taking them as healing medicine in order to get well. The power of suggestion is a great thing. I came bouncing out of there full of energy, racing up steps as if I were eighteen again.

Having been “healed” I tested my luck by trying out a dish that Vong told me was “poison soup”. At another airy, bamboo and rush-roofed eatery in the jungle we sat and ate lunch and I just couldn’t resist trying out this soup, called samlor ka kor, after hearing Vong’s story. During the reign of one of the ancient Angkor Kings, it was found that one of the royal retinue, usually eunuchs, had somehow escaped the snip and had conducted an illicit affair with one of the royal concubines. The court conspired to get rid of this pseudo-eunuch, but felt unable to kill him in too obvious a manner. They therefore concocted a soup using the most poisonous plants they knew of and cooked it up with fish and served it to him. Their intended victim wolfed it down and asked for more as it was so delicious.

Not only did he not die, the soup went on to become a delicacy and continues to appear on Cambodian menus today. “Not using poisonous leaves any more though” said Vong. I was quite glad about that. It was deliciously herby with a chilli zip, like a soupy green fish curry and I lived to tell the tale.

At Preah Khan we saw the first of the temples which have been left as they were when they were found after long centuries of abandonment. Enormous trees grew out of, on top of and through the temple which had become swallowed up by the nature around it. We would see an even more impressive example of this the next day – Ta Prohm – which was used for filming Tomb Raider, on which more on the next post.

We ended our day of temple visits with a climb up to Phnomh Bateng. “Phnomh” means “mountain” in Khmer, and this one was one of the very few around. Temples built on flat ground had several levels rising up to a peak in the centre, symbolically representing a holy mountain. This one, said Vong, was a temple on a real mountain.

He left us to climb up and explore – we began our ascent accompanied by traditional Cambodian music played by men who eked out a living this way since losing limbs stepping on hidden mines. There are still many in Cambodia.

Vong had brought us here to watch the sunset over Angkor. As we approached the summit the temple appeared, and we clawed our way up extremely steep sets of stairs to get to the top. Still full of beans from my visit to Neak Pean, I raced to the top. All around us the light was becoming golden as the sun began to set. The whole world was there at the temple at the top of the mountain and we could hear Spanish, Korean, Japanese, Italian, Russian, Chinese, Swedish, Portuguese and of course, Khmer. Normally I’d balk at being surrounded by so many people but the atmosphere was that of a party. Everyone smiling and chatting and sharing in the experience, including a group of monks whose robes glowed bright in the light of the setting sun.

All around us stretched an extraordinary view – the dense jungle-forest; Angkor Wat, the whole of the massive East Baray reservoir, gleaming silver, many temples. Far on the horizon, storm clouds drifted, flashing occasional lightning. It was a spectacular and dramatic sight.

We, along with the world up there, watched the sun go down. It started to become dark and a few spots of rain announced that it was time to go; steep steps had to be negotiated safely while there was still light – there was no artificial lighting anywhere in the vicinity.

We arrived back in town and had a bite to eat at the stylish looking FCC Angkor hotel restaurant. We weren’t terribly impressed with the food and wished we’d eaten at the street-side restaurant near our hotel which was always full of Cambodians. We’d save that for tomorrow. Once back at the hotel, I slept better than I’d done for months.

 

Cambodia, Day One

I’m blown away.  I’ve seen pictures, documentaries and read descriptions about the Angkor temples – Angkor Wat, in particular – but none of these prepared me for the incredible reality.

 

[An aside:  I'm currently uploading this from Nha Trang in Vietnam.  It's a hell of a struggle to upload these posts - internet speeds are s...l....o....w.   I'm watching a baby gecko on the wall beside me as I wait for this post to upload, from one of the very places there are here with internet.  It's pretty basic, a hole in the wall!  As each photo takes fifteen minutes to upload, and one post can take well over an hour, I can only upload every once in a while, and with fewer pictures.  Thanks for your patience!  I'll upload all photos to Flickr once I have better internet access.  Now, back to Cambodia...]

 

On our first day, as with each of the four days we were in Siem Reap, Vong, our guide, collected us from our hotel.  On the edge of town we drove through a checkpoint where we bought our three day passes for visiting the Angkor heritage sites.  Then on we continued, down a single paved road lined with rows of wooden and bamboo huts on stilts, dogs, bare-footed children and chickens running about.  Eventually the huts gave way to thick forest and suddenly we reached a towering gate topped by vast bas-relief sculptures of four gently smiling faces.  This was the South Gate of Angkor Thom, the great ancient city of Angkor, and these faces, Vong told us, were the different faces of the Buddha, representing his four aspects of loving kindness, compassion, charity and sympathy.

 

Before the gate lay a long bridge flanked on either side by enormous sculptures.  This was the first of many naga sculptures we would see during out visits to various Angkor temples.  The seven heads of the naga, or serpent, reared up as balustrade ends, while on the right side, demons pulled at the snake’s body and on the opposite side, gods pulled back in an eternal tug-of-war.

 

 

Here was an illustration of the story of the Churning of the Sea of Milk – from the Ramayana, an epic of Hindu mythology.  Here was our first glimpse of the Hindu and Buddhist mix that would characterise some of the temples here.  In this particular scenario, recreated in a number of different sites, Vishnu umpires the tug of war, standing on a turtle’s back, as the demons and gods pull alternately at the naga, wrapped around a mountain which is twisted back and forth in the sea of milk, in order to create the elixir of life.  This took place during the creation of the universe.

 

I saw this as the circle of life, bad and good, bad and good, cycling back and forth in eternity. 

 

This was to be the first of many stories that Vong would tell us – complex myths involving the main characters – the Hindu gods and their consorts – Vishnu and Lakshmi, Shiva and Uma, Brahma, all of whom created many long stories involving jealousy, anger, love, forgiveness, a veritable Holy Soap Opera.  The temples of the Angkor period reflect Khmer beliefs, a mixture of Hinduism and Buddhism, and the stories are told in the bas-reliefs, the sculptures and architecture of each of the temples.  Most feature the three gods, Vishnu, Shiva and Brahma – though most are dedicated to Shiva or Vishnu. It would take a lifetime to learn and discover all there is to the Angkor temples, I would imagine; a rich source of study.  There are countless books on the subject and there is, no doubt, still much that is mysterious about the place.  We found Michael D Coe’s book, Angkor and the Khmer Civilisation (Thames & Hudson), to be fascinating and informative, though it was Vong who brought everything to life for us.

 

We drove on under the bridge and further into the forest.  Coming upon a clearing, suddenly, there appeared a vast stretch of water – the Angkor Wat moat – then, the ancient towers of Angkor Wat itself.  As the first proper glimpse of these ancient temples it was breathtaking.  We continued to drive past, Vong teling us that we would be back later.  There was another temple he wanted to show us first.

 

We drove deeper into the monsoon forest until we reached another clearing.  This was to be the first and, I think, one of the most beautiful temples we saw – Bayon.

  

This was built in the twelfth century by Jayavarman VII, whose name cropped up again and again in our tour.  It seems he was considered the greatest of all the Khmer kings, a Mayahanist Buddhist, builder of hospitals and temples and extender of Khmer territory.  He built Angkor Thom, a city within a city, covering three square kilometres.  Many of the temples and hospitals he built, along with those built by other kings – including Angkor Wat – lie within it.

 

The kindly, smiling, beautiful faces of the Buddha that we saw on the South Gate of Angkor Thom and which characterise other temples built by Jayavarman VII were everywhere we turned in Bayon (there are fifty-four in total).  Like many of the other Angkor Temples, it was built on five levels, the layout reminding me of Inca ruins.  Well-preserved and graceful bas-relief sculptures were carved everywhere – graceful apsaras – dancing celestial nymphs – on many of the pillars, and representations of daily Khmer life.

 

 

 

Vong, who had studied for years before becoming an official guide, clearly knew his stuff – including where to get the perfect “Kodak moment”, nose to nose with one of the faces of the Buddha.

 

Following Bayon, we visited Baphuon,  built by the King Udayadityavarman II in the eleventh century, which had suffered great damage from collapse during monsoon season in the 1940s, then had its restoration, led by the French, severely disrupted by the Khmer Rouge.  Now, it seems, the painstaking task of putting the temple back together, piece by piece, was fully underway. 

 

Next, Phimeanakas, Suryavarman I’s state temple; it was said that in its top tower there lived a nine-headed naga snake woman, and that the king went there every night to sleep with her.  A more probable story about Suryavarman was his building of the impressive West baray, a reservoir 8 kilometres long and 1.4 kilometres wide, holding about 48 million cubic metres of water. It is so big it can be seen from outer space.  It had symbolic, as well as practical purpose – representing the Primordial Ocean.

 

We made a brief stop for lunch, Vong taking us to a local place where we sat at tables shaded by a woven rush mat roof, hammocks slung beside some of the tables where locals took refuge from the intense humidity and heat outside.  Paul and I ordered each ordered typical Cambodian dishes – Amok, a soupy coconut milk based stew served in a coconut, and Sour Soup – a… sour soup.  I asked Vong what the Khmer name for Sour Soup was.  “Sour Soup”, he told me.  Both were served with a plate of rice (chicken Amok for Paul, fish Sour Soup for me) and were herby, tangy, spicy with chilli and delicious.

 

Vong then took us to see the Elephant Terrace – a vast parade ground built by Jayavarman VII – the terrace adorned, as the name suggests, by enormous bas-relief carvings of an elephant procession – and opposite, a vast open area where it was said elaborate processions and displays took place, including large towers strung with rope for tight-rope walking acrobats to walk across to entertain the king and his guests.

 

We saw out our first day with the most famous and well-known of all the temples, Angkor Wat.  Built in the early twelfth century by Suryavarman II, this place was huge and impressive.  The entrance to the temple was along the Rainbow Bridge, straddling the vast 200 metre wide, 1.5 kilometre square moat.  All around, sugar palms, the national tree of  Cambodia, rose up, the damp lushness of the dense foliage everywhere lending to the exotic atmosphere.  Half way along the bridge, we watched a group of giggling boys take turns to leap from a great height into the moat and clamber up ancient stairs back up to the bridge again.  I imagined countless generations of young boys doing the same thing throughout the centuries that had passed since the buillding of the temple.

 

Inside, we climbed up increasingly steep stairs from one level of the temple to another – the outer, lower level comprising vast long corridors decorated with extraordinary bas-relief carvings illustrating Hindu mythologies.  At each higher level, narrower corridors and steeper stairs, with more and more carvings depicting Vishnu, to whom the temple was dedicated.  Four massive pools, representing the four oceans, are positioned at each corner, filling up during each wet season and reflecting back the strange shadows of the temple.  The extraordinary layout of the temple, aligned symbolically in a way that can only have been designed by builders using sophisticated measuring tools, can also be seen from outer space.

 

 

 

Breathless from the impressive array of temples we had seen, as well as from the humidity and heat, we were dropped off back at our hotel for a freshen up before Vong picked us up again to take us to a “dinner dance show”.  We are not big fans of such performances laid on for tourists but went along anyway.  A large all-you-can-eat buffet was on offer, with a wide range of Cambodian and Chinese food – and later in the evening a dance troupe performed various traditional Cambodian dances accompanied by live music which sounded to my ears like a mixture of Thai (finger cymbals), Indonesian (gamelan type instrument) and Chinese (string instrument) music, with drums.  The women danced with graceful, curved fingers familiar to me from Thai dance perfomances, flexing their feet and slowly stepping forward, heads bent.  We ended up enjoying it far more than we’d expected – and more than the food.  We knew we’d find better where the locals liked to eat.

 

After the heat, we were tempted when we got back to our hotel, to have a swim in its lovely looking pool.  But we were too tired.  I was asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.  The temples of Angkor filled my dreams.

 

A whole lot of Himeji and just a taste of Kobe

Another shinkansen ride and bento lunch and we arrived at Himeji station. With some relief we stuffed our heavy rucksacks into a locker and despite the rain, decided to walk to Himeji Castle, the main attraction for us in this city.

I told Paul about amayadori – taking shelter from the rain – and the romantic connotations it has in Japan. In the UK, one might draw a love heart enclosing the intials of the two that are in love. In Japan, the heart is replaced with a stylised umbrella, the names on either side of the umbrella handle. Someone later pointed out that this is only easily done in Japan, where traditionally, words were written vertically, from top to bottom. Nonetheless, the idea is that it is rather romantic and sweet to share an umbrella to shelter from the rain. Ah, if only this idea caught on in the UK – the Brits would become a nation of romantics from constant opportunities for amayadori.

So Paul and I walked down the long and wide avenue, trying to be romantic under our shared umbrella despite our squelching, rain-sodden shoes, heading for the misty horizon out of which rose the upper levels of Himeji Castle. Its much photographed white walls and grey tile roofs tower over the city, a permanent reminder of its ancient heritage.

The castle is another World Cultural Heritage site, and with good reason. It is extremely well-preserved, the castle complex remaining as it did when it was completed in 1618. Building first began on the site in 1333, commissioned by the first ruler of the area, Norimura Akamatsu. Successive clans built further on the site – the Kotera, Kuroda and Ikeda clans – with shogun such as Ieyasu Tokugawa, lords such as the Matsudairas, the Sakakibaras and so on each making their mark on the place. The final lord to inhabit the castlewas Tadazui Sakai, who moved in in 1749. The family remained there until the feudal Shogunate system disappeared in the Meiji Restoration of 1868.

Constructed in such a way that any enemy attempting to break into the inner sanctum of the castle would be thwarted at every opportunity, the path meandering uphilll to the main part of the castle was divided by gate after gate; I imagined myself an ambitious intruder on horseback, envisioning obstacle after obstacle presenting itself to me – a series of four or five enormous wooden gates eight inches thick and reinforced with iron – once through those, having to duck and dive from the shower of arrows launched from the many arrow-holes in the walls of the six stories above, and rocks thrown down through specially designed slots on each floor. Even if I besieged the castle with an army, and those inside had closed themselves in behind the protection of their many solid gates and wallls, there was a well, and enough rice and provisions in their massive stores to keep them going for long enough to dispirit any army.

Even if I had been lucky to reach the interior of the main tower, the creaking wooden floors would have given me away – little cubby holes in every corner would have released hidden ninja to attack (that’s what they think the cubby holes were for) and I would have had to work my way up to the very top floor, climbing steep stairs up the entire six stories, fighting past samurai who had their bows and arrows, and later, guns and ammunitiion easily to hand hanging from hooks pinned into every wall.

As it was, I was glad to be a tourist, climbing up each level unhindered so that I could safely enjoy the view from the top floor – quite a sight – after paying my respects at a little Shinto shrine there. There was a shrine located on the top of the hill where Akamatsu wanted to build the castle, and so it was moved. After that the place was felt to have been cursed by nature, so it was placed back inside the main tower of the castle. It’s now said that it is haunted by the ghost of Miyamoto Musashi, a great swordsman who was killed there.

Later, we walked down long corridors in the West Bailey Buildiing, the living quarters of the Princess Sen, the eldest daughter of the second shogun in the Tokuawa government. This place felt less designed for war, and more for pleasure and peaceful living. The rooms all looked out over beautiful gardens and the many rooms off the main corridor would have been filled with the many maidservants of the Princess, all of whom, it is said, loved a laughand a gossip. I could imagine it must have been a lively place. It stopped raining and the sunlight poured in through the windows.

It seemed a good opportunity to visit Kokou-en, a ten minute walk away from the main castle complex entrance. This garden was only created in 1992 to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the creation of the Himeji municipality. Its nine gardens are so well established, however, with mature trees and moss-covered stones, that you would never think it was so new. Again, cherry blossom was magnificent here, and we wandered along meandering paths winding through boulders, across bridges over miniature waterfalls and ponds full of enormous koi carp.

A bamboo garden felt fresh and springlike, with new leaves made for a pale green mist; a tea garden, complete with traditional Japanese tea house, was quiet and contemplative. Paul and I took tea there – a bowl of deicious, frothy, bitter matcha tea and a delicate bean paste rice cake.

Which led my thoughts to other things. The garden was about to close, and although we needed to head for Kobe on the next shinkansen, I wasn’t going to leave Himeji without getting hold of some tama tsubaki, recommended by our friend Michiko san. She says it is her favourite! Tama tsubaki means peony bud, because that’s just what these sweets look like – pale pink buds. Inside there is a white bean paste; the enclosing mochi (pounded rice paste) is soft and toothsome.

Most places near the castle seemed to have sold out, so popular is this confection; but someone directed us to a department store near the station. As always in Japan, its basement was dedicated entirely to food, and there we bought ourselves a box, and a niku manju (Chinese meat dumping) as a snack. We were hungry.

A short shinkansen ride later and we were in Kobe. Like Hakata, poor old Kobe hardly got a look in. It was pouring with rain and we arrived late – tired and hungry. We had just enough energy to go and eat some of the famed Kobe beef at a surprisingly reasonable price in the hotel teppanyaki restaurant. Teppanyaki is a relatively recent culinary development in Japan – less than 100 years old, where meat, seafood and vegeables are cooked on a steel griddle right in front of you by a chef with exceptional knife skills. The meat was, as expected, melt in the mouth tender and delicious. All we could do was eat and go to bed. We did have one drink in the bar afterwards on the top floor of our skyscraper hotel. We looked out through the rain to the distant hills, lit with beacons in the pattern of anchors and ships to welcome sailors into the port. I spent some infant years here, but remember nothing about the place. I was sorry not to have had more time and less inclement weather to see it. Like Nagasaki, it is a port that has seen the influx of outside influences – Western as well as Chinese – and has a large Chinatown area. But it would have to wait for another time – we had come to the end of our journey. The next day the shinansen would take us back to Tokyo where we would spend the next stage of our trip – nearly three weeks – meeting family and friends. The two week journey to Kyushu and back was unforgettable, fabulous. But we felt pretty tired too. And so after just one drink we fell deep asleep. I dreamed about tadpoles and giant toads that lived in the sea.

 

Ghosts of the past in Kurashiki

We let the shinkansen whisk us away from Kyushu and back towards the big island of Honshu.  Our time there had been much too short and we hoped we’d be back again before too long to explore some more.  Two weeks with a car would be a good option, to meander around the mountains in the interior and stay in some of the more remote hot springs.  We’d also want to bring our hiking boots and take the four-hour ferry to Yakushima, the wild island south west of Kagoshima, which has been designated a UNESCO Nature Heritage site and which inspired Miyazaki Hayao’s extraordinary animated film “Princess Mononoke”.
Our next stop was Kurashiki, in Okayama prefecture, about 600kms away.  Our friendly taxi driver, who drove us from the station to our ryokan told us that Okayama was the perfect place to live in Japan – temperate, even climates and hardly ever any earthquakes.  The town of Kurashiki was a prosperous, thriving trade centre during the Edo Period, about 400 years ago; the river and canals were the routes along which merchants transported and plied their wares.  Now it is a historical town, a genteel and popular tourist destination.

We were to stay in a beautiful ryokan in the centre of the historic centre.  About three hundred years old, it was the oldest place we’d stayed in in Japan so far.  Its traditional old stone-flagged entrance faced out onto a picturesque miniature canal, conveniently close to the tiny humpbacked Nakabashi footbridge.  We left our luggage at the inn to explore the Bikan area of Kurashiki – the oldest, historical part of the town, preserved so that it looked exactly as it would have done centuries ago.  With the bright sunshine, the place looked even more beautiful.

Our first stop was the Ohara Museum of Art, an elegant Palladian style buliding set back from the main street in the Bikan area.  This wonderful art gallery was established in the 1930s and houses a collection of exceptionally good taste with works by Gaugin, Picasso, Renoir, Monet and a various modern Japanese painters as well as pottery by Bernard Leach and other potters inspired by Japanese ceramics.  We spent a peaceful hour or so drinking all this in before continuing to stroll around the town.

As the sun began to set we strolled around until we found a steep flight of steps up to a small hill – climbing up, we discovered the entrance to Achi shrine – then descended back to the main street of Kurashiki’s Bikan area to have a long soak in the bath before dinner.

Our rooms in the inn were huge – a large tatami area, and another newly renovated room for sleeping in, surprisingly, with western-style beds and a huge plasma screen TV attached to the wall.  The bathroom was also newly kitted out, with a deep Japanese bath with jacuzzi jets and beautifully arranged cosmetics.  It looked immaculate.

 

Dinner was something else – the chef had made huge efforts with the presentation – dishes laid out like ikebana flower arrangements that were so beautiful it was a shame to eat them.

  

 The menu was printed in English and great care had been taken to make the food accessible to foreigners.  It was a curious sensation for me, being so used to staying in Japanese ryokan with my mother as a child and being treated as Japanese, to have a translator arrive in our room to explain all the dishes.  I felt grateful and excluded at the same time.  The rice course was a curious selection of cooked and vegetarian sushi – delicious – but very different from what one would expect in a ryokan catering to Japanese guests.  Later, the lovely lady who was employed by the ryokan to translate explained that the majority of guests at Ryokan Kurashiki were westerners.  They had made changes to the menu to cater for western tastes.  The dish they normally served at this point always came back untouched, which was why they had come up with a fusion dish instead.  I asked her what was normally served.

“Taichazuke”  she said.  Inwardly I wept.  A favourite!  I used to eat it when visiting my maternal grandmother’s family in Kyushu–? sea bream on rice, with green tea.  It is a delicacy I would have loved to have eaten.
The translator and I had an interesting discussion; the topic in question: how to cater for Western tourists and yet keep things authentically Japanese?  There is so much a foreign visitor needs to know before they can stay in such a place.   No slippers on tatami.  How to take a bath.  That dinner is usually served in your rooms – and often, you sleep on the floor in the same room after taking a bath.  On top of this, to those unaccustomed to Japanese food, some things can be a challenge, with new textures (slimy, for example), tastes (simmered sea bream eggs and pepper tree sprouts).  So do you serve up Western food instead?  Then, the authenticity of the experience is lost.

Many ryokan just go ahead and keep to the menu they would serve Japanese customers.  But as the translator said, a lot of food then goes to waste.  It is an interesting challenge.

Once we had eaten up our delicious food, we went to bed and I immediately fell into a deep sleep.  At half past midnight, I woke up with a start.  Paul was fast asleep and snoring and everything was quiet and dark.  I knew that we and another couple were the only guests at the ryokan and the stillness was all-enveloping.  At the same time, I felt inexplicably and completely spooked!  I couldn’t get back to sleep, overwhelmed with the strange sensation that I was being watched…. Like a six year old, I pulled the covers over my head, my heart pounding.  I switched on the TV at low volume to try and chase the shadows away and after a while I felt less alarmed, as if whatever was watching had gone away.  After an hour or so I switched off the TV and went back to sleep.

In the morning, Paul told me that he too had woken up suddenly in the small hours, hearing footsteps in our tatami living room on the other side of the door…. and I told him about my own restlessness.  Having scared me witless by looking through our camera pictures and telling me that the last photo on there was of us sleeping (a ghoulish joke), we went through to the dining area to have breakfast.

I asked our translator whether this ryokan, being so old, had any ghost stories attached and she said:  well yes, many people ask us if there are ghosts here and things have been seen and experienced here.  In fact, there are some rooms are staff will not enter alone…. goosebumps raised up on my arms.

You may poo-poo such things; whether real or not, Japan is full of fantastic ghost stories.  The idea might be, here, that this ancient inn, inhabited by generations of innkeepers and their families, is still home to generations past who are curious about the renovations and new customers, especially if they are foreigners.  Well, if you have lived all your life in the inn, running it as a place for travellers to stay, wouldn’t you want to stick around and see what became of it?  Although I’d been spooked, I didn’t feel, at any point, that I was under threat.  I just felt I was being watched – and in the middle of the night, that can seem alarming.

At breakfast, the sun was out, and things no longer seemed so ghostly.  We had a little time to explore some more, so we decided to visit the Japanese Rural Toy Museum.

 

This is a treasure trove, founded in 1967 and hidden in a series of old, black-tiled warehouses, displaying thousands of colourful folkcraft toys.  There are bells, whistles, tops, dolls, traditional Kurashiki Hariko (hand-painted, rustic papier-mache figurines) wooden toys, kites and masks covering every shelf, from floor to ceiling.  An enormous wooden spinning top is displayed along with its Guiness Book of World Records certificate for the longest human-powered spin of one hour, eight minutes and fifty seconds.  The top was hand-made by the owner of the toy museum, Hiroyuki Ohga, and the Guiness Superlatives certificate is in his name.  He guided us about the museum in very good English and explained that the world record had since been broken by someone else, using a custom-made top Ohga san had designed.  It seemed a generous gesture.

On our way out we bought a tiny daruma, a stylised, round Bodhisattva figurine made of colourfully decorated papier-mache.  One is meant to fill in one eye with black ink while making a wish for a successful conclusion to a project; the other eye is filled in once the wish has been granted.  Paul and I decided to get one for ourselves as a good luck charm for settling into our new life in Australia – to wish for good jobs and a comfortable home we loved.

Behind the counter I spotted some familiar pictures framed on the wall.  Professor Yunoki’s textile pictures!  He is a wonderful folk artist who is a friend of my father’s.  Yunoku Sensei is from Kurashiki and it made sense to see his work in the toy museum, whose objects embody the hand-crafted, child-like playfulness embraced in Yunoki Sensei’s art.  More of his work was hung upon the walls of a little cafe attached to the museum.  In the sunlight the bright pictures added to the light-hearted joyfulness of the place.  All thoughts of spooks and ghostliness were chased away.

Onwards, onwards.  We could have explored some more in Kurashiki.  But we needed to get back to Tokyo before our JR Passes expired and we still had more to see.  Picking up our luggage from the inn, we made our way to the train station for a shinkansen that would take us further east again, to Himeji, where we were to make a flying visit to the great castle there.  We were booked to stay the night in Kobe, so we would need to make the most of the four or five hours we would get to explore this historic site before we headed closer and closer back to our temporary ‘home’ in Tokyo.

 

Trying not to get fatta in Hakata

“How much?!” Paul exclaims in horror.

We are staying in the Hotel Nikko Fukuoka, stylish, modern and immaculate.

We gaze at the photograph in the hotel information file.  A gorgeous swimming pool in a glass atrium, a gym, spa, sauna. 3000 yen per visit per person (fifteen squids, UK people).  Great if you have an afternoon to splash, soak and be massaged but we just need to work off some of the bulk that’s accumulated after so many (albeit healthy) dinners.  We decide to DIY Keep Fit on the cheap.

Paul is down to his boxer shorts and is running on the spot in our hotel room:, thump thump thump.  God help whoever’s in the room downstairs. “Hup two three four!”. He’s doing the Jane Fonda thing, minus leotard and pink legwarmers. For the next half hour we take turns to be aerobics instructor, making it up as we go along. I struggle when it’s Paul’s turn to guide us through the push ups. I’m laughing too hard and I keep collapsing in a heap.

We’ve worked up enough of a sweat to feel justified in our mission for our very short stay in Fukuoka (also, confusingly, known as Hakata), a port city on the north-eastern tip of Kyushu. Having indulged in a second sand steam bath in Ibusuki that morning, we didn’t arrive in Hakata until late afternoon – our sleek shinkansen traversing the island of Kyushu from bottom to top in one speedy swoop along about 300 kilometres.  Poor Hakata, so much more deserving of a long visit from us, but we were heading back eastwards the next day, so we only had that night to enjoy there.

We did, as I say, have a mission in this city.  Seek and find Tomo-chan, a yatai (street food stall) run by the friend of the sister of a friend of a friend who I was introduced to back in London. As it happens, Tomo-chan also featured on some photocopied gourmet guide pages for Hakata that Okuda san in London kindly brought us just before we left the UK.

Hakata is famous for its good food, and especially for its street stalls (yatai).

Row upon row of stalls line the river, port and streets all over the city.  Each of these yatai make me think of Dr Who’s Tardis.  Clearly, they’ve been wheeled to the location, a single package on wheels. But they open up to include a little roof, awnings, counters, grill cookers, steamers, shelves full of glasses, fridges….a whole little restaurant bar on wheels unfolds.  From the outside these look ever so inviting, the warm glow from the lanterns enticing you in, the voices of customers hidden away inside filtering out into the street; wafts of delicious smells make your mouth water. Cosily arranged so that customers lining the tiny counters feel tucked away intimately inside the noren (short curtains), the interior of the yatai is warmed by the rising heat from the steaming vats of oden (Japanese ”hotch potch”, so the translation goes – fish cakes of different shapes, flavours and sizes, whole eggs, chunks of daikon mooli, potato, all slow-stewed in a seaweed broth and eaten with yellow mustard). The proprietors busy themselves over yakitori (skewered chicken) charcoal grills, serve up ice-cold draught beer and warm sake to rosy-cheeked customers.

We take a long time to find Tomo-chan. We decide to walk from our hotel to add to the exercise quota.  Although we’ve been told which street it’s on, and that it’s opposite a big Japanese bank building, we get a bit lost. There aren’t any rows of stalls to be seen, and it looks an unlikely place to find a yatai.  We ask a passing office worker going home. He’s friendly and helpful, peers at our map under the light of a street light, squints at it, then at a speck of golden light opposite the vast road and says – “Isn’t that Tomo-chan, over there?”.  Sure enough. Tomo-chan’s stall squats, tiny, at the foot of some vast buildings.  We walk over to it – it’s tiny and from the lively conversation audible from outside the noren there seem to be five or so customers in there.  Suddenly I feel a bit shy – it’s so small, and our entrance feels like an intrusion – but I take a deep breath, push aside the noren and shuffle inside. There’s a pause in the conversation as the customers, a group of funky young twenty-somethings clock these one-and-a-half foreigners lumbering into the tiny space.

We squidge up next to them, order some beers. The conversation resumes again. We’re fine, settled in!

Two young men are manning the stall – one plays host and clearly knows the other customers quite well.  The other is standing, sweating, before the hot charcoal grill, cooking up the skewers to order.

In front of us at the counter, a glass chill cabinet (how? How? It’s just a tiny wagon stall!) is filled with skewered chicken, octopus tentacles, gingko nuts, slices of marinated beef rump, beef tongue, air dried shishamo – a slender, silvery fish – behind the young man chatting to us, two enormous pots, one filled with boiling water, the other with tonkotsu broth (pork stock), piles of ramen noodles, shelves of gleaming beer glasses, bottles. Beside him, the obligatory vat of steaming oden, and the smells from the tonkotsu, the oden, the charcoal grill on which skewers of juicy chicken morsels, marinated beef fillet are sizzling, all just make it irresistible.

We order, we eat, we order again. Whole skewered green capscicums, the charcoal roast rendering them soft and savoury, with a bit of a kick; gingko nuts, chewy and soft and nutty-tasting; plates of beef fillet (sagari) and beef tongue (tan), tender and oozing with a dark, juicy sauce. Shishamo fish, fresh off the grill, huge white scallops charcoal-grilled and dressed with a squeeze of lemon juice.

A few beers in and we are part of the crowd. We make our occasional contribution to the conversation.  Paul orders another beer – in Japanese.  I tell the chap behind the counter that we have come to Hakata just to eat here, and that the stall was recommended to us because Tomo-chan was run by “the friend of a sister of a friend of a friend back in London”. They ask the name of this friend of a friend.

Kondo san, I tell them.

Aaah!!! says the one manning the grill.  This stall’s owned by my brother, who isn’t here today.  But I think I know his friend Kondo san.

A connection! He knows who I’m talking about.

Is Kondo san a man? he asks.

Er, no.

Never mind!  He says he’s sure he’s heard the name, but his brother would know for sure.  Anyway, the food’s great, nothing else matters.  We’re just eternally grateful for this fabulous recommendation.  So we eat some more.

We want oden too, but we knew we couldn’t possibly leave without ordering one of the vast bowls of Hakata ramen, the specialty of this town, noodles in pork broth topped with bean sprouts, so we decide to reserve what little space we have left in our groaning stomachs for that.  Our neighbours, who had a head start on us, have already slurped theirs down and the sight, smell and sound of this was just too much.  We want ours NOW.

We watch our friend behind the counter expertly scoop two piles of ramen noodles up into a giant sieve scoop and drop them into boiling water.  Two bowls put out on the counter are filled with steaming, creamy tonkotsu broth. The noodles are vigorously drained of excess water (is he on a mini trampoline? Paul asks – for his draining action is very bouncy behind the counter) are dropped into the broth. Slices of pork, bean sprouts, spring onion are generously piled on top. Each steaming bowl us placed before us on the counter and we tuck in.

It’s heaven. The broth is rich, porky in a good way, mouthwatering; the noodles firm and pert, the spring onion adding the necessary zing. The delicate slices of marinated pork are tender, soft, the crowning glory on an absolutely great bowl of noodles.

By this time, another group of customers has arrived and the little stall is now full, all ten seats taken; convivial conversation flows, punctuated with laughter, while glass after glass of beer and sake is replenished. The charcoal grill sizzles, the proprietor’s brother fanning the glowing embers and wafting more tempting smells our way.  But our stomachs are beginning to protest, gently.

It was getting late and we had an early start in the morning. An hour and a half had slipped by quite easily and it was time to find our way back to the hotel. Weaving slightly, and loosening our belts, we saunter along the river, over the bridge, through the brightly-lit night-time city, Arriving back in our beautiful room in our hotel, we gaze out below us at the twinkling city and say a wistful goodbye.  Hakata, our one-night stand.  We loved what we’d seen of it.  And then, gazing down at our ramen-filled bellies, we knew that our encounter with Hakata had definitey made us fatta.  Paul, get those leg-warmers on.

 

Black pork, volcanoes, black vinegar and bright smiles in Kagoshima

We got the most fantastic train back from Hayato to Kagoshima City.  Run by JR Kyushu, we got the Hayato no Kaze (“Wind of Hayato”), a direct train that took just over an hour – too short, for such a fabulous ride.  A sleek, polished, old-fashioned-looking black train, Hayato no Kaze was kitted out inside with pale Japanese pine, with woven rubbish baskets and professional, uniformed ladies bringing delicious coffee and cake to you on little wooden trays.  Large floor-to-ceiling windows looked out to the sea and the great volcanic island of Sakurajima which could be seen just across the water more or less throughout the entire journey as the train chuffed along the coast.  Large, outward facing wooden bench-chairs had been positioned directly opposite the windows so that passengers could comfortably admire the view.

  

We were lucky to be able to see the volcano on our journey, because by the time we arrived in Kagoshima itself, the mist had descended and the volcano was barely visible.  Until then it had looked fairly placid and the usual puff of volcanic smoke wasn’t visible.  Sakurajima was sleeping.

 

As soon as we’d dumped off our luggage at our hotel – the Shiroyama Kanko Hotel,  perched on top of Shiroyama (Castle Mountain) facing the volcano – we took a CityView bus, a quaint little tourist routehopper, down to Sengan-en, a famous Japanese garden in Kagoshima which uses the “borrowed backdrop” of the volcano as part of its beautiful scenery.

Sengan-en was a villa built by the Shimadzu clan in 1658 – later, during the Meiji restoration, the house became their main home.  in 1851, Nariakira Shimadzu, then lord of Satsuma, built the first industrial complex in Japan in a bid to modernise Japan in competition with the West.

 The gardens were vast, with little food stalls near the entrance, a tea house, and several Shinto shrines, including one dedicated to the cat god, where I got a souvenir omiage for my cousin Asako, who loves cats, especially her own – Momo-chan.

 We shared a kintsuba, a cake made with local sweet potato, then some jambo, another specialty of the area – glutinous rice cakes on a stick, covered in a sweet soya sauce glaze.  It reminded me of one of my favourites, mitarashi dango, a smaller version that can also be found in Tokyo.  The two sticks we shared fired us up with the energy we were going to need to explore the gardens and the mountainside behind them.

 

At first, we explored the lower sections, discovering hidden corners and surprises, such as a garden for composing poetry, the Kyokusui garden, where people sat around a circular stream, casting off cups of sake on little rafts.  They had to complete a haiku before the sake cup came around again to be drunk.

The Konan Chikurin was a bamboo grove we found a little further up, where one of the Shimadzu clan had planted the first bamboo shoots brought over from China – the moso variety, which we had tasted back in Myoken Ishiharaso ryokan the night before.  The little shoots poking up out of the ground would have been too tough to eat though – the ones used in cooking are unearthed from beneath the soil before they see the light of day.

We carried on exploring the many shady hidden paths lit by bright splashes of pink, white and red azalea and rhododendra, until we found ourselves heading steadily upwards.  The longer we walked, the steeper the path became.  By now we were high up in the woods on the mountainside, surrounded by complete silence except for the bird calls.  The edges of the dirt path appeared to have been torn up, and I suspected wild boar activity  Sure enough, we then saw cloven footprints imprinted in the churned earth around the tree roots.  We guessed the boar had been busy foraging around the roots for food.  But being spring, with boar protecting their young offspring, we were rather hoping we would not encounter one.

 The sweaty, hefty climb was worth it – near the top, we had an incredible view over to Sakurajima; the mist had lifted for us and now the volcano was awake and puffing away happily, a cloud of volcanic ash rising from its south-eastern peak.

 

We clambered back down again to explore what we could of the rest of the garden before it closed, then hopped back on to the CityView bus to go to Dolphin Point, a modern recreation and restaurant area on the harbour.  A two-level complex with wooden decking surrounded by palm trees, something about it reminded me of Adelaide. 

There was a local specialty food market which we explored, buying some dried horse-mackerel belly as omiage for family back in Tokyo on the advice of a nice man and woman who helped us out.  We shared a small cup of satsuma-imo ice cream – flavoured with local sweet potato – duty-bound, of course, to sample local specialties.  Tasty.

Once we’d explored enough we plonked ourselves down at an ashi-buro – a shallow, long hot spring pool for people to soak their feet in, right there at the edge of the shopping complex, free to use for anybody passing by.  Perfect after wandering around for so long.  The hot water soothed our aching feet as we gazed out to the mountains and the bay opposite.  That was when we heared a “hello again!”.  It was the two people who had recommended the horse mackerel belly to us. 

The friendly lady and I ended up having a lengthy chat.  She asked us about our travels and we talked about the differences between Japanese and Western culture, about moving to Australia, about London, Tokyo and Kagoshima, and especially about food.  It turned out that the two were colleagues working for a company selling kurozu – fermented black vinegar, a local specialty. 

On the Tsubame shinkansen, I’d seen a poster of a field full of neat lines of dark glazed clay pots.  Higashiteso san (that was the lady’s name) explained that black vinegar was made by fermenting rice vinegar in clay pots arranged in rows in fields, with the fresh outdoor air circulating around them, using a naturally-occuring baccillus.  It can be made only in one particular area of Kagoshima, where the temperature and humidity remains constant.  It takes a minimum of one year before the vinegar is ready and develops a deeper flavour over time.  This is not cheap stuff.  It’s used as a cooking condiment – in chicken and pork stews, or as a marinade for oily fish, but it can also be drunk on its own as a health tonic, or added to fruit juice – we had tasted it this way in Myoken Ishiharaso, in the apple juice they brought us when we first arrived.

When we told Higashiseto san and Nagata san that we were hoping to sample some black pork shabu-shabu (hot pot) that night at Ajimori, a restaurant recommended by the Okuda san of JNTO in London (he is from Kagoshima himself – we knew any recommendation from him would be tip-top), they rang the restaurant for us to see if they had tables free (Ajimori is famous in Kagoshima, and as it was a Saturday they were concerned that we would not get a table) – then gave us a lift there, stopping off at their offices to present us with a gift pack containing a bottle of black vinegar and another of sugar cane vinegar, another product which they sell at a high-end supermarket in Tokyo, so that we could sample it properly for ourselves.  On the way there, we chatted more about the vinegar.

Selling their Kibisu (sugar cane) vinegar to Meidi-ya, their challenge was to explain to the many foreign customers who bought from this supermarket chain how it shoud be used.  I said that I thought a simple leaflet would be useful, and that as a food-enthusiast keen to spread the word amongst non-Japanese foodies and as someone who wrote leaflets and brochures for a living I would be delighted to cobble something together for them.  A happy coincidence.

When they discovered Paul was a chef, they asked him to come up with recipe ideas they could put on the English page of their website.  Paul and I were going to have fun thinking up ways of using the kuro- and kibi-su from then on.  We’re looking forward to experimenting when we get back to the Tokyo flat.

How nice these people were!  They were going to be visiting Tokyo for their monthly sales trip there, and we agreed to meet up with them for a drink.  I hope to bring you more on our kuro- and kibi-su culinary experiments in the next weeks.  Who knows, you may see bottles for sale somewhere near you sooner or later!

Having dropped us off, we just had a half-hour wait for a table at Ajimori.  We chose a standard pork shabu-shabu menu and a dish of chicken sashimi on the side (see previous post!) – and yes, that really is raw chicken, thinly sliced and dipped in ginger and sweet soya sauce.  There was straight chicken breast as well as wing (the latter slightly cooked) and gizzard.  Paul hesitated just a moment – he said he had to get his head around the golden rule that states – always, always eat your chicken well cooked.  But this local, free range and organic chicken, a specialty of the area, was as fresh as it could possibly be.  And it was absolutely delicious.  We both wolfed down every bit.

 

Everything at Ajimori was tasty.  Some pickles.  A plate of golden katsu (short for “cutlet”) -  breaded and deep fried pork cutlet, served with Burudoggu (Bulldog) sauce, a dark, thick, worcester-sauce flavoured condiment and finely shredded Japanese cabbbage.  A bronze-coloured nabe pot full of stock soup was placed on a burner in front of us, and the thinly sliced, surprisingly red pork, marbled delicately with fat and without a shred of gristle anywhere was brought on a large dish, together with another plate of vegetables and a bowl of whole raw eggs.

   

The waitress put the first batch of pork slices into the stock and told us to eat them just as they were, without any sauce or dip, once they had turned opaque and creamy.  So we did, and we melted with the tastiness of the meat.  Neither of us have ever had pork like this – sweet, soft, melting and so delicious that it needed no accompaniment whatsoever.  The next batch, said the waitress, could be dipped, sukiyaki style, in beaten raw egg.  Paul gave that a miss, but I went for it and again, it was delicious, the egg cooking slightly with the heat of the pork and giving it a rich flavour. 

As the stock intensified, the waitress added more water, until we’d cooked up and eaten all of the meat.  Now it was time to eat the udon noodles that usually signalled the end of a shabu-shabu meal.  These were hand-made, thick white noodles, brought cold and fresh to the table, then emptied into the stockpot to cook through.  These are served up in little bowls with the stock from the cooking. 

They say the sign of good pork is the complete absence of scum rising the top of the cooking fluid.  Sure enough, the stock was golden and crystal clear and scrumptious and we ate up every last shred of noodle. 

Rounding off with our choice of dessert – vanilla ice cream or a local red bean paste dumpling – I had the former, Paul the latter, we finished up and rolled back to our hotel, where we headed off to our respective female and male baths.  I sat in the outdoor bath, perched up on the third floor of the hotel, and gazed out over the twinkling lights of Kagoshima city, and out at the dark outline of the volcano on Sakurajima, ever present over this beautiful and friendly city.  Once out of the baths, both of us were peacefully asleep within half an hour.

Next morning, we had one last important task to do.  We wanted to visit a little ramen (chinese-style Japanese noodles) shop in Kagoshima station building, Zabon ramen, which had been heartily recommended to us by Okuda san back in London for its local specialty – Kagoshima tonkotsu (pork broth) ramen.  Having loaded our stuff into a locker, then found the shop in the basement of the busy station building, Paul and I plonked ourselves down on stools at a counter table and ordered a Zabon Ramen each – the shop’s own specialty bowl, which had slices of tender black pork, menma (pickled bamboo shoot), chopped spring onion, flecks of fried onion, bean sprouts and the famous tonkotsu pork broth soup.  Okuda san, it was muchakucha oishii!!! – not only was it cheap and cheerful and filling, it was absolutey delicious.  Thank you for your recommendation!

 

 

Shimomura-san’s wonderful dinner at Myoken Ishiharaso

The evening meal at our Hayato ryokan was so wonderful it does warrant its own post,  The restaurant itself was stunning – what a place this was – creatively decorated with clever dividers to provide private dining areas for guests.  The dividers were made up of old Japanese objets-trouvés – empty cider bottles with marble bottlestops, hand-made paper balloons, old-fashioned cameras, clocks, papier-mâché traditional masks.  It was like an art installation of old childhood memories, many of the things famililar to me from my own Japanese chidhood.  I found it strangely moving – and very attractive too.

 

There were big chunky tables where you could sit to eat, on western-style chairs; tatami cubicles with long low tables hewn out of giant tree trunks, with colourful rustic floor cushions.  The look of the place was just beautiful, with flowers arranged in chunky modern vases here and there, a cinder hearth with wooden benches around it, large glass windows onto the wilderness outside – none of it really possible to capture on camera.

 

We were shown to our own private cubicle, a tatami-matted room at the corner of the building with floor-to-ceiling glass on one side so that we could see all the way out over the river – a wooden sunken pit under the solid wood table, heated, no less, so that we could cosily nestle our feet down in there – and amazing paper cast walls imprinted with antique Japanese wheels and door rivets.

 

The décor paled into insignificance though, once the food arrived.  Makoto san told us that the head chef there, quite young at 39, was trained in a Kyoto kaiseki restaurant.  You could tell.  Shimomura san’s food was exquisite.

 

To begin with, Makoto san brought us a bamboo container with a milky saké from which she poured us each a saucerful, the customary start to a kaiseki meal.  It was sweet, cold, creamy and delicious.  Some milk – another specialty of Kyushu, with its dairy cattle farms – had been added to it.

 

I was so keen to drink it that I missed the opportunity to take a photograph of the attractive container it came in – but the hand-written menus we were each given carried a drawing of it, which you can see here.

 

 

With the milky saké came a bowl of kibinago – a tiny saltwater fish with attractive silver stripes down the side, mixed with tofu whey crumbs and topped with the buds of a local fern like flower.  Alongside it, a bowl of tofu made with yomugi, a local herb dressed with miso and goji berries.

 

 

Makoto san brought us a beautiful hand painted bowl containing a rolled fillet of sea bream wrapped in cherry blossom leaf and served with baby fern fronds, tiny rice crackers and a cherry blossom leaf glaze.  This was fantastically good.

 

 

We decided to have hot saké with our meal for a change.  We chose a dry, savoury one, which was brought in a warmed baked earthenware bottle, and Makoto san offered me the choice of two hand-made ochoko – saké cups – something that is often done so that the guest can drink from a cup they like and that they can admire.  I chose the rougher earthenware, so that Paul got one with a handpainted red seabream – “tai”, in Japanese – which is a symbol of  good luck.  The brush-stroked characters referred to good fortune.

 

 

Makoto san then brought us a beautiful hand-made pottery “basket” containing fresh bonito sashimi, decorated with shiso (perilla) flowers, shredded mooli and chives.  This was eaten with a sesame and yuzu sauce.  This was meltingly delicious, the fish fresh and pert and the sauce giving it a savoury edge that was zingy and earthy at the same time.

 

 

The next bowl to appear before us was made of black lacquer and decorated with gold warabi – baby fern fronds – a spot-on seasonal decoration, Makato san pointed out.  Inside, a soft block of tofu with shiro uo – tiny white baby fish, served with the tips of the ostrich fern or kinome and incredibly soft, tasty wakame seaweed.  All this sat in a delicious pool of crystal clear bonito stock. 

 

 

A red lacquer tray appeared with more local specialties – skewers of the local fresh free-range chicken with shiitake mushrooms and miniature peppers.  The chicken was tasty, firm and about a million miles away from your standard supermarket variety.  With the skewers, some moso takenoko – a local variety of bamboo shoot.  Makoto san said that Kyoto often claimed to be the original home of the bamboo shoot, but in fact, Kagoshima was the true home of bamboo, something not widely known.  Later, we saw the place where bamboo was first grown, in a garden in Kagoshima, when the first seedlings were brought over from China.

 

Next to appear, a slice of a local variety of sushi – the rice mixed with saké dregs, giving it a moist, slightly alcoholic taste, was layered with white seaweed and vinegared white fish, kibinago, fresh prawn, and egg.  It tasted fresh and lively.

 

Following swiftly on, a dish of black pork – our first taste of this local specialty, topped with a broad bean (soramame – a little less floury and fresher-tasting than the British variety) sauce, spinach and a thick slice of daikon (mooli radish) underneath, which had absorbed all the delicious flavour from the stock the pork had been cooked in.

 

A palate freshener served in a bamboo cup – broad strip noodles of agar agar, similar to the tokoroten I ate in Tokyo on our second day there.  The cold broth it sat in was savoury, cold and tangy.  Paul loved this version and ate the lot.

 

A chunky square plate appeared next, with the tenderest, softest slicest of local wagyu beef, served with green and white asparagus spears and a watercress sauce.  Absolutely beautiful.

 

The carbs part of the meal appeared in a clay plot – steamed rice cooked with peas, fern fronds, pepper plant leaves and sliced paper-thin omelette.

  

This was accompanied by a dish of pickles, one variety of which was made from the famed giant daikon radish which grows in the fertile volcanic soil to enormous sizes weighing about 25 kilos.  The miso soup with this was red, Paul’s favourite, and contained paper-thin slices of soft black pork.  Again, just fantastically good.

 

 

Dessert was a scoop of home made vanilla ice cream, a lychee, strawberries and a local specialty, tankan jelly, made with local mikan tangerines (the latter known as satsumas in the UK, presumably because Satsuma is the old name for the Kagoshima region, where this fruit originates from.

 

We raved about the food so much that Makoto san called out the head chef, Shimomura san.  He greeted Paul in solidarity as a fellow chef, and thanked us for our enthusiasm for his food.  Makoto san took a photo of the three of us.

 

Another dinner of memories to dwell on when we are back to eating ramen noodles from Seven Eleven once we move into our rented Tokyo apartment next week.  They’ll be tasty, but it’ll be nothing like the subtle, fine flavours we enjoyed that night in Myoken Ishiharaso.

 

Myoken Ishiharaso – Hayato, near Kagoshima. Only one word for it – wow.

Our shinkansen trip from Nagasaki was pretty spectacular. The Tsubame, or “swallow”, is a Kyushu specialty bullet train, with seat backs made from Kyushu wood and the seat covers from woven local fabric. Brand spanking new, the toilets had warmed electric seats and shower cleaning sprays, the handwashing areas were divided by cotton noren curtains, the doors and fittings lacquer red. A fabulously stylish train.

At Nagasaki station, before getting on,we sat at wooden tables on the platform to share a green tea Kit Kat (yes, really – and it was delicious) and some tea. We admired the real cherry tree bonsai, complete with miniature blossom, placed on the tables as decoration. We couldn’t help but wonder how long such an arrangement would last at any British station before it was stolen or vandalised.

Once off the Tsubame we transferred to a local train at Kagoshima Central. It was a cloudy day, but we glimpsed the great volcano on Sakurajima as we headed along the coastline on a chuff-chuff train towards a little village called Hayato. The ryokan had arranged for a taxi to be waiting there for us at the tiny little station when we arrived, and sure enough, we were greeted by a polite, peak-capped, white be-gloved driver who stowed away our rucksacks and drove us up into the mountainside, chatting all the way.

I asked him what the food specialties were of the area – he said it was mainly black pork, shochu (a strong spirit distilled from either rice, potatos or buckwheat), and good free-range chicken that was so fresh it could be eaten raw, as sashimi. We bore that one in mind for later – we would be trying that out for ourselves in Kagoshima city next day.

On arrival, we received the usual ryokan welcome with three people outside bowing, “Irasshaimase!” (“welcome!”). Our bags were quietly whisked away and we were led to a calm, tastefully decorated lobby with vast windows overlooking the hillside and a flowing river. Sitting at a beautiful chunky wooden table, I filled in our check-in forms. As is the custom, we were served a refreshment – here, fresh-made apple juice served in gorgeous hand-blown glasses with a drop of another of the Kagoshima area specialties, black vinegar – on which more later.

Our young hostess, Makoto san, was incredibly friendly and sweet – she explained where everything was and brought us our yukata in time for our kashikiriburo – private reserved bath – another outdoor one. Our room – or rooms, I should say – was absolutely enormous – two separate areas for sitting in, another for sleeping in, and a stunning bathing area, with our own deep Japanese pine bath. We were served tea and a cherry blossom sweet made with rice and red bean paste.

The style of the place is incredibly appealing – completely Japanese and traditional, yet with a modern, contemporary feel. You could tell that whoever chose the décor has a great eye for good design, with impeccable taste. The whole place was immaculate, as if completely new and as if nobody before us had stayed there.

Once again, the view outside the window was extraordinarily beautiful, opening out to a river flowing past. As we both stood there taking it all in, a white stork flew past and landed on the rocks below, looking for its dinner. Then, suddenly, a flash of bright blue. A kingfisher! Neither of us had ever seen one before. I remembered how my mother had always longed to see one. We managed to get a distant shot of it, the photograph doing little justice to its colourful plumage. Next day, on the taxi drive back, I asked the driver if sightings of kawasemi (“river cicada”, the Japanese name for kingfisher) were common – and apparently, they are extremely rare. So we were very lucky to have seen one.

We put on our yukata and colourful obi and headed down to our private bath called “nanaminoyu” – hot spring of the seven berries. This was the closest you could get to a treehouse bath. Built out over the rocks, a large wooden tub was set into wooden decking built around two trees, again, overlooking the river. There was a strong smell of iron in the air near the water spout and a faint and not unpleasant smell of sulphur. The wood near the water spout, where the hot spring gurgled up out of the ground, had turned a rich dark red from the iron deposits. A perfect hot spring for an anaemic like me. We had a good long soak and washed away our travel fatigue. The sight of the tree-covered hill opposite and the river, strewn with giant boulders, made us feel we were right in the midst of the wilderness.

Returning back to our room, we had just enough time for a cold drink before heading to the restaurant area for our evening meal, which, unusually, was not served in our room. I will write about the meal at greater length in the post after this one…

After our wonderful dinner we headed off to the other outdoor bath, one that is shared by both sexes and therefore requiring us to wear towels when we got in the water. We made our way along a woodland path, heading for some lanterns lit up ahead of us, passing tiny little shinto shrines lit with candles on the way. Hugely atmopheric, we felt we were going deeper into the willderness until suddenly, we saw just below a steaming pool where hot spring water gushed out into a hollow in the rocks. Paul and I clambered in after our customary wash and had a relaxing soak. We could hear the river below us rushing by and I had to pinch myself to persuade myself I wasn’t dreaming.

There was a foot bath, so we made a brief stop there too.

Wandering slowly back to our room, toasty warm from the hot soak, we arrived at the front entrance where the inn’s tortoiseshell cat sat in the heat of the lights. When we walked past he didn’t even budge. We shared his contentment.

Burrowing into soft fluffy futon I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow and didn’t wake up once until it was morning. I filled the Japanese pine hot tub in our bathroom and had another lovely long soak.

Breakfast was served at a table in the wonderful room we’d eaten our evening meal in. The quantity of food, though all of it was healthy, was vast – but it was all so delicious that we ate every crumb. The rice was particuarly good, having been steamed in iron pots; every little thing was tasty, right down to the freshly made carrot juice (carrots being another specialty) that we had before we began our meal.

We had just enough time to have change out of our yukata and pack before check out, which can be early in ryokan like this. We sat at a table and enjoyed a couple of cups of coffee each, different crockery being used with each serving. The modernity fused with the traditional ran through to the availability of wi-fi so that I could sit at my laptop catching up on atchikochi.

All too soon, the taxi came to take us back to the station. This is a place we hope to come back to one day.

A note on cost for those interested to coming to such places. It is definitely not as cheap as a night in a capsule business hotel. But for two enormous, delicious meals, prepared to exceptionally high standards, unlimited use of the hot spa facilities, a maid who looks after your every need and beautiful surroundings, you’re looking at spending the same as a night in a three star hotel in London or a good evening meal in a central London restaurant.

We’d better get earning fast in Australia. We want to be back in time for next November, when the food will be autumnal, delicious and different again from the spring, and when the hillside will be covered in red and gold.