Please Be Naked!

...is the sign that greets you at the counter when you enter the Hoyo Land mud bath/onsen in the very scenic city of Beppu. Not a sign you're likely to come across back in London!

Some friends and I went on a weekend road trip to Beppu (about 5 hours from Nagasaki), where we spent 2 days visiting several jigokus ('hell'), onsens, a sand bath, a mud bath and Mount Takasaki.

The main attraction are the 9 'hells'. We visited the 'blue hell', 'red hell' and 'bubbling mud hell', and got to dip our feet in the foot onsens.

Beppu is famous for its many onsens. The sand bath that our guidebook had highly recommended was under the construction for the month of Februrary. Just our luck. But, we were able to find another one. This was my first experience going in a sand bath and I didn't realize it would be so much work first digging yourself a hole to lie in, then covering yourself. Once buried, the sand really weighs you down..it felt good to finally wash it all away and soak in an onsen.
We also visited a mixed outdoor mud bath. We were enjoying it so much, we lost track of time and ended up staying almost twice as long as the recommended lenghth of time. Despite having lightly burned my ankles, once i washed away all the mud my skin felt very suwa suwa. I would definitely recommend taking a mud bath!

The only non-onsen related site we visited was Mount Takasaki, which is a mountain on the ouskirts of the city inhabited by 2 or 3 clans of monkeys. According to the brochure, each clan has over 1200 monkeys. For the mere price of 500 yen ($5), you can wander around freely amongst the monkeys. They have become very used to having people be in close proximity. One of the baby monkeys climbed up my friend's leg! Not shy at all. They seemed to spend most of their time grooming each other. There was so much grooming going on, it rubbed off on us...!

The weather was great, we couldn't have asked for a more beautiful day. The drive back from Beppu was gorgeous. We were a little pressed for time on our way back, because we couldn't afford to miss the last ferry back to Nagasaki since we had to be at work the next morning! The scenery was so beautiful we couldn't resist stopping to take some pictures along the way. We still made it to the ferry with a few minutes to spare!