Remember those horror stories they used to scare you with on school camp? The one where the catchphrase of the story was, “Whatever you do, DON’T LOOK UP!”? Yeah, well…we had one of those nights. But more on that later!
Yakushima is one if those places that we love visiting in our travels. Unknown to most tourists, and yet chock full of natural beauty. In this case it’s even world heritage listed!
We took the ferry down from Kagoshima, taking a couple of hours. After arriving in the port of Anbo we then picked up our car rental (a Mazda Carol..?!!) and tracked down our accommodation for the next four nights, Shikinoyado Onaida. This minshuku is run by a very friendly couple, with both Kentaro and his wife being able to communicate with excellent English.
Our ‘western’ style room
Again, our traditional Japanese dinner was amazing. I even tried some of their homemade passionfruit liquor. Very tasty!
The view from the balcony of our room
Ｐｒｅ－ｄｉｎｎｅｒ ｄｒｉｎｋｓ ｏｎ ｔｈｅ ｂａｌｃｏｎｙ． Ｔｈｅ ｂｏｔｔｌｅ ｏｎ ｔｈｅ ｌｅｆｔ ｉｓ ｔｈｅ Ｓｈｏｃｈｕ ｔｈａｔ ｗｅ ｂｏｕｇｈｔ ｉｎ Ｋａｇｏｓｈｉｍａ， ｍａｄｅ ｆｒｏｍ ｓｗｅｅｔ ｐｏｔａｔｏ！
First night’s dinner!
After dinner the evening then took a rather interesting turn…we found out that we were sharing our room with about a half dozen spiders! Most were small, but there was one massive unit that can only be described as a “massive mother @#$%er”.
The MMF!
Karen woke me up at midnight by jumping on my bed (twin room was all they had available) after looking up and seeing the MMF on the ceiling directly above her face!!
We normally apply a ‘catch and release’ strategy to the numerous huntsmen that we get back home, but unlike their sedentary friends in Tasmania, the MMF and his dastardly progeny are most assuredly on MDMA, moving like lightning at the slightest attempt at capture!
What followed was a rather sleepless night as we both crammed into my single bed and, in the little time that we actually nodded off, dreamt sweet dreams of the eight legged wonders of Japan!