GW2024 D4 onsen in the rain and train

Route: Asoshirakawa - Tochinoki - Choyo - Asoshirakawa
Bicycle: 0 km
Walking: 5 km
Bus: 11 km
Train: 9 km
Weather: rain and more rain all day, 20 C

Today will hopefully be the only really rainy day for this week. It started raining during the night and hasn’t stopped yet. Luckily today isn’t a day where I need to get moving to my next accommodation, so I could do rain weather activities here in Minami Aso. There aren’t many but surprisingly I managed to do two:

Relax in a very nice onsen with views and take a theme train. 

I had asked the owner of my Minshuku yesterday what he would recommend for a rainy day and after excluding to go strawberry picking and a garden in a tunnel (it seems there were plans to build a railway to Takachiho and they started digging for a tunnel when they found too much water and gave up. Somehow that tunnel is now a garden!?) I settled on an onsen that was reachable by public transport, aka the neighborhood bus. This onsen got damaged by the earthquake but has since been restored and has a very nice rotenburo with a real view of the narrow valley. You don’t find too many of those. Before going to the onsen I had some fried chicken at this very retro place. Retro without wanting it to be retro. Still original including the two elderly who are running it and the television series they were watching in an old style “tailed” TV. 

It turned out that I didn’t have that much time in the onsen, if I wanted to catch the bus back. I hadn’t checked but there was actually a train, which I ended up taking, because I arrived 30 min too early to the bus stop. (Walking times were kind of hard to calculate and with only 4 busses a day you can’t miss the one you are aiming for. At the train station was a small coffee shop where I got 2 cupcakes for the price of one plus a free cup of tea while waiting for the train. Which turned out to be a special train. In front a torokko train (a kind of sightseeing train where you can’t close the windows) and in the back a OnePiece manga themed carriage, which I took. The train went very slowly explaining where you could see some OnePiece characters and even a green house with famous local “red” cows, which the train conductor introduced as very tasty. 

Now just remains to hope that the weather forecast for tomorrow is correct to state that it will not rain.