Beppu: Full of Hell(s)

We arrived in Beppu yesterday and checked into our hotel, which is very nice and is populated by a large number of eldery drunks, and some young drunks too, I suppose. Being a resort town, everyone here is on vacation like us, soaking is hot springs or enjoying the night life. The result being that we get to see a number of Japanese people at their most unguarded. Which can be both interesting and annoying, as one can imagine.

Today we toured the `hells` of Beppu, of which there are officially eight. The `hells` are hot springs with a variety of different mineral properties. In Japanese, they are called jigoku, which are essentially hot springs you can`t soak in. They were sort of interesting, and sort of not. The actual Jigoku are interesting, but they are covered with cartoon demons and such, kind of a like an amusement park. Some also have other attractions, like a ghastly zoo that I`d rather not talk about. Overall, not that exciting.

Otherwise, we have spent a lot of time soaking in onsen, which are hot springs you can soak in. There are five of them attached to the hotel, and we took a bus into the mountains to soak in a private onsen covered by a thatched hut, which was very nice, but smelled like eggs, much to Alison`s dismay.

We were not entirely impressed with Beppu, although our hotel is very nice and the ocean shoreline is exceedingly pretty. Tomorrow we spend the day on Shinkansen trains getting back to Tokyo for our flight out on Friday.  Our internet situation will be a little sketchy, so we will upload pictures of our Beppu experience as soon as we get a chance.