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Day at the Monkey Onsen!

The monkey onsen was awesome! In fact, the whole day was awesome! Here’s the rundown.

I had to meet my friends at a train station two towns away by 8:00am, so I was out of my apartment by 6:45. It was raining when I left. As a result, the trip to my train station wasn’t very pleasant, but I managed to get there in plenty of time. The first train I took started at my station, so it was waiting when I got there. This was great because I got to sit down and warm up before the train even left. JR (the major train company in Japan) trains are awesome because not only are the cars heated, but the seats are heated in the winter too. They’re always really nice. Seeing as I had to transfer trains at the next station though, I had to go back into the cold for a few minutes before getting on my next train. Luckily, it had stopped raining by then although it was still grey.

I arrived at the station we were meeting at with ten minutes to spare, so I hung out in the waiting room for a bit before going outside to wait for everyone else. The others got there a few minutes later and we set off for the monkey onsen.

The trip to the onsen was pretty long. Altogether, it took about three hours. Still, it was a lot of fun. We talked, shared stories, got to know each other a little better… I knew the guy who invited me on the trip and was driving, but it was my first time meeting the other two girls in the car. Once we got out of our prefecture, we encountered a lot of snow. There was a good amount of it on the ground, but it was also actively snowing… and foggy. There was another car of people meeting us there, so we sent them a weather warning. The message we got in return was pretty amusing.

“Well, we’re stuck in mud, so…”

There was no more explanation offered, so we spent a while trying to figure out what could have happened to them.

Eventually, after a little bit of parking confusion, we got to the monkey onsen! Once we got there, we still had to walk about 25 minutes from the parking lot to the park. The path wouldn’t have been so bad on a good day, but after all the snow we’ve gotten lately (and we were now in an area that gets snow iregularly all winter), the entire trail was covered in ice. Luckily, it wasn’t horrible ice. Truthfully, it was more like packed snow, but it was still slippery at times. We all slid a little here and there, but no one fell.

I wasn’t sure what to expect when we got to the park itself. I think I was expecting to find a zoo set up where the monkeys and the people there to see them were separated by a gate or maybe an incline or something… I couldn’t have been more wrong. As soon as we stepped into the main area of the park, the monkeys were literally running around us. It was like the deer in Nara and Miyajima in the way that you’re really right in their space. But unlike the deer, the monkeys can get aggressive. You don’t want to interact with them and there’s signs here and there warning you not to look them in the eye, feed them, or bother them. We didn’t have any incidents and we didn’t see any either, but we heard a few stories of people getting attacked.

Now, the signs warned people not to bother the monkeys and no one really was, but people were getting really, really close to take pictures. And there were a lot of people in the park, especially considering the weather. There was one hot spring in particular where people could stand right in front of it and take pictures of monkeys in the water. People were putting their lenses inches away from the monkeys and the monkeys didn’t seem to mind at all. I’m sure they’re pretty used to it, but still. I was pretty surprised when I first saw what was going on. Eventually I got used to it though and headed over to the hot spring so that I could take my own pictures. I’ll post the best ones here soon!

After we had seen enough of the monkeys, we started heading back towards the car. We met our friends on the path back. It turns out that they had tried to turn around on a side road and do a K-turn using part of the side of the road. Well, the side of the road was actually a rice field covered in snow and the car sunk right into the mud. It took them an hour to get a tow truck to drag them out before they could keep going. We agreed to meet them at the onsen we were going to after they had seen the monkeys and we had eaten some lunch.

Lunch was delicious. I had an area specialty, katsu (breaded pork cutlet), served over rice in a pretty box. Then we drove another hour to get to the onsen. We waited a bit longer for the other group to catch up with us, but we went into the onsen together. The water was a bit sulfuric, but it’s supposed to be good for your skin. We stayed in for about 45 minutes. Of course, this turned out to be a little too much for me and I spent the next ten minutes trying to recover my ability to stand up without feeling sick. One of my friends was nice enough to get me a sports drink from the vending machine and that helped a lot.

By then it was already 6 or so and we still had a three hour drive home, so we all said goodbye and headed out. The ride home was fun and I got home around 10:45.

Unsurprisingly, I was exhausted all day today, but I only ended up having one class, so it didn’t really affect anything. I think I’ll be at full power again tomorrow. :)

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