Keep it clean
Start with
a thorough prewash. It’s not just considered rude and unhygienic, it’s against
the rules to get into a communal bath without giving yourself
a serious scrub-down first.
There’s a
special area set aside for this, with benches and wooden buckets and a
hand-held shower.
By the time
my first communal bath came around, I was ready to do some ostentatious public
scrubbing. The more vigorous the scrub, the better, and I was amazed at how
some of the old hands – some of them wonderfully wrinkled octogenarians –
literally left none of their own creases un-seen-to.
Women's Large Bath Room and Outdoor Bath (Fresh
hot spring bath)
The wooden
washing stalls reminded me of stables. The complimentary shampoo even had a
picture of a horse on it. It was so rich and lathery I bought some from the
gift shop. (And fervently hoped the small print I couldn’t read didn’t reveal any
horse products in the ingredients!)
If you have
long hair you need to tie it up to keep it out of the bath water. You never put your Onsen towel into
the communal bath water either, but you can fold it and put it on the top of
your head. This is supposed to help keep you cool, but I preferred the effect
of a cold shower between baths. My Onsen routine was
one of contrasts - a hot soak followed by a
blast of icy water that really gets your circulation going!
All that
would follow, once I conjured up enough courage to brave the glass corridor. As
I grateful that at least I have no tattoos – not only are they frowned upon,
but some baths won’t admit you if you’re inked.
David was
far away (I hoped) in one of the areas designated for men, and I really needed
to take the plunge.
Long walk to blissdom
It felt
like the longest corridor I ever traversed. To this day I still don’t know what
lay on the other side of that glass, other than deep dark night. But the
journey was so worth it: eventually the corridor opened out into a series of
stone pools on the high cliff overlooking the river.
It was so
Zen I didn’t mind not being able to speak to anyone. The four Japanese women
who had arrived there ahead of me soon left, and I was blissfully alone.
I couldn’ve stayed there forever, but soaking in a hot tub is
hungry work and dinner was calling. I’d thought things couldn’t get any better.
But when I got to our Japanese-style room, with its low table and cushion-seats
on the clean tatami floors, it was to find the most incredible feast I had ever
seen laid out for us.
The food looked too beautiful to eat
The food
looked too beautiful to eat – sashimi presented in bowls sculpted from ice;
radishes sliced into artistic swirls of purple on white; dollhouse-sized
pumpkins made of bean paste with little acorn tops; and paper-thin kobi beef with miniature mushrooms to boil in broth on a
small gas burner. All of it delicious.
When we
first entered our room, I’d looked around for the bedroom, and was perplexed to
find there wasn’t one. I was about to find out why. After our feast was
finished we set off for one last soak, and returned to find the table cleared
and a king-sized futon with a silky quilt laid out and waiting.
As I
drifted odd to sleep I watched a single yellow maple leaf waft down to meet its
reflection on mirror of deep teal water, leaving a faint watermark on my skin.
