The Oldest Tree in Japan!

I’m going to cut to the chase and say that I’ve probably never been on a more spectacular hike than the overnight we did up the mountains in Yakushima.

The first few miles of the trail is on a set of railroad tracks (still in use! we discovered as a mini-train car passed us that day).

After the tracks end, it’s a pretty immediate hike into the ancient cedar forest, where you can walk through and under tree roots like this!

In what we now know as traditional Japanese hiking trail maintenance, a solid portion of the trail is actually walkways and block staircases, which is always good for the ankles, if a bit unlike the hiking I’m used to in the States.

Kelley and I discovered a new game in which we each searched for the best mossy tree root nooks to perch on or inside of. All of these pictures are thanks to Kelley, who does some pretty amazing things with that camera of his!

Hiyao Miyazaki is a famous director of animated movies here in Japan, one of his most well-loved is Princess Mononoke, whose forest scenery was inspired by Miyazaki’s time in Yakushima!

Below is the oldest tree in Japan, Jomon-sugi. There are a wide range of estimates of his age, none of which can be confirmed because he’s hollow inside. We read that 2700 years old is the most commonly-agreed on age.

Really though Jomon-sugi was nowhere near the highlight of the hike.

Kelley and I were both entranced by Wilson’s stump, which is a 50-ft wide, 10-ft tall hollowed out tree stump, discovered by an American botanist in 1914.

The entrance and stump itself are directly behind Kelley and me above. And below are pictures of each of us standing inside the stump, which can probably fit about 25 people comfortably all at once.

This link I found tells about the history of the tree, which was felled in 1586 to build an important temple in Kyoto.

I really never thought that a tree stump would cause so much wonder and amazement, enchantment is probably a more apt term.

Kelley and I boiled up a killer lunch of soba noodles for lunch right next to Wilson on the way up, and on the way down, I was sad to say goodbye to the most mystical spot in Yakushima for me.

The four of us hiked up to a very large two-story hut up in the cloud layer, and had an excellent vegetable curry over rice for dinner.

Kelley got some amazing pictures of the stars, and the next morning we set off again, a little faster this time, to avoid an approaching rainstorm.

Kelley and I saw monkeys and deer both days, including this one deer family of a mama with two babies that we found in the same spot both days! I think the Japanese variant are a bit cuter than our American deer.

Though the four of us got absolutely drenched (even with our ponchos on!) the last hour of our trek back to the car, even that experience seemed like a good one to have…Yakushima is a subtropical rainforest after all!

I was thrilled to have seen this place and think it is truly one of the most magical spots in my known world!

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Yakushima!

One last ferry took us from the town of Kagoshima in the south of Kyushu to our final road trip destination – the island of Yakushima!

Suddenly we were in the tropics! It felt like a balmy 70°F, and we were ready to explore, which of course, started by exploring the island’s seafood. Below you can see Nori’s flying fish (really this fish jumps like 3 ft out of the water) plate at the best restaurant on the island!

Quite frankly, I had only very recently heard of Yakushima, but really it ended up being a very rare privilege to be able to visit in the low-tourist season and be caught in just one ridiculous rain storm.

As you can see Yakushima is located in the southern-most island chain of Japan – the last island of which is Okinawa!

It’s also the site of a UNESCO World Heritage designation, protecting its ancient temperate forests, a lot of which we got to see on our hikes up the mountains. Add to this that Yakushima is the largest nesting ground for endangered loggerhead turtles, and it becomes really easy to see why almost 300,000 tourists visit the island each year.

The island is very humid subtropical, but its highest peak measures in at over 6,000 ft, meaning that varying elevations provide very different climates, especially during winter.

Fortunately for us, peak season had finished, and we didn’t have to deal with any crowds or tour buses. We had our trusty rental car to wind along the curvy mountain and seaside roads and we had all our gear to camp!

Our first night we found a great guesthouse with a campsite and kitchen available for us (Nori, really) to cook up a great fish stew with some local seafood.

In what was one of everyone’s favorite experiences from the trip, Nori steered us to a public natural hot springs that was only accessible at low tide! It was not separated by gender, which was a first for all of us, and was really just a bunch of hot water pools among the rocks, affording an amazing view of the sunset in the western sky.

Kelley’s pictures are truly incredible, especially of the island’s magical, mossy forests, all of which I’ll have coming up in my next post!

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The Wide Open Road ( Japanese Sea!)

As if Thanksgiving didn’t pack enough excitement for the Sen Guesthouse gang, two days later the four of us packed into a rental car and hit the road!

And boy, did we put some miles between us and Matsuyama!

In the first two days alone we were either on a ferry or in a car for twelve hours, Kelley and I secured the backseat (mostly because we have no international drivers’ licenses…) and Matt and Nori shored up the front seats, doing ALL the driving and navigating….thanks guys!

Before I continue a small geography lesson might be in order.

On the map below, the city where Sen is, Matsuyama isn’t actually labeled, but it’s on the west side of Shikoku, the island where Kochi is to the bottom and slightly left on the map.

From Matsuyama, we took a ferry across the sea to the southern-most large island in Japan, called Kyushu.

The ferry took us to the town of Beppu, which is known for ONSEN! All four of us love Japanese hot spring baths of course.

And that love inspired us to go to two different baths in the span of our 16 hours in the town of Beppu – the one above, a historically preserved onsen from the early 20th century called Takegawara. The next morning we tried out one of the famous sand baths that are found only in Beppu.

What you see above is actually a huge sandpit that is filled with hot spring water to heat the sand, then drained. Four women with rakes spend the entire day burying customers in the hot sand for fifteen-minute increments.

I know. It sounds silly, but honestly it’s delicious. The weight of the sand on your body, and how your head gets propped up by warm sand so you can see the sea out over the sandpit.

To be quite honest, we all fell in love with Beppu and wished we had more time to explore. The whole town had plumes of steam billowing up to the heavens from everywhere, there is just SO much hot steaming water below the city’s surface!

But move on, we did! We covered the entire length of Kyushu to Kagoshima in the south on Sunday, the second day of our trip. We found a delicious little rest area (nothing like their American counterpart) where we all had a different kind of soul-filling Japanese meal. Above you’ll see that Matt was a little jealous that Nori got her meal first!

Because we got so many pictures (all thanks to Kelley!), I’m going to break up this trip into multiple postings and keep you all on pins and needles about where our final road-trip destination was. I promise it’ll be worth the wait!

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