Sometimes when you travel luck can be extraordinary helpful. In the evening before, it started raining intensively just a few minutes away from our hotel. We went under a shelter again just when a bus heading to our next destination Kurokawa stoped next to us. If we didn’t had to wait, we would had taken another expensive taxi back to the station. But because of that, on this day we just carried our luggage a few minutes and were on our way through the mountains once again seeing the massive damage caused by the heavy raining a month ago as well as construction sites.

And than we arrived at beauuutiful Kurokawa Onsen, an oasis in the valley between supergreen mountains. The small village is mainly made of many ryokan and onsen and a perfect place to rest – without being „bothered“ by things such as combinis and internet. A driver picked us up at the bus stop and brought us to the information center and our stuff to our ryokan. We made a walk first through the mountains than the village always along these wooonderful river Kurokawa and it’s sidearms. I love the forests in the mountains and hills – both in Japan and Germany (just thinking about one near Munich and another in Lower Fraconia), but I especially love the river… the view on how the water is running through his bed over stones and woods, the greens around… the sound and smell… it was warm and humit, but the water and trees kept the temperature absolutely bearable.

After the driver brought us to our ryokan a little outside the village and after we were able to breath again – as it’s area is breathtaking beautiful – we took a bath in one of it’s onsen. It was a mixed open air bath (rotemburo) and it turned my father, who was a little sceptical before, into an onsen lover. I also checked the women only rotemburo too, which has an even nicer atmosphere directly beside the path of a small rill.

And than, yeah… for those who don’t know it – talking about ryokan is most of the times connected to getting a lot of food. Well… at Sanga Ryokan we had sooo much, you the words „a lot“ is not enough. And everything was so increadably tasty, we had to eat sooo much of it. Amazing. And the wonderful thing about Japanese cuisine is, no matter how much you eat, it’s not laying heavy in your stomach. We would have never thought about going into a bath after it, if we hadn’t reserved a private bath, which was nice, but not that amazing as the ones before. Relaxing pure and living Japanese lifestyle including wearing our Yukata we bought before for dinner. Wonderful!