On the third day in Wakayama, we basically woke up too late and could not go through our plan to visit Hongu, a small town that boasts the best hot springs in Kansai and a great temple with paths that go through mountains that doubles for a great place to hike. The original travel plan also included a visit to the tallest waterfall in Japan, complete with a temple in the scenery, but we had to choose between one or the other because of the high transportation costs. Today we missed the bus to go to Hongu by 10 minutes :(. So we were kind of stuck in KII-TANABE for the our last day in Wakayama. This day was far from uninteresting though. When we woke up we notice this sign at the hostel (see pictures) that said that the curfew was 10PM.. oups! Today was an extremely hot day, to the point that it was uncomfortable just to walk in the streets. We wanted to eat something cool and fresh, such as sushi, and we remembered that the hostess from the bar told us about this cheap and delicious sushi train but we didn't know how to get there. We asked some girls that seemed to be fascinated by our presence and asked us a bunch of questions. They were also surprised everytime we responded in Japanese. They told us the general direction, but told us it was far. We walked for about 10 minutes but gave up because of the heat. We turned around and walked back to the train station area and met the girls again and continued to talk with them a little bit. We also encountered Mormon missionaries! That was quite funny especially considering the fact that my American friend is from Salt Lake City, Utah and use to be a mormon. For lunch we ended up in a noodle shop and had cool noodles that you dip in a sort of sauce. It was the first time I had cool noodles, but for the temperature it was doing outside, we were not complaining.
When we returned to the terminal to find out about traveling to Hongu, we were quite disappointed to find out we were out of luck for transportation. We were thinking about going back to Osaka and cutting the trip short, but we decided to make the most of our day off and see what we could do in KII-TANABE. We first went to a small temple that was quite nice, and then headed back to the beach were we had spent the previous night drinking. We actually had a small dip in the water and that was quite refreshing. We also felt like we were aliens on the beach because one old man squated 5 meters from us and stared at us for minutes on end... My French friend called out "NANDE?" = why? and the old man slowly walked to another part of the beach to continue staring at us from far away. Two other girls seemed to have interest in us as they were saying all the English they knew, from far away and in a shy manner, indirectly and carefully trying to get our attention. When we started responding to them, first they were scared and ran further, and always came back slowly with more broken English sentences that you learn when you first start learning the language: how are you, what's your name? ect. The youngest girl, the most "intrepid" started chanting: I love Japan, do you? and when we responded in Japanese, there was again a big reaction of surprise. It was the beginning of the afternoon and we still had not given up on the sushi place and when they were confident enough to come talk to us directly, we asked them for directions for the sushi place. Again, the they didn't seem to know exactly how to get there, so they offered us to walk us to their father's business to get assistance from him. So we walked with both girls who seemed to be excited to be ambassadors to their city. When we arrived there, we felt ashamed to find out it was a restaurant! The father started looking up the place and the mother immediately called to find out if it was opened at that time. The mother told us not to go there and said it was cheap, but tasteless. I responded by saying many people in the town said it was delicious, and when the mother was not paying attention, the little girl confessed (in doing so contradicting her mother) that she thought it was the most delicious sushi in town. That was pretty cute. Just then, the father pulled up in his car and told us to hop in! We could not believe how kind the people were in this town. The sushi indeed was cheap and delicious, I ate over 20 pieces for 9$ !
Satisfied, after that great meal we headed back to the train station and it was time to say goodbye to KII-TANABE and Wakayama. This happens to be the nicest surprise in all my travels in Japan so far. I remember on the first day when we were on our way to KII-TANABE I felt tired and like going straight back to Osaka to spend our money on other things, I thought 6 hours of travel and 30$ wasn't worth it, but today I do not regret going through our travel plans.
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