Day Eleven. TRAVEL - SHIKOKU. So day 11 was Friday the 13th. This has never really meant much to me but on this particular day bad luck came crashing down!!! We had planned to leave the hotel at about 8.30 - 9 to depart for Shikoku, but woke up at about 9.40! We ran around wildly getting ready, packing and checking out before catching a JR train to Okayama. From Okayama we caught the train to Marugame where I had organised to hire a car. At this point we were already running an hour late, I had planned to get the car by 12 at the latest. I had a sketchy map of where the car rental place and we went off in search of it in the streets of Marugame. Pretty much noone in this town spoke english or even understood hand gestures or anything we tried. We hadn't had hardly any difficulty with the language barrier until now. We had come to Shikoku to get away from the main island and forgot to prepare for this! We circled an area in Marugame for about an hour looking for the car rental, we ended up asking a man for help who spoke a bit of english and he was just lovely, he took us into his shop, fed us green tea, rang the rental place and lo and behold it was about 200m away. We had walked past it about 3 times and thought it was just a garage. It was a mazda rental but there was no signage we could recognise so we learnt a bit of a lesson from that one... the map we had was pretty accurate as well so not sure how we missed it!! My advice would be as I said before and try to get maps printed with the japanese characters as well (most street signs have no english so the english maps are sometimes worthless...) Finally we got the car, and asked the guy working at the rental place to set up the GPS for us to direct us to where we were going. We were pretty flustered and stressed at that point and got on our way, when we should have asked him some more questions about using the gps & setting an end point. However we were still able to follow the directions and got to our hotel just in time. We used the expressways that headed to Matsuyama and then Kochi before heading down to Iya Valley along the river. There are toll ways on the expressways. They are quite expensive (I think it might have been 1,700 yen?) And it can be a bit stressy driving on the roads simply because you are in a different country, but in the end we got there fine and it took about 2 1/2 hours from Marugame to our hotel, Iya Bijin.
Iya Bijin is pretty incredible. The outside of the Inn looks a bit tudor roadhousy and small, but once you are inside and go downstairs it all opens up. Once the door to our room was opened we pretty much cheered up after the bad day instantly - it was a lovely traditional room, with a balcony overlooking the valley & river. The balcony had a private shower & bath, and just inside there was a luxurious massage chair - perfect! We had dinner in a dining room next door with the fire pits, feet warmers and views over the valley. The dinner was traditional japanese - so about a gazillion courses served with sake, green tea & a plum wine. Delicious! Breakfast was also served in the room with another round of courses - also delicious :) Relaxing in the room after our day, having our hot bath and then sitting in the massage chair and sinking into the futon bed was lovely. Oh and did I mention the people were lovely and friendly?! I dont think it even needs to be mentioned I dont think I went anywhere where the service was impeccable.
Day Twelve. SHIKOKU. We left Iya Bijin fairly early (not really early about 9.00 but they werent too happy because they wanted to give us more treats and green tea and chats :) But we had a deadline as we had some waterafting booked at Koboke Gorge for 10.00. It took about 30 mins to get from Iya to Koboke across the rivers & tunnel, probably a lot less time for locals but we are very wary drivers on those roads! We had booked our 2 hour rafting session with Happyraft. An absolutely lovely bunch of people - an aussie runs it and the other staff are japanese and extremely fluent in english. The night before the rafting, the rivers in the area were absolutely crystal clear and stunning an azure colour, most beautiful water I have ever seen. HOwever overnight it POURED down and when we woke up and I looked down at the river, it had turned into a brown swirling mass. We were already a bit intimidated by rafting, and the gushing water terrified us. However the rafting guys were super excited and told us we were so lucky - all the rafting was going to be even better etc etc... well they were right! It was such fun, not frightening at all. We jumped into the river at one point and it was just plain freezing but the whole experience was excellent! We spent the rest of the day in a hot springs to recover, and looked at the kazubashi vine bridge. The vine bridge was good (and frightening to walk over!) but there was this horrifying information centre with 100 levels of concrete multi level car parking built right on the river next to it.... WHY! Supposedly it it worth driving the extra hour to see the double bridges further down the river which are more untouched. We stayed that night in a little guest house one of the Happyraft guys runs, very cheap and backpackerish, but with amazing views and really out in the thick of it! THe locals are all pretty much over 70 and very friendly, while we were shopping for dinner some old ladies gave us mandarins :)
Hotel: Iya Bijin Ryokan
Cost: 33,600Y for two, inc kaseiki dinner & breakfast.
Web: http://iyabijin.jp/2-1.html
Email: info@iyabijin.jp
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