More Beppu and Oita

So the ferry has just withdrawn from the dock at Yawatahama and the intrepid explorers are headed out to the semi-open sea. What new dangers await our fearless chickadees?

Our onsen - we also had a sand bath, literally a good moment to tell your
friends to go bury themselves, and a sauna. I was the bravest soul who sat in the
sauna for several minutes at an extremely hot temperature.
It was a little wooden shed with sulfurous rocks in one corner of
our outdoor private onsen. A truly wonderful experience.

Scary faces and angry-looking statues of other-worldly entities are everywhere in Beppu.
This makes sense because the ground actually steams and the gutters run with semi-boiling water.
There is even a tour of 8(?) hells, which I hear are mostly mud-pots.

None, really. Beppu is a bit of a tourist trap. A lot of a tourist trap, as a matter of fact. But the towering hills and modern-looking buildings around the downtown area remind me of home. The burning, sulfurous steam kind of reminds me of what home would look like if God finally had enough of us.

One of the very touristy and still fun things to do is make your own jigoku, or steam your own dinner in  a little steamer built to capture the rising mists of the boiling underground. We made a dinner of vegetables, seafood, eggs, chinese dumplings, and three kinds of rice, all by lowering a little collection of trays into a little steam-urn and waiting the appropriate amount of time.