stormsewer | may travels 6: matsuyama (Reply)

So after finishing up on the Rock, I headed out to Oita (thus visiting every single Kyushu prefecture on this trip (on which I revisited a lot of sites from my first Kyushu hitchhiking circuit two years earlier), and then took a boat to Matsuyama to complete my collection of Shikoku prefectures.

Matsuyama is another castle town, so I went to check that out. It was actually quite nice, up on a hill in the middle of the city.

I also went out to a nice little temple complex, called the Ishiteji.

Supposedly one of the bones of the Buddha is housed in this pagoda.

And I visited a famous hot spring/bath house, the Dougo Onsen. It was more like the bathhouse in Spirited Away than any other I've been to (and WTF later told me that the bathhouse in that was actually based on this one). The water itself was nothing to write a blog entry about, but the building was interesting.