Back to Kagoshima for our third rail day, but this time not to change for Ibusuki but to stay in the city.

It was a pretty foul day today. As our Shinkansen made its way through the mountains, we kept coming across snow scenes. And the rain falling in Kagoshima when we arrived was awfully close to sleet... So we abandoned our plan to take the ferry to Sakurajima (the volcano), and decided to stick closer to civilization.

First stop, a warming drink at Meri Coffee, with a nice view over the square:


Then we headed up the hill to the Shiroyama Park Observation Deck, which offers good views of the volcano.

The rain started again on our way up. I have discovered a deficiency in my wardrobe that I would be interested in correcting. I can keep warm. And I can keep dry. But keeping dry when I also need to keep warm is a bit more tricky... A cagoule on its own is fine if you're hiking, but not really warm enough for sight-seeing. And if you wear your puffer jacket under your cagoule (by necessity a fairly close-fitting garment), you lose a lot of the puffer's insulating properties because you're compressing the down. I'm investigating the Uniqlo catalogue to see if they can suggest anything...

Anyway, we trugged up the hill, through very lovely forest:



Our volcano was playing hard-to-get:


But by exercising a bit of patience, we saw him start to emerge (although he never entirely doffed his tam-o-shanter):





Lunch-time by now, and we had another stroke of luck. We've been very fortunate on this trip. We tend to bumble into an eating-place, looking clueless, and then point to what takes our fancy, and hope for the best. Up to now, we've been richly rewarded.

Today's serendipitous choice was tempura. And we'd never been to a dedicated tempura restaurant, so had no idea what to do. As is the case at many Japanese restaurants, you sit at a kind of bar arrangement, facing the action and the chefs/servers. My guardian, who did speak some English, encouraged me to help myself to the pickles in front of me, and mixed something up in a bowl for me. A white substance and a dark liquid. Umm, nice, I thought, and slurped it all up. Shortly afterwards, I was given a bowl of rice, and a bowl of miso soup. And the server mixed me some more of the stuff, explaining that it was dressing for the tempura... So I'd done the equivalent of eating the mayonnaise before the salad arrived... Oops...

According to this source, the dressing is called ten-tsuyu, and it's made of dashi soup stock, soy sauce, and mirin (which is sweet rice wine). The white stuff was grated daikon radish, often added to the mix.

Then my tempura started to arrive, bit by hot, delicate, crispy bit. First the vegetables, then the fish. Really delicious.


Nigel, meanwhile, had (totally by accident) plumped for the "ten-don" version. This means the tempura is served on top of rice that has already had some of that dipping sauce poured over it. Same ingredients, just a slightly different format.


We decided that the iffiness of the weather was a good reason for checking out the Kagoshima City Museum of Art, which exhibits a surprising number of works by well-known Western artists (Picasso, Renoir, Cezanne, and the like), as well as works in Western style by Japanese painters, plus examples of Satsuma pottery.






Our final act was to visit Shochu Ishinkan at Kagoshima station, with a view to arming ourselves with a couple of bottles of the alcohol for which this region is famous. This outlet reportedly has one of the largest selections in Kyushu, with hundreds of brands on display. But more on this later, when we've tried it...

Fukuoka was in the grip of a tempest when we got back, with flurries of snow blowing sideways along the roads. We were happy to get home to our snug little pad.

So..., that's our first rail pass done and dusted. Hectic days, but most enjoyable.