Grumpy in Ibusuki

Catching up now, after a wonderful week of holiday with the Bear.

Another busy and exciting day! Arrived in Kagoshima to heavy rain, and Luke bought me 'Seattle's Best' Coffee whilst I grumped. Then off to the supermarket to buy provisions for our forthcoming hiking trip: nuts, copious bananas, snickers.

Since it was still raining, we decided to get the bus to Ibuski, where there are sand onsens (where you can get buried in hot sand on the beach and relax). Unfortunately, it took far longer than we thought, and so we were only able to spend half an hour there before returning to Kagoshima in time for our ferry. This included a fifteen minute walk to the desired place. Sand onsen was out of the question, as there was a long queue. Luke (the wonderful Tealuke) was now the grumpy one, even after I showed him how to dig his feet into the sand in another (free) part of the beach - the poor man's onsen experience! Here he is, with all our luggage, looking cross.

He felt ill (poor bear) on the way back, so we read David Copperfield together to take his mind off it. Got to the ferry terminal in Kagoshima with time to spare, however all attempts to find the actual boat were in vain. Turned out that it had been cancelled due to high waves out at sea, and so we instead decided to stay at a little hostel on the nearby island of Sakurajima for the night. Sakurajima is one of the most active volcanoes in the world, pretty exciting!