Normally I'd be wailing and gnashing my teeth at the idea of spending four hours on a train in the middle of the day on my penultimate day of holiday in Japan (I'm not counting tomorrow and Sunday as that's the conference) but the buses from the station near the guesthouse are timed to meet the fast hydrofoils, not the slower ferries, so I'd probably end up waiting an hour or more at the ferry terminal - which makes it almost the same length of time as the train, and I get the train with my JR Rail Pass.
There are other side benefits - I get to spend four of the hottest hours of the day sitting down in air conditioning, and that suits me just fine as I seem to have food poisoning. Nothing major, but I don't feel very energetic.
I went back to Dogo Onsen last night and took the more expensive ticket that gets me into the Tama-no-Yu (water of the spirits) bath. It's smaller than Kami-no-Yu (water of the gods) but you get a yukata and towel, tea and senbei, and when I went in not long before closing I was the only person in there. It was bliss.
You also get a quick guided tour in Japanese (with an English leaflet) of the imperial bathing rooms. The imperial family now uses another ryokan nearby, which draws its water from the same spring, but Dogo Onsen have kept the rooms as they were at the time of the last imperial visit as an exhibition. The bath (empty) looks gorgeous, as do the rooms, but the highlight for me was the beautifully lacquered Japanese-style toilet -
which has never been used, as the guide proudly pointed out.
I've written all my overseas postcards, I have some domestic ones left to write and then it'll be time to check out of the guesthouse and see if my case behaves any better going downhill to the tram station. I'll pick up reserved seats at Matsuyama Station, and then it'll just be a question of changing trains at Okayama before arriving in Hiroshima with plenty of time before the pre-conference reception.
