この間、週末の旅行でパンダが多い白浜(和歌山県)に行きました。

As I mentioned the other day, we took a short weekend trip to Shirahama (白浜), in Wakayama Prefecture a three-hour drive south from Kyoto. We left on Friday after Anthony got home from school, so arrived late in the evening, giving us all of Saturday and most of Sunday to enjoy the area.

We had a nice hybrid Western/Japanese room at Hotel Laforet....

The area is known for its small white-sand beach, and for having pandas (in what I assumed was a zoo, but as we'll see in a later post, the pandas are at an amusement/nature park). It was cute to see panda paraphernalia everywhere, starting with the lobby of the hotel on Saturday morning.

What we didn't see were other customers. The hotel was 11 floors, but on Saturday morning the place seemed deserted; we didn't see anyone except a few staff. It was eerie.

(It turns out that it filled up quickly later in the day, after thecheck-in time.)

Our first order of business in the morning was to stroll down to the beach, which is actually named Shirarahama (白良浜, literally “white good beach”), though the town it's located in is named Shirahama (白浜, literally “white beach”).

The last time I was at this beach was 20+ years ago, when I spent a weekend with a metal detector scooping up 500-yen ($5) coins. During the morning it was as empty as seen in these photos, but during the day during the summer it was a solid carpet of people.

For lunch we stopped by a place for sushi that Fumie had seen in a guidebook.

It was lucky that I didn't realize at first that this was a real sushi place, meaning pretty expensive. I'd asked Fumie to order for us all, so I didn't realize at first that no prices were displayed anywhere, but when we got our first sushi the taste told me that this was a really high-quality place, so I steeled myself for the bill.

It turns out to have been about $100 for the three of us, which is certainly pricey for a lunch(!), but I suppose it's much less than something comparable would have been in Kyoto. I think it was my first time at such a high-class sushi place. It was delicious, especially early on when I didn't think about the price. 🙂

After lunch we made a short drive to a seaside place called Senjojiki (千畳敷), a name that means something along the lines of “spread out over a bazillion room's worth of area”. It turns out to have been an amazing area of many different kinds of rock formations all in one much-smaller-than-a-bazillion compact area...

The modern world, both in Japan and America, seems to have gotten so regulated and controlled so as to remove even the slightest risk of injury or of having fun, lest, I suppose, someone sue. So it was refreshing that at this place there were no guardrails, no ropes, no handrails, no “don't have fun” signs. You were responsible for yourself, and if you did something stupid you would likely die or maim yourself. I'm a big believer that personal responsibility should be personal, so I really enjoyed the freedom to explore to the limits of my own sense of responsibility. We lived.

In some areas the rocks were very stratified into highly distinct layers. I seem to have been unable to capture it in a photo well, but you can sort of see a bit in the next photo, where a thin layer of gravel-strewn rock runs near the top of the frame:

Some layers were just a few inches thick, some a foot thick, but the passage of time was clear and the abrupt changes in composition brought to mind cataclysmic events (volcanoes, tidal waves, earthquakes, etc.). One thing I never did notice in the 50+ meters of vertical layers were shells, so I guessed that this area had never been below sea level.

Above the tidal line were “bowls” encrusted with a thick layer of salt. I'm guessing that sea water is blown in infrequently during storms, then evaporates and leaves the salt behind.

Yet just a few seconds away...

We really enjoyed the area, and it was the highlight of the day.

We then took a leisurely drive along the coast without much of a destination, but at some point I noticed on the car navigation system that a kilometer or so inland was a “Kinkakuji Temple” (金閣寺). The famous “Golden Pavilion” temple in Kyoto has that name, so I thought it'd be interesting to see what this temple with the same name looked like.

Unfortunately, it was closed for some kind of construction. It seemed deserted.

The Kongorikishi guardians flanking the entrance (described here) were wood-relief carvings instead of statutes carved from wood. I'd never seen that before. Too bad it was closed... the map showed lakes and such inside.

We continued our drive and ended up at a big orange something sticking out of the mountain, something we'd seen and wondered about from the hotel...

It turns out that it's to support landing lights for the local airport, which seems to have been carved out of the mountains:

The hotel had a ping-pong table we could rent, which Anthony was excited to try...

I couldn't let him get too full of himself, so of course I had to crush him with a powerful slam from time to time. Proper parenting, you know. 😉

The hotel has huge onsen baths on the 11th floor, separated by gender, but you could rent a private “family bath” for 50 minutes, which we did...

We'd scheduled it for sunset hoping for a nice display, but it was overcast so sunset was entirely uneventful. But the bath was nice.

For dinner we ate in the overpriced-but-surprisingly-tasty hotel restaurant, and went to bed early so as to be fresh for Day Two.

Continued here...