Day 30, in which we sleep in the shadow of a volcano

Today we took our longest train journey yet, in three legs from Hiroshima to Fukuoka on the island of Kyushu; from Fukuoka down to Shinyatsushiro; and from there down to Kagoshima. Apparently by next year the Shinkansen will have been extended the whole way, which just proves we're ahead of our time.

Kagoshima is a nondescript little city in what is generally regarded as the backwater of Japan, and its primitive nature only revealed itself to us as we tried to take the train to our hotel. We completely missed our stop because we hadn't realised it was a stop at all: there was no sign announcing the station name, no station building and no means of crossing the line to the street (as one little Japanese man demonstrated, it was necessary to climb down from the platform onto the tracks and then cross on foot, hopeful that you would catch your train and not the other way round).

We travelled to the next stop where there was a station building, and asked for directions. The ticket inspector was very friendly but spoke no English, so our conversation mostly involved saying 'Thank you' and 'Bye' over and over again. Eventually we found our way back to the main road and paid for a taxi to take us to our hotel, which was the best £7 I've ever spent. Once in the Kagoshima Tokyu Hotel we were able to relax. Our room was perhaps three times larger than anything we've stayed in so far, with a nice seating area in front of French windows, leading out onto a balcony with a view across the sea to Mount Sakurajima, an active volcano on the other side of the bay. Although still active, spitting our smoke and dust every day, we have been reassured that Sakurajima has not erupted since 1947 (and not significantly since 1914, when the lava flows blocked one entrance to the harbour, creating a new bank of wonderfully fertile soil where the locals can grow radishes five feet in diameter).

We took a taxi to the Dolphin Port for dinner. Tourists are thin on the ground this far south and so the locals speak virtually no English. We had to resort to the 'Waffle House' method of food selection, i.e. just pointing at the picture of the thing we want to eat. This is far from foolproof: while the Italian restaurant we went to had a very long selection of pizzas, they sadly only had photographs of two and so those were the ones we had to settle for.

Back at the hotel we changed into our swim shorts and hotel regulation costume of white gown, towel and straw slippers and wandered down to the al fresco onsen, two large geothermal plunge pools filled with naturally occurring minerals and salts. The waters were almost too hot and, combined with beer from the hotel vending machine, far too soporific. And so to bed.