Day 33, in which we go on a day trip to Hell

We resurfaced from our hotel at around 11am and took brunch at the Royal Host, a Japanese diner in Nagasaki railway station which served some very good fried eggs and one of the smallest sausages I've ever seen. We were on our way to Unzen, which required a 30 minute train journey to the middle of nowhere, and then a long and snaking bus journey through the countryside for an hour and twenty minutes. We were both a bit irritated to discover how long the bus journey took (there was no mention of a four-hour round trip in the guide book), until Paul remembered that sometimes taking a bus through the countryside can be a pleasure in itself, and then we settled down and enjoyed it.

We passed on route through the town of Obama – a settlement on the coast, with small chimneys built into the roads and buildings releasing large amounts of subterranean steam from geothermal activity – and it was nice to see that the tourist office was cashing in on the coincidence of names with a large (if not terribly convincing) plastic model of Barack Obama standing in front of the US flag.

Unzen is a spa town which sits over 700 metres up a mountain, and is famous for its geothermal activity. Japan as a whole is the meeting place of four separate tectonic plates, and its geography is almost entirely the result of plate collisions and volcanic eruptions. While active volcanoes pepper the entire country, Kyushu appears to have more than its fair share and Unzen itself lies in the shadow of Mount Unzen-dake, which last erupted in 1991.

Scattered around Unzen are large and sulphurous areas of steaming geothermal vents, and I really wanted to visit the main ones in the park thanks to a report in the guidebook that an old crone in a bonnet would lower an egg into one of these bubbling craters, and then remove it hard-boiled to eat (for a fee). The reality was somewhat more disappointing: a bored looking teenager in a hoody sat in a wooden shack, and when children asked for an egg he would pull himself to his feet, swagger to a wooden box filled with pre-boiled eggs, shove one in a plastic bag and then begrudgingly swap it for a handful of yen. If I don't get to see the egg being lowered into a boiling crater with my own two eyes, I'm not forking out any yen for it. Bonnet or no bonnet.

The rest of this geothermal park was rather disappointing, in that so much steam is generated you can't actually see the craters themselves. The most famous of these jigoku (or “hells”) was Daikyokan Jigoku, into which 33 Christians were boiled alive in 1630 as punishment for being Christian. I assume they were thrown in consecutively rather than concurrently, otherwise the hole would have soon blocked up and the Shogun would have at least 13 singed and angry Christians on his hands. Anyway, a helpful sign explained that the Japanese call these 'hells' because in the Buddhist faith hell is associated with sulphur, heat and smoke (perhaps the Shogun was not so dissimilar to the Christians), and the gurgling noise made by the hell is likened – somewhat fancifully, it seemed to me – to the screams of the damned as they plunge into Hell.

After taking in all of this sulphurous terror, we took a nice stroll up the mountainside in an attempt to reach the Nita Pass, where one can catch a cable car up to the top of the mountain from which the crater of the volcano can be observed. We had to walk since the tourist information guide had explained that the bus was not working today, but it would perhaps also have been nice if he'd explained that the cable car also was not working as this would have saved us a journey. As it was, we went halfway up the mountain before determining this for ourselves, but it was not an entirely wasted journey: we saw a wild boar, a self-driving motorised golf buggy and a superb view down to the sea before turning back.

Although Unzen has three separate tourist information offices, they were not generally very helpful. When we first arrived in Unzen – worried by the length of our return journey and eager to ensure we knew when our last possible bus home would be – we popped in to ask as tourist information. “There is one leaving in ten minutes,” we were told. “Is there not one three hours from now?” I asked, looking at the timetable in his hand. “Oh yes, but then you'd have to spend three hours in Unzen,” he explained, straight-faced, as though he truly considered the best advice for tourists to be “Get out, get out now and be glad!”

As it happens, he was probably right. The hells were a big disappointment and as the cable car wasn't working there was no real reason to go up this mountain rather than the one in – say – Nagasaki where we'd woken up. As we came back down the hill, full of suggestions of getting a late lunch or perhaps seeing if there was a hotel with a pool, we saw a blue bus destined for Nagasaki and boarded it without another word. Within an hour and forty minutes, we were home.

We bathed again in the hot spa on the tenth floor, this time in the company of an elderly man who sounded very much relieved to be in hot water, before heading out to the Dejima Wharf for a spot of dinner at the St Andrew's Inn. So far, all of the Japanese cities we have visited have been identical to each other: sprawling messes of boxy buildings built high and in concrete. Dejima Wharf bucks this trend, being a modern development of charming wooden buildings, built along the wharf and overlooking the estuary, with a range of interesting bars and restaurants. While sipping white wine here, I realised Nagasaki has a slightly different feel from Tokyo / Kyoto / Osaka / Hiroshima / Kagoshima, and may well end up being my favourite of the cities we visit this holiday (in Japan, at least).

Cultural Note #003: during our time in Japan we've come across a surprising number of examples of relatively mundane noises which have been given extremely poetic interpretations. A bubbling fountain in Kyoto was known as the 'Crying woman in the night', yet might better be compared to 'Urinating man in fountain'. The squeaking floors of the Nijo-jo – a clever alarm system installed to alert to intruders, and sounding mostly like the squeaking of baby rats – was interpreted as 'the nightingale song' floorboards. Most recently, the sound of raging geothermal water – reminiscent mostly of a kettle as it comes to boil – was compared to the sound of screaming souls as they plunged into Hell. It's elegant right enough, but suggests a cultural habit of euphemism in which one describes how one would like the world to be rather than how it actually is, and this may help to explain why Japanese society appears to be so incredibly straight-laced and conformist on the one hand and yet feeds a growing industry of schoolgirl prostitution and manga-porn on the other.