Having skipped the cable car in Hakodate I make my first train in good time. Between the fish market breakfast and the walk around town I managed to go to the station to reserve my tickets in the hope of better seats. The first train is a normal JR train. 2 hours on I change at Shinaomori for the JR Tohoku Shinkansen for the next leg of my journey. I only had 13 minutes to get from one platform to the other which given the different networks was a short walk. I find my carriage and seat and get settled. My seat was next to an old lady so I gamble and sit in the 2 empty seats. But given the train was a rapid service to Tokyo my luck ran out at the next stop and I had to move to my allocated seat. Seeing the snow covered Japanese countryside is quite humbling. Its so different from Tokyo with simple one or two story buildings scattered around. Seeing the sparse road traffic makes me realise how bloody fast we are travelling. It’s only when I get off the train I see the full beauty of the Shinkansen train that I’ve only ever seen on TV documentaries. Just the nose itself is 2 long car lengths. I guess the aerodynamics play a large part in the whole bullet train set up. Last leg is another Shinkansen, but just the one stop to Tazawako where I have to get an hour long local bus transfer to Arupa Komakusa and the onsen I booked will come pick me up. So Nyuto Onsen is an area close to Lake Tamagawa (deepest lake in Japan) that boasts 7 different onsens, each with different mineral compositions and some dating back to the 1600s. The one I was staying at Tsurunoyu is a mixed onsen that had 20-30 rooms and probably the most famous in the are. When staying at any of these onsens the price includes dinner and breakfast. The mixed thing wasn’t that big a deal as the way they are set up allows people to get changed in separated changing rooms and enter the onsen discreetly. The water is a cloudy milky white and combined with the steam off the onsen you would struggle to see far in front of you. I get there close to dinner time so opt to onsen after dinner. Dinner was an interesting collection of foraged mountain vegetables, mushrooms and fish. It was nice to see such good use of what was around them. Each normal thing you would find at a Japanese dinner was slightly different. The soup had mountain yam in it. A creamy slippery potato like dumpling that added a little bite to the soup. Deep fried rice ball and some sort of fried chicken are one of the tasty highlights. The pickles were all smoked in a lovely woody flavour which quickly subsides when the vinegar kicks in.    The fish was on a wooden skewer with a salt bake type layer probably to protect it from the wood fire it was sitting over. A whole arrange of different tasty mushrooms throughout the dishes and as I eat them I wonder if I will have funny dreams tonight. A short while after dinner I onsen and have the whole place to myself. Given its outdoor its more like a warm soak. I hunt for the onsen source like a crab trying to keep my whole body submerged and must have looked something special. It wasn’t that much hotter so I shuffle around a bit more. In that process I feel my buttocks get a little hotter than comfortable and realise there are various natural outlets from the gravel covered floor. I head for the indoor onsen and its a much hotter affair. It almost scolds the skin as you get in, but only for the first second or so as my body gets used to the temperature. I realised that the slightest movement of any body part causes that same initial sensation to reoccur. Better not get too excited then hey? I return to my room to find my bed made (awesome!) I try and revise my Japanese vocabulary as a couple of brushes of difficult conversations encourage me to get my head back in the books. 2 weeks off snowboarding in Australia didn’t really help matters either. The next morning I onsen before breakfast and I book my shuttle to the onsen and the lady is really helpful in helping me with the logistics. I have to get a shuttle to one of the other onsens and from there I can walk along to the others. She also gives me a number of bus schedules to help me get back to the train station as well as the Tokyo train schedule. I buy a ticket booklet which allows me to go to 5 onsens and take the shuttle for about $10. Ganiba onsen – I’m dropped off by the bus and met by an angry looking man (and yes I realise the irony in me saying that) and he points me to the 2 different onsens available. The first is an outdoor onsen which is clear as day and has a smattering of egg white like particles in it. To get to it you have to walk through a cut out path with snow walls twice my height either side. As the sun comes out and reflects in the virgin white snow its hard to make out the difference between floor and wall. As I bathe a couple of guys come by and take a snap and then see me bathing, apologise and carry on snapping. One tries to have a full on conversation with me and after whats seems like his life story and apologise and explain I can’t speak Japanese. He apologises profusely, gets naked and bathes the other side of the onsen. I try the other onsen the other side of this hotel and its a hottie. A lovely wooden tub which is really smooth. The water is not as clear and loads more white particles that resembles the egg in a chicken and sweetcorn soup. As I doze off slightly my perfirial vision sees each of the eggy particles spitting out a rainbow along its edge as the sunlight beams through the windowed wall. Pretty special but I do wonder if any of those mushrooms might have taken hold. Oogama onsen – pretty standard after the others but was amazed to see the size of the icicles hanging pretty close to the outdoor onsen’s edge. This indoor one was the hottest yet and I bail after no more than 5 minutes hoping to save myself for the others.

I planned to head back to Tokyo as there wasn’t a great deal that had caught my eye between here and Tokyo except a certain nuclear reactor that I’d rather keep clear of. Ben was away in the Philippines and I try to arrange to pick up the keys from one of his friends, but proves difficult mainly due to my last minute plan and complete lack of mobile phone reception the night before. I skip the last onsen I had planned to go to. Firstly because I walked straight past it and secondly because the bus back to the train station and train back to Tokyo only run hourly with a 40 min gap in between. Much more hot soaking and I think I’d pass out anyway.

I get on the bus back to the station as it picks up quite a few passengers on the way. One of which a young family who decide to put their fold up buggy in the aisle. A short while into the journey I wake up suddenly from a post onsen nap and drop my phone and bus ticket I was holding. It had fallen under the buggy and reach down to get it holding on to the seat in front for balance. Ouch – feck. Did I just dislocate my arm? Yes I did. Did I just managed to dislocated it after avoid serious injury including this bloody recurring one after all that snowboarding. Yes I did. Numpty. I couldn’t really afford to go to hospital as I was on a pretty tight schedule to pick up Ben’s keys. After liaising with Ben in the Philippines and planning out the weekend in Tokyo the last thing I wanted to do was delay it all and have to depend on my Japanese friends to help me translate over the phone to the doctors that I had managed to dislocate my arm picking up a bus ticket. At this point I was thinking of heading back to Tokyo (3.5 hrs away) and getting it seen to there. But then wondered how was I going to get my heavy rucksack or suitcase off the beaten up old bus. Every bump the bus hit was hurting so I decided to try and do it myself. I read an article maybe about 2 years ago and had a couple of episodes where I could have but didn’t try it. This was the time to pull it out the bag. Medic friends always tell me that it is procedure is to first exclude a fracture, but even I couldn’t be that unlucky and the trauma was low impact (a bloody bus ticket!). I put my hand into my shoulder socket to check and yep its definitely out. I put my hands together and interlocked my fingers and clasped my bent knee. I straighten the knee and voila. Crisis averted. Was it really that easy? Appears so. Pretty painless too. Still I won’t be trying to do that again in a hurry, but good skill to have in the back pocket. Well done Tim – you now no longer wear the badge of always being there when I pop my arm out. Just only when it requires medical attention. Anyway onward back to Tokyo to celebrate my birthday!