Kagaonsen Trip 3

For the third and final day of the Kagaonsen trip, we once again rode the CanBus to tourist destinations.  We checked out of the hotel and stashed our bags in a locker in the train station, then jumped on the bus.  Our first stop was Yamanaka Onsen, which means "mountain inside hot spring" literally translated.  We weren't headed for the hot springs part of it so much, but rather the gorge carved by the river next to the town and the interesting bridges across it.

 We went first to this very artsy winding purple bridge, which has an unusual curved design.  We crossed it from the town side to the nature side, where they have a green walk that goes the length of the town from bridge to bridge, along the gorge.

 Some places along the walk have picnic spots and stands for buying snacks - a nice place, though we did not stop.

 This is the gorge under the bridge on the other end of the nature walk - there are fancy hot springs hotels lining the other side of the gorge, so all the rooms facing the gorge get a view of the rocks and river.  The bridge was supposed to be hundreds of years old, but at the least it had been reinforced much more recently than that as large modern steel fittings could be clearly seen on the underside.

 After walking along the gorge, we walked back through the center of town.  It looked like they were setting up for a festival, and unfortunately a lot of shops that looked interesting were not open, possibly in preparation for being open non-stop during said festival.  Probably half the shops were closed, but we still saw some nice things as we meandered through.

 After catching the bus back to the terminal to switch to a different bus line, we had half an hour or so before the next bus and got greasy McDonald's fries for lunch and milkshakes to combat the heat.  After getting on the other CanBus for the different route, we headed for a place whose advertisements had long confused us, to ascertain the true nature of the place.  The brochure talks a lot about rabbits (website).  Apparently, they are for petting.

 It's free to get in, and you can get gloves from bins.  Posing with gloves optional.

 After you put on the gloves you can pet the rabbits, which are mostly pretty OK with this.  Additional OK-ness can be purchased in the form of rabbit treats, which get their attention better than just offering to pet them.

 The rabbits ranged in size from quite small to quite large, and despite the large number of rabbits, the place seemed to be kept quite clean.  There were also many places for overexcited rabbits to hide from attention, which got used when some younger Japanese children would for instance run screaming after a particular rabbit.

The rabbit place also had a lot of creepy statues of various animals and demons stuck all over the buildings and grounds.  There are more examples in the Flickr set.

The free rabbit petting is paid for by sales from a very large selection of rabbit-themed merchandise, and other non-rabbit-themed selections.

Our final stop before getting back on the train to Kanazawa was Kaga Fruits Land, which offers you-pick fruits of various sorts and products derived from the fruits that presumably nobody picked, along with a yakuniku (small grilled pieces of meat) restaurant and probably a bunch of other ways to make money that we remain ignorant of.  We didn't particularly want to do the you-pick since the prices weren't so great and it was almost closing time for them, but we did want to see what a "Fruits Land" was and what interesting things they had for sale.  They had a lot of juices and jams and jellies and the like, along with fairly expensive fresh fruits, and three house wines, which we had to purchase half-bottles of and evaluate for science.  We determined that their red is about a 2 out of 10, qualifying it as "plonk", while their white is probably a solid 4 out of 10, making it "drink-ably inoffensive, possibly worth paying something for".  The rose fell between them as probably 3 out of 10 and "not awful, but hardly good".  We also bought an unfermented grape juice which turned out to have a bit of a funky flavor to it, so we used it as a mixer with Sprite and rum, which worked reasonably well.

Also shown in the picture is the tea mug that Ana bought at the "Crafts Village" and the free seeds from the "Fruits Land".

All told, our little three day trip to Kagaonsen was a pretty simple, cheap, and easy good time, and we saw a lot of the strange little tourist attractions in the Kanazawa area that we had been aware of but not visited yet. Definitely check out Flickr for more photos of the statues!