My goal for this day’s travel was to see Mizu no Kuni, a museum focusing on water in the deepest reaches of Shimane Prefecture. I had originally seen pictures of it on this blog, and have wanted to see it ever since. Its location, however, makes it relatively inaccessible, and even more tricky if you don’t have a car. Luckily, I had a bicycle! The nearest train stop, however, has only 5 trains each way each day. Getting on the train in Hagi at around 9:30, I finally arrived at the station at around 1:30pm. Using my phone’s handy GPS function, I found my way to the museum, enjoying the river scenery and the cool weather. I arrived at the museum and was not disappointed.

The museum is set into a pass in the mountains, and the museum nestles into the trees, and the only sounds around are those of the bubbling fountains (and the occasional other guests!). The exhibit halls are actually rather small, but they had an exhibit on a local movie director from the sixties, a traveling exhibit of curious mechanical items, and the main permanent exhibits of various curious water-related things. There was a “well” where spouts dripped water melting from ice cubes, a water powered music-box, another water-powered music thing, and some ways of playing with water, including a high-speed camera for capturing water droplets.

I had a good time there, but by the time I was done I still had a couple hours left until the next train! And there was really nothing else around, not even a convenience store! So I decided to take my bike and ride it all the way to my hotel, which was about 10km from the museum. So off I went! Except it was about 3:30 at the time, and very sunny, so it was getting hot, and I was not feeling so awesome without any sunscreen on.

I ended up taking a few breaks along the way, and even crossed over to the other side of the river once I decided that the side I was on had too much sun and too many cars. Luckily, the other side was much better on both accounts, although it did have the occasional “Watch for bears” sign. It followed pretty closely along the train tracks, and I got a nice picture of a place where the train goes through a tunnel but the road goes around.

After about an hour all told (with a few 5-10 minute breaks), I made it to my ryokan (recommended if you’re ever in the area, unlikely as that may be), and took a nice cool shower and a nap until dinner. Dinner was a curious selection of fishy things and fresh fruit, all tasty, and I was told that it was the night of the local Obon dance, so at around 7:30 I headed out to watch the dance. People there were particularly surprised to see me there! It’s not the kind of place that gets a lot of foreigners. Part of the Obon festival in this area is a special style of story-telling dance called Kagura, and they interspersed that with the traditional dance around the tower. Obon dances are meant to send off the recently departed to heaven, and everyone participates (even I got dragged into it!). The festival was pretty small, for a small village, but the people were nice and I got free shave-ice.

The next morning I had some more delicious food and then set off for Masuda city, a bigger city in Shimane.