Japan Day 4- Travel Day and Iya Valley

 Woke up at the Fukuchi-in Monastery and attended an early morning prayer service with the monks. Two monks setup their service and did various songs, chants, and prayers continuously for just shy of an hour. During the service you could approach the shrine and say your prayer as well. It is a small room but they gave us a tour around the shrine afterward (no pics unfortunately) and the walls and shelves had all types of mini shrine ornaments. I would almost compare them to like a trophy room and lots of trophies but little shrines I obviously couldn't read the Japanese on them but it was a cool setup. 

This monastery and certainly the prayer service were one of the more unique experiences of the entire trip. It was truly sitting in a temple in a meditative state listening to the monks work through their prayer procession. Cool experience. 

Off we go and onto our first ferry ride! The Nankai Ferry over to Tokushima. I hadn't been on a big-time ferry before the bus itself just drives onto the boat, then we get off the bus and go up into the seating areas. They had "first class" seating areas, sleeping areas, regular cafeteria style seating areas. Of course our group can chat it up with the best of them so we had a great hang for a hours and ferry was done. 

Vending machines aplenty on the ferry boat as well. I tried this Yakult drink it was one of the few non-coke or non-familiar drinks i tried from vending machines. Not bad. The rest of the crew bought themselves some hot cup o noodles. Needless to say our boxed lunches this day weren't hitting the spot. 

We arrived at the Awaodori Museum. This was a traditional Japanese dance hall where they performed their dance for us and had all of the crowd join in as well. Jodi won the best dancer award of the day! The waiting area had some simulation music items to dance to or drum a beat to. The dance itself seemed like simple moves but funny to see those of us that aren't doing it frequently and in rhythm still get offbeat. I also decided to take a pic of the cleanup signs to remind myself to never get a dog! ;)

We then drove up into the Iya Valley and arrived at the Ryokan Hotel. This was an older hotel on a hillside that had essentially an entire extra building attached to it. Our rooms of course were in the "extra building" so you had to take an elevator to get up to a level where the extra building connected, traverse to the extra building, then another elevator to get to your actual floor and room. This hotel also had attached to it a fairly large Onsen building. It had a large arcade for kids in it that seemed straight out of the 90's to me. Of course I did some onsen again they were wonderful hot baths!

Our room was another tatami-mat room. This time we did have our own restroom facilities and showers in our room. One item i'll comment on and it was extra noticeable here was the water pressure in almost every shower in every hotel was absolutely incredible. Need that here! It was awesome. It was noticeable in these rooms because the little shower room was super tiny with no shower curtain so your little closet just got blasted with water. This impacted your towel that was waiting for you as well so your towel on your first shower if you hung it up inside the closet with you was soaking wet. 

We were given Yukatas again at this hotel to wear at our dinner. This dinner had lots of unique items including a fully scaled roasted trout! I just couldn't get myself there that night but Rachel tried it (Jake as well) and both said it was actually quite tasty! The salt on the skin made it tasty. They didn't eat the entire thing but this was apparently a delicacy in the area as we saw it the next day out in town as well. 

The view out of our window was a steep mountain that was super green and beautiful. It reminded me of the old view out of Back of the Moon to the big steep hill across the canyon. 

In retrospect this day was more of a chill day with lots of bus travel to get to this remote area. It was still super fun and starting the morning with the prayer service felt like it had happened forever ago by the time we reached the end of the day.