A year ago today, I went to Japan’s Kumamoto prefecture for the first time. Other than the famous (yet non-original) Kumamoto castle, I wasn’t sure what was so good about Kumamoto, but then when I was at my Eikaiwa job, I had a student who mentioned that she went to a place named Cuddly Dominion and she held a bear there. I had wanted to hold a bear for a while, specially since I had held a tiger cub in Thailand and a lion cub in Oita, meaning a bear cub was the last thing I needed to hold in the “Lions, Tigers, and Bears, oh my!” trifecta. So, I talked to Nami about it and we decided to make Cuddly Dominion the target of our Valentine’s day weekend trip.
We took the shinkansen from Hakata to Kumamoto station where we got a local train up through beautiful mountains and countryside to get to Aso, where Cuddly Dominion was. Cuddly Dominion also has helicopter rides that you could experience and having never been in a helicopter, we opted to take a ride above Mt. Aso, the famous active volcano of Kumamoto. I really wanted to do this as I have never been in a helicopter before, Nami wasn’t super interested, but agreed to go if I paid for her. It was phenomenal. It was only about 15 minutes and it was just Nami, myself, and the pilot. It was so different from an airplane and the volcano was cool of course (but we couldn’t get too close). After the helicopter ride he took us down back at the park and then took off somewhere else.
After the helicopter ride, we wandered around the park, we played with llamas, pigs, and capybaras in the petting zoo. Here, I got to pet my first capybara, however they weren’t nearly as soft as they looked, their hair felt more like the rough bristles of a pig. Throughout the day we watched three animal shows, a penguin show, an animal trick show, and an animal play of sorts, they were interesting, but I felt a little bad for the animals as they seemed to be worked really hard. After the penguin show we went to the bear center and held a bear, which was super cute, but it was a little unfortunate that the bear had to wear clothes, but anyhow we got to hold a bear cub, so we were happy. The cub’s name was Matsuri and was one year old. After walking around the park and seeing a few things we walked back to the station, checked out the market and got the train back to Kumamoto city.
For dinner we wanted to try some of Kumamoto’s famous dish, basashi (馬刺し/horse meat). This was my first time eating horse meat and it tasted fine, a bit different from beef, but hard to explain, but I think I’ll stick to normal meats. We ended up finding a love hotel to sleep at for the night and when we woke up we saw a marathon taking place outside our window. I guess we were here during the Kumamoto marathon. After waking up we walked out to Kumamoto castle to start the second day of our trip.
We took our time getting up to the castle and checked out a shrine in front of the castle. The castle itself we rushed a little bit because we wanted to make sure to catch Kumamon (the precture’s famous bear mascot) as he only was around for an hour in the morning. The castle wasn’t particularly interesting compared to other castles, it was entirely recreated, but it also had an attached palace which took a while to get through, but was a new experience. After the castle we rushed to see Kumamon’s show at his “office”, we were a little late but we got to see him put on his show and do the Kumamon Taiso (Kumamon aerobics) which we enjoyed when he visited the Ube festival a few months earlier, unlike when we saw him at the Ube festival, we got to pose for a picture with him after the show which was great. We took the long walk back to the station, spent a little time at another shrine, looked for goods at the station, then took the shinkansen back to Hakata and went back to Munakata to sleep as I had an interview and school visit to the school that I presently work at right now in the morning.
Length of trip: 2 days (Sat, Feb. 14 – Sun, Feb. 15, 2015), 1 night.
New cities visited: Kumamoto, Aso.
New prefectures visited: Kumamoto.
3 Replies to “First Trip to Kumamoto (Looking Back)”