I am back in Japan! This time I chose November to see the beautiful fall colors.

Check out an interactive map of the places I visited here. I will update this map as I continue my journey. This post is about days 0-2.

I arrived a couple of days ago but so far had no time to document anything. This blog post is a write-up of the last three days.

I didn't get much sleep on the plane, maybe 3 hours in total. I got off the plane, met up with the friend I am traveling with and had some pretty good ramen for 6.50€ at Haneda airport. For this trip we rented a car to explore the countryside of Japan. We picked it up at 5pm near the airport and were off. With not much sleep, getting thrown into left-hand traffic in a super busy city like Tokyo is not the best experience in the world. Google Maps predicted it should take us 2 hours to reach our first destination near Tokyo, but with traffic at its peak and me not being used to driving on a Japanese highway that much, it took us a good 3 hours to get there. One wrong exit on the highway alone cost us an hour. Would not recommend it. Lesson learned: add +30% to your driving time when traveling in Japan by car.

Luckily, we reached our country inn around 8pm. We learned that the place we chose to stay - Sano City - is famous for its ramen. So we had ramen for dinner a second time. This ramen felt much more "home", it reminded me of the chicken broth my grandma used to make.

I really felt the jet lag that first night. I only slept 5 hours and woke up feeling pretty groggy.

I took the first real picture in the morning, this is the "living room" of our inn, a pretty nice guest house.

We ate a small breakfast at the guest house and headed off to the first proper destination: One of the oldest onsens (hot spring) in Japan: Sekizenkan Kashoutei.The bridge leading to the onsen was inspiration to a famous Miyazaki movie: Spirited Away. The atmosphere was pretty magical there.The town itself also kind of reminded me of the first scenes of the movie where the main characters parents eat food at a market and turn into pigs.We reached our final destination around 3pm after driving through lots of scenic roads: Kusatsu Onsen. Kusatsu Onsen is a famous onsen town that is popular with Japanese tourists. We didn't see many western tourists there at all. Above, you can see the main "attraction" on the main square of the town. The hot spring water flows from the mountains through the town and then falls down in this waterfall that you see here. The whole town has manhole covers which have steam rising from them from the hot spring water flowing under them. This makes for a quite magical atmosphere, especially when the outside temperatures are a bit lower.

Since the onsen water has a high sulfur content, the smell is hard to get used to at first. It smells of rotten eggs everywhere.

The high mineral content of the spring water colors the areas it touches in blue teal, creating some unique looks (see picture above).We had dinner and went to an outdoor onsen. It got dark in the meantime and we had to climb a bit up a hill to get there. The way they illuminated the steaming hot spring water made the journey there so much more mystical.

Usually, onsen baths are taken same-sex only. But on friday nights, Kusatsu Onsen has mixed-sex onsens. We saw a lot of couples going to the onsen together. Not thinking anything, we got undressed and wanted to go into the hot water but were quickly called back by a well-meaning english-speaking person. We learned that you have to cover your private parts in the mixed-sex onsen but luckily, they handed out free bath shorts for everyone. One side-note: Japan is usually pretty strict with forbidding entry to tattooed individuals, but my friend had no issues with his tattoos in Kusatsu.

After the onsen, we felt warm although the outside temperature dropped to close to 0ºC. We finished the night at a local bar and went back to our Ryokan (guest house).The Ryokan had its own private onsen which was a great addition. Taking hot baths is so relaxing, especially after sitting in a car for so long! I took a bath in the morning to wake up and get ready for the day.

We had a big journey ahead of us: 4 hours road trip from Kusatsu Onsen to Niigata. From Niigata, we wanted to take a ferry to Sado island and spend some time there.

Again, traffic predictions were not very accurate and the prediction of 3.5 hours turned into 4.5-5 hours. We didn't account for these inaccuracies and had a pretty stressful journey and almost missed our ferry!Luckily, we caught the ferry 10 minutes before its departure and were off. The adrenaline was still high when we saw this beautiful sunset from the ship. The Niigata skyline got smaller and smaller in the distance.

The sunset and looked like a bowl of Ramen touching the sea. Only in Japan!
You can even see a small spoon sticking out on the right side if you look closely!