Chik's Crib: 2026

25 January 2026

Wakayama: Osaka In Autumn 2026, Part 2

Travel January 25, 2026 0

We took a long train ride down from Amanohashidate to Wakayama. Wakayama is a peninsula that boasts of unfettered nature and the historical Kumano Kodō pilgrimage route. I envisioned ancient temples, stretches of countryside and small towns. So as we exited Wakayama station, I wasn't expecting to come face to face with a Louis Vuitton store. It’s quite the bustling city centre!

But as we collected our rental car and drove away from the city centre, orchards and other farmland gradually came into view.

We swopped landscapes of large orange globes of persimmon in Amanohashidate for the smaller mikan (Japanese tangerines) of Wakayama.

As we passed towns and the plots of farmland, we stopped intermittently along interesting spots to stretch our legs. We bought a box of mikan (2kg for 900 yen) from Morimoto Farm 森本農園, whose owner was a bit surprised to receive tourists.

We explored Momijidani Teien Garden and Wakayama Castle. The gardens are free to enter despite the signage, and a couple was taking wedding pictures as we came.

We also stopped at Bandoko Garden, a private garden by the coast.

Despite the reviews of people who visited Taniino Orchards 谷井農園, it seemed like most people don’t. The staff were really, really surprised to see us turn up. Most of their customers just order their mikan drinks online, as we later learnt.

There’s no sign posts or storefront to speak of, just a small quiet unnamed building in the corner, sun-kissed mikan trees in the soil, and not a single person to be found anywhere. We walked up the pavement to the strong sweet whiffs of cooking fruits, which came across almost caramel-like. There’s definitely some activity going on here. We poked around the ground floor of the building, but it was devoid of any people. The lights were on but there was nobody home. So where was the smell coming from?

We rather hesitantly climbed the stairs to the second floor (with flashbacks of Uketsu’s Strange Houses dancing in my head), and we found the most incongruent scene: a modern office with a lot of people in formal office-wear. Huh. Our unplanned presence threw everybody into a bit of a tizzy. It’s not a fruit shop/juice joint after all. It’s more like their head office. There was a bit of language barrier as well, but they finally understood that we just dropped by to buy a couple of bottles of their Mikan juices. They graciously invited us in to sit inside and wait while they fetch some bottles for us.

Each bottle costs about $10 USD (!!) and is about 100ml. Is this one of those Japanese things that’s meant to be gifted to business partners? It’s great, but the cost is really steep for personal consumption.

We drove on until the next town of Tanabe, where we took a lunch break. The breaded pork cutlet at Yoshihei Inari was terrific. The breaded exterior is wonderfully crisp and - surprisingly - even fluffy.

We visited Senjojiki Rock Plateau (千畳敷), Sandanbeki Cave and Hashiguiiwa Rocks before arriving at Hotel Urashima for the night.

Senjojiki Rock Plateau (千畳敷)

The main draw of Hotel Urashima is their onsen, some of which runs in the caverns under the hotel and on the beach. It was a pretty cool experience, but truthfully, our experience in these onsen were mid at best. It was pretty crowded with many other guests, and the onsen was quite dated. And somehow, there were mosquitos. I prefer my onsen experience to be more peaceful and clean.

While the rooms were decent and large (they were newly furbished), the rest of the hotel also did show its age.

We got up early the next morning to get to Nachi Falls, the Seiganto-ji Temple and the Kumano-Nachi Grand Shrine. We had to wake early to beat the crowd, but this was worth our effort.

The entrance ticket is a piece of token that you can keep with you.

A fountain under the waterfall allows you to take a sip from the waterfall with a sakazuki.

Over at the Grand Shrine, you write out a wish on a wooden token and carry it through a hollowed-out tree.

We stopped by Ōyunohara Sanctuary on our loop of Wakayama. The largest tori gate in Japan, Kumano Hongu Taisha Otorii, is on the sanctuary grounds.

Nearby is 宮ずし, a sushi lunch spot. It was another good meal. The sushi’s fresh as usual, and the seared Kumamo beef was well-marbled and melted in our mouths even when served chilled.

The last stop in our Wakayama itinerary was the town of Koyasan (Mount Koya), and we reached just after lunch around 3pm. It’s a pretty large town, with several temples in the area. The most well-known one is probably the head temple Kongobu-ji.

And in the cemetery Okuno-in, where we took a quiet evening walk, we came across the final resting place of Nobunaga Oda. Anyone who had spent as much of their childhood playing Samurai Warriors (as I did) would need no introduction to him.

After all the driving around we did on the empty roads, this would have been a nice town to set up for the night, especially when some of the temples are offering a stay. It would have been quite the cultural experience.

If I could do one thing over again, it would be to tour Wakayama over three days instead of two. We optimistically (foolishly) thought that 4 hours of driving per day is manageable. It turned out to be quite a punishing schedule. Daylight was already in short supply in autumn, and we had to rush from attraction to attraction. And despite our best efforts to avoid driving at the night, we had to navigate through the mountains after sunset.

On our way down the mountains, we had quite a bit of a nerve-wrecking experience on a single lane, involving another car coming in the opposite direction while navigating a sharp turn with no roadside barriers between the road and empty air. We eventually inched our cars past each other, with our side mirrors folded in and my front car tyre precipitously close to the edge.

It was a road as narrow as this, but late at night, along a 100 degrees bend, with no barrier and with another car trying to make its way past you too.

Not a single person in the history of humankind had ever said to be pleased to see gridlock - except me. When we finally got down the mountains and into Nara city’s traffic, I felt immense relief at the familiar sights of city traffic once again.

Our rental Toyota Aqua shone here in the mountains. It was a wonderful car powerful enough to get us through the incline. And as a hybrid, its fuel economy was unreal: a 3/4 tank of petrol got us the 5 full days of driving going through mountainous terrains of Wakayama and Nara. And thank goodness for its small size: when our car was inching past another car on a single lane, I don't think a car larger than ours could've made it.

Wakayama was a wonderful experience, despite our scheduling mishaps. In future, I wouldn't schedule driving more than 2-3 hours per day. For people planning to visit Wakayama, this is one place where you would need to allocate more than 48 hours to see the best of this wonderful peninsula.

11 January 2026

Ine and Amanohashidate: Osaka In Autumn 2026, Part 1

Travel January 11, 2026 0

It's autumn. Bright orange globes of persimmon, hanging on gnarled branches, can be found almost everywhere we look in Amanohashidate. There are persimmon trees at every street corner. Loose persimmons - both Fuyu and Hachiya - sit unattended in small baskets outside storefronts, with a small sign indicating how much they were being sold for. As night falls, we bought two small sacks of persimmons at a pharmacy, and a kindly pharmacy staff brought us out of the store to show us how locals would hang the fruit out on their balconies to sun-dry. I'd forgotten how much the Japanese prides themselves on going ahead and beyond on their services, especially to slightly-hapless foreigners.

The sandbar is the most striking landmark of Amanohashidate, a swatch of land that cuts through the Miyazu Bay to connect both halves, and affectionately called the "Bridge to Heaven". We walked through the windswept sandbar. One side of the bay, enclosed by land, was calm and still; the other, wild and turbulent. The shrubbery were almost bent over from how relentless the winds were.

There's also a bridge to the sandbar Shotenkyo that swivels around in the waters to let boats through. I feel that it's not talked about enough online.

There are chairlift services on both sides of the sandbar, and we took a ride on both to get to the hills overlooking the town. The southern chairlift has superior views, and costs 2000 yen, even for people like us holding a 2-day Amanohashidate-Ine pass (which came together with a 5-day JR Pass). The northern one is free for pass-holders, though the view was only partial.

Toss a ceramic token through the hoop, and your wishes will come true

It’s a sweet little town, and rather quiet despite the presence of a few tourist buses. We arrived in the late morning and subsided on roasted chestnuts and fish cakes turning over an electric grill by the side of a road. The chestnut soft and sweet, are almost like sweet potato in terms of texture and sweetness. There are a few shrines and temples in the area, including Motoise Kono Jinja, the first shrine of Japan.

This town requires an early start to your day, especially in autumn and winter when the days grow short. By 1pm, our designated lunch place(s) had either ran out of food, or were full and no longer accepting walk-ins. Don’t expect restaurants - except for a couple - to be open at dinner time too (Google map’s opening hours may not be reliable here). We were caught a bit flat-footed when the sun set at 5 in the evening, and we were on the opposite side of the sandbar from our hotel. We hung around for a bit longer, hoping to go a restaurant that was meant to open at 6. But 6 came and went and the restaurant remained dark. We finally decided to find dinner elsewhere. We hooved it back across the sandbar at night, which was an hour’s walk that the grocery store clerk did not recommend. But we were out of options - there’s no public bus was available (on Google Map) and the ferry service had also stopped by 5pm as well. It was surprising how fast the town emptied out by nightfall.

We made a few detours to other restaurants that were meant to be open but not, and we finally arrived famished on the doorsteps of 310. But there’s a silver lining to it: this is perhaps one of the best fine-dining meals that we’ve had in Japan.

We did not expect such a restaurant in a small town, but here it was. I need to gush about this restaurant for a bit. It was run by a couple. The food was bold and delicate in equal measure. Every dish came with a change of dinnerware (with each piece handmade by an artisan in Kyoto, tyvm). Between the two of them, they handled the entire dining experience top to bottom with no lapse in service. How did they do it?

My favourite was the Steamed Fish with Sake and Garlic (above, picture). The fish fillet was seasoned, breaded and fried, and then steamed. Each bite was incredibly meaty.

A thick slice of daikon with an accompanying yuzu sauce was served as an appetiser with the cover charge, was one of the best things I’ve eaten on this trip.

Vegetable dishes were cooked to excellence here. A humble bowl of assorted vegetables, beautifully presented and each steamed to perfection.

Because it was snow crab season, we also got the crab in claypot rice. That, alongside their Pork Rib mains, was definitely overkill for just a table of two. But it had been a long day for us: we had an early morning train ride to this town, we bounced around restaurant to restaurant the entire day trying to find something to eat, and finally walked over 23k steps in just one afternoon. We were famished, and we ate every grain of rice and every scrap of vegetable and meat.

We retired back to the hotel finally sated. The hotel foot bath overlooking the bay was a godsend. We rolled up our pants in the cold air, stepped in, plonked ourselves down on the bench and decompressed there.

The perks of living next to the sea is the abundance of seafood. We had free-flow salmon roe and sashimi in a soy sauce marinade, served as part of the hotel breakfast. My breakfast was a self-made chirashi don overflowing with ikura. There's also sashimi, which I'd added to my don after taking this picture.

And of course, a trip to Amanohashidate would not be complete without going into Ine. We took the bus up north, sharing it with a few students who were all headed to school in another town, and reached Ine within an hour.

Took a sightseeing boat out to the bay and watched the seagulls.

It was the town of turquoise ocean and red sake. The renowned, elusive Ine Mankai is from here, and we stopped by the sake brewery Mukai Shuzo. This delightfully pink sake was served at the 2019 G20 summit, and was made using wild red rice. It’s produced in such small quantities that bottles are entirely sold out within months, even in Ine itself. My sister-in-law who visited in April couldn’t find a bottle anywhere. Luckily, our trip was more fruitful, and we snagged bottles not just from the brewery (only 300ml bottles available), but also from a shop deeper into town.

A broad single lane runs through the coastal town, which was enough to service the entire town.

It was raining the entire time we were in Ine, sometimes heavier, sometimes lighter, but throughout. The drizzle added to the atmosphere of the small fishing village, and a small foldable umbrella kept both of us mostly dry.

Persimmons hung on window sills and balconies out to dry in the sun.

The brewery does not host tastings or tours. We had the sake: it tastes of red fruits on a background of grain notes. It’s overall quite an umami taste. Perhaps not everybody’s cup of tea, but pretty remarkable. Get them while they last!