A nice, cheap place to go for great food and great hot springs is called Kinosaki in the northern part of Hyogo Prefecture.
If you are ever in a JR station in Kansai and see a pamphlet for a Crab and “Onsen” or hot spring spa trip, there’s a chance you are looking at an ad for a trip to Kinosaki.
A good way to view the town is through its web cam! You’ll see a quiet area with a few people walking around relaxing and trying to work off all that crab and sashimi.
A friend of mine recently went and provided me with some picks of the food there…
Feast your eyes on some of the Tajima beef for shabushabu! (Tajima beef is extremely high quality beef like Kobe beef, but not as famous outside of Japan. Tajima beef is from the northern part of Hyogo, not far from the Kinosaki Hot Springs.)
Shabushabu by the way is a dish in which you take very thinly cut slices of beef and swish it around in hot water until it’s cooked (which only takes a few seconds). The water has some flavoring in it and you can also cook a bunch of vegetables in the water. The water also gets flavored by the beef so that at the end you have a nice soup of vegetable and beef stock… then you can drop some udon noodles in there and finish it off. No waste!
This looks like a good place to get crab!
Or if you want some traditional, um, Hello Kitty souvenirs…
And if you take a walk around the small town there’s lots to see. In this picture on the right side you can see some Cherry Blossom trees just starting to bloom. They should be in full bloom right now, this picture was taken a few weeks ago.
Since this blog is about traveling in Japan cheaply… I thought I’d just mention the price.
About $US170 or about 17,000 yen per person… Now that might sound like a lot, but it included the food pictured above AND two servings of crab. The Tajima Beef included was also about 200g per person. You could easily pay over a hundred dollars for the food alone anywhere else… and everyone at this particular ryokan had access to three different hot springs and saunas, including one which was open air (an open air hot spring in the snow is one of the most memorable experiences I have of traveling in Japan).
If you are looking for hot springs, I’ll give a few recommendations as I fill out my experiences on this blog, but if you are in the Kansai area and want someplace easily accessible by train or car, check out the Kinosaki Hot Spring area! Here’s the Kinosaki Hot Springs official homepage!