Japanese Ryokan with Private Onsen Experience | Shinhotaka Onsen in Takayama

My recent travels to Japan have mostly focused on the big city experiences of Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka. Exploring their many attractions and tasting all the delicious food on offer. So I knew that if I ever went back to Japan, there was something I needed to experience at least once. And that was staying at a ryokan which came with their very own onsen. So for this trip, I traveled to Takayama in the mountainous Hida region and booked a night at a ryokan. This was my experience. We arrived in Takayama. Before we decided to check in at our ryokan, we spent the day exploring the town. We visited the morning markets and explored its ancient streets. We visited the old Takayama Jinja, an old government complex, and even found some time for the region's famous Hida beef. Completely melted. Definitely not like at the level of the Kobe we had, but it's definitely like it's still really, really good. Still really, really good. Afterwards, an hour bus ride awaited us until we reached our ryokan at the Shinhotaka Onsen. Alright guys, so we just checked in at our ryokan, a traditional Japanese inn. The name of place is called Yuki Murasaki and we opted for a sort of open bath room plan with a tatami floor mat and it looks absolutely gorgeous. Especially a hot spring out there. It's a little bit dark right now so you can't really see much, but apparently you should be able to see like a mountain range somewhere out there. So here's hoping that we get to see it early in the morning when there's a little bit of light. If you're wondering where we are right now, we're basically an hour bus ride away from Takayama here in the Shinhotaka Onsen. There's several other small onsen towns nearby, but we're fairly close to the Shinhotaka roadway which we hopefully will do early morning. But yeah, so far this looks really, really cool. I love the tatami mat. We got the yukatas. We got all the stuff. So we're gonna probably change into that later. And the cool thing is we're gonna have dinner in about an hour or so. So it's gonna be a pretty good like kaiseki, at least a small kind of kaiseki dinner downstairs. And then we booked a sort of what is it? Private? Yeah, we booked like sort of a private rooftop, right? So we booked like a sort of private rooftop hot spring. There's actually two of them with different sort of, slightly different in style. So we booked both to try them out because why not? Like we're only gonna be here once so might as well try to enjoy it. But so far it looks really nice. The room is very close to what we had in Koyasan at the sort of temple lodging. This obviously is a lot more nicer. There's a lot more luxurious amenities, free drinks, all that kind of stuff. I can't wait just to have a relaxing time here in Takayama with Lisa. And yeah, I'll share with you guys our, I guess our experiences. What is that? What is that? I don't want to kill it. Look at it. It's a buck, but I don't know. All right, so before we head down to dinner, I thought I would give you guys a short little room tour of our little room. This is the door we came in. We just put our bags here for a moment. And in here, it's our sort of main room, our living room, sleeping section. We got the TV. We got this. I got my gimbal. We got, so before we head to our open bath area, we're going to go to the bathroom. So this is the bathroom section. Little sink. Here I am. All right. So this is a toilet. This is not any normal toilet. It's like the Japanese toilets. They're the best. You know why? Because they're just sprinkler thing down here. A bidet. It's a bidet. Bidet. I don't know how to pronounce it. Bidet. And you can control it right here. Now it looks very complicated, but you generally just want to push either one of these, I guess. And I guess this is a stop button. I'm not sure, but these are the best. I miss them. Ever since I left Japan, last time I was here with my brother, been missing these guys. They're awesome. I don't know why people don't like them. Well, maybe because, yeah, nevermind. In here, I think we have another sort of indoors hot spring. Let me just fog the ISO. It's a little bit dark in here. So yeah, this is the indoor bath section, as well as like a hot spring. Looks super nice. Ooh, the water's hot. Really, really hot. I guess you sit here in a little stool, wash yourself. And then out here, we have the open bath. It looks awesome. Also hot. The hot spring water just comes right in here. 24 hours, they said, never stops. And then out here in the darkness, there's supposed to be mountains. So that's our room. So yeah, that's our onsen, Japanese traditional inn, ryokan onsen room. We're just going to relax a little bit right now before we head down for some dinner. So dinner, dinner, dinner, dinner. Drinking menu. Oh, look at this. This looks so nice. This entire trip has just been me eating and drinking. I promise you guys, I'm not doing that. I'm like, I'm actually walking around a lot, shooting a lot. It just seems like I'm eating like constantly, which is not the case at all. First time having plum water. Ooh, a bit strong. I have no idea what's happening. There's so many dishes, I have no idea what it's I'm just trying. It tastes really good. I'm trying pickled squid. Pickled squid? Is it good? Different? And that's the thing when you try out a lot of these kaiseki meals, is like there's a lot of different things. You won't always like everything, but I just think it's this experience in itself, just trying all these different dishes. It's very interesting. Very interesting to me. I don't like everything of it. It looks really pretty. Yeah, the setup. The range of the dishes is absolutely beautiful. It's really cool. Mmm. Oh, they made all our beds. The tatami beds. No, the futon beds. The futon beds for tonight. So nice. So nice, so sweet of them. So sweet of them, but we're not going to bed tonight yet. We're gonna take a quick dip. All right, we got our we got our yukata on and we're ready to head up to the rooftop where there's a nice sort of scenic hot spring, I believe. There's two, actually. We're gonna try them both and we'll see. To the left. To the left? Right first. Right first. This is right. This is right. Oh, you're getting a little off the door, just in case if you don't want any intruders. Basket for your clothes. All right, so the first thing you want to do is before you jump into an onsen is to cleanse yourself. Basically just a good old-fashioned scrub down. So this is our little onsen right next door. There's somebody else and there's a different onsen that I think we're gonna go try it out later and see how that is. Should look a bit different, but really heavy rain right now, as you can probably see. This is nicer, don't you think? I think this looks nicer. So this is the second hot spring and by far this is the better one, I think. I like the stones and things. I love the aesthetics of this place. A little bit more rural kind of feel to it, I guess. But yeah, this is definitely better than the first one. I think we had our doses of hot springs for today and we're just gonna go back to our room, relax, and yeah, figure out our plans for tomorrow. So let's go up. All right, so hopefully you can see how beautiful this place is in the daylight. Really beautiful open-air bath and we just took a dip. So now we're heading down for some breakfast before we head back on the road back to Tokyo. So yeah, this is what we slept on, the futon. Nice. Yeah, let's go. All right, so that was our Japanese onsen ryokan experience. It was super, super nice. Yuki Morisaki was the place we stayed at, if I didn't mention it already. But yeah, really great place and I highly recommend you guys, when you come to Takayama, to go to one of the onsen towns and stay for the night and just enjoy the experience, especially if you haven't done it before. And if you're looking for a place in particular, go to Shinhotaka Onsen and pay the Yuki Morisaki establishment a visit. There's several others. You don't have to pick this one. We just wanted a private open bath with our rooms and Yuki Morisaki was sort of the one that popped up. So anyways, I hope this video was a bit enlightening, a bit inspiring at least, if you're coming to Japan and you want to try an onsen experience. Usually you won't find onsen in like the major cities like Kyoto and you need to go a little bit outside to get that real feel to it. But yeah, awesome, awesome little establishment, awesome little place. We definitely enjoyed it and I'll see you guys in the next one.