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Alessandro
Wed Aug 16, 2006 12:32 pm

Re: [E] Dewa sanzan, the three sacred mountains, Yodono-san
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As promised, the first part will be dedicated to Yodono-san, but first a small comment: as I said in the introduction, the climbing season for some of the mountains was already over, so we could not go to the top of Yodona-san. We planned to sleep later that day in a shukubo (which will be the last part of the post), and they organize everything for us because it was a low season period: they came to Yamagata station, picked up us there and drove us to Yodono-san. I will try to find information on how to get there by bus and complete my message later.

So we arrived there by car driven by one member of the shukubo, and saw this impressive gate just in front of us. There you can find the usual souvenir shop with the usual food (soba mainly), and also a little bus to drive you a little bit up the road. We choose to walk and really weren’t prepare at all for what came. 

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I unfortunately have no picture of the temple: it was strictly forbidden to take any, and the guy from shukubo gently asked me to put my camera back in my bag; so you will have to trust my words. There, understanding nearly nothing, our guide asked us to take off our shoes, and a monk put on our head a stick with some white paper to purify us; after that only were we allowed entering the temple.
 
I said temple, but it was not exactly a temple, rather a very strange hot spring. It looks like - sorry for the term - a nipple out of the soil made by a kind of light brown clay with hot water bubbling out of its top. It was a little cold in the temple without shoes, but we could put our feet inside the hot water and watch this very strange phenomenon, which is a holy representation of the power of nature. We finally received a cup of sake from the monk, and quietly climb down to the main gate again.


Next post will be Gassan.