I left Mifuneyama Rakuen Hotel Rakan-no-Yu and drove from Takeo to central Nagasaki.
About an hour’s drive.
I’d landed at Nagasaki Airport on the first day of the trip, but headed straight for Shimabara, so this was my first time actually setting foot in the city. With the harbor and the mountains so close together and the town climbing up the hillsides, Nagasaki reminded me somehow of Kobe.
My destination, ONSEN&SAUNA YUKULU, is inside Nagasaki Stadium City, a huge complex built around a soccer stadium, with a hotel, shops and offices all rolled into one. The onsen and sauna floors take up the 6th and 7th floors. I’d had the impression it was a place serious about its saunas, so I figured it would be a fitting way to wrap up the trip.
It was 12:30. I checked in and headed to the baths on the 7th floor.
At a new place, my personal rule is to get the lay of the whole bathing area first.
The bathing area was smaller than I’d expected. Two baths, where you can enjoy a natural onsen said to be pumped up from 1,500 m (4,900 ft) underground. Then one dry sauna and one cold plunge. That’s it. Then again, there’s a co-ed Premium Sauna on the 6th floor. I guessed the idea was to keep the bathing area to the bare minimum and let you enjoy the saunas to your heart’s content downstairs. Satisfied with that, I first sank into the onsen.
For my first set, I went to the dry sauna in the bathing area. It looked big enough for about 20 people, with a TV on the wall. Your standard dry sauna. Apparently there’s automatic löyly every 20 minutes. But while I was in there, the air felt dry. I barely sensed any steam. I watched TV and sweated away, steadily.
The cold plunge was 14°C (57°F). Properly cold. The instant I went under, the cold pulled my body taut.
Now, the main event: the Premium Sauna (co-ed) on the 6th floor. I changed into loungewear and went down to the 6th floor.
Three saunas. The Light and Sound Sauna, where the lighting and sound change with the time of day and the season. The Meditation Sauna, modeled on a cave. And the Wakaran Sauna, designed around a blend of Japanese, Chinese and Dutch cultures. Every one of them is a carefully designed sauna.
But there’s no cold plunge.
There is a cooling room. I went in, but it didn’t cool me down much. You heat your body in the sauna, then plunge into cold water and the cold pulls you taut in one go. That contrast is supposed to be the very source of totonou, that state of deep relaxation, yet cooling like this just doesn’t snap you back. At this point, wouldn’t a warm-stone room do just as well? Honestly, that’s what I ended up thinking.
And so my sauna session at YUKULU ended after a single set.
I left Nagasaki Stadium City and drove to Nagasaki Airport. I returned the rental car and caught an evening flight to Kobe.
On the plane, I looked back on the past four days. At Hotel Nanpuro in Shimabara, I was greeted by a cold plunge of famously pure water and the sunrise over the Ariake Sea, and hit my peak at the very first stop. At Kanigoten Ariakekai-no-Yu in Tara, as if pulled back by the moon’s gravity, I was reunited with that beautiful gravity sauna. At JIN6 Sauna in Yobuko, I sat in the steam inside the belly of a whale and enjoyed a cold plunge made from a squid tank. At OND HOTEL in Takeo, I lost all sense of time amid wood fire and forest, and at Rakan-no-Yu, in front of a bonfire in the dark of night, I genuinely thought that if my life ended right there, I’d have no regrets.
The theme of this trip was recovery. My body feels light, my head is clear, and my heart is calm.
After about an hour in the air, Kobe Airport came into view.
And with that, this trip comes to an end.
