Monkey onsen park & Matsumoto

In the morning, we headed off the to Monkey onsen park, which is only 10 mins drive from Yudanaka onsen. But we had to walk for about 20 mins to get to the Monkey park from the carpark. The scenery made up for the long and uphill walk though.

Geyser seen along the way



At the Monkey Park, there were hundreds of monkeys running around, sitting down and sometimes fighting.

Most of them are quite fat, and there were a number of cute little baby monkeys too.
There’s an outdoor onsen there that’s meant only for the monkeys to dip in. The monkeys have grown used to humans and you can get pretty close to them.

Monkeys around onsen

Monkey in onsen

Nagano is famous for...

APPLES! Humongous, sweet and expensive apples called shinshu apples!! Stopped by apple farm on the way to Matsumoto and bought some freshly-picked apples (7 apples for S$14...bargain!...seriously!!).

Beautiful scenery of mountains with autumn colours along the drive to Matsumoto

Matsumoto is known for the Matsumoto Castle, which is one of the four most complete castles left standing in Japan. The castle was built in the 1500s and had strong defence features, which included extremely steep and narrow stairs...so that the perpetrators will be forced to ascend the stairs one-by-one and cannot be very fast and the defenders have a better chance of shooting them. Some of the steps were as high as knee-level.

View of Matsumoto City from the top of the castle (about 6 storeys high)

For dinner, my father and Uncle Jack had Matsumoto's speciality - raw horse meat, aka basashi. I was recovering from a bad stomach, so couldn't try anything adventurous :(