Akune(阿久根) is a small port town of about 17,000 people, but for its size it doesn’t seem short on places to stay. Look at Google Maps and there are hotels, pensions, hostels.
But maybe they were all booked up — for some reason the booking sites barely had anything available.
There were about two places open for my dates. After a lot of back and forth, I booked a hostel called Shioya(塩屋).
I’m not used to sharing a room with strangers, so I did hesitate. But it looked clean in the photos, and the location was good. It had private rooms too.
Once I got there, it turned out to be exactly as the photos suggested — clean, and clearly well looked after.
It’s about a ten-minute walk from Akune Station.
I walked from Akune Station dragging a big suitcase, and once I got near the hostel there were signs here and there, so it was easy to find.
The hostel sits slightly off in a back alley, so it’s confusing not just the first time but every time you come back from being out. Those signs helped a lot.
Follow the signs inward and you come to a small yard, and across it you can see the back door of a cafe called Harmonican.
Shioya Hostel and Harmonican are run by the same people. So to check in at Shioya, you stop by Harmonican and pick up the key.
I arrived a little past ten in the morning, which is far too early to check in. So I planned to leave my bags and look around the town.
It was Saturday, and they said the cafe was closed that day.
They told me the room would be ready for check-in before noon. But since they might not be at the cafe when I came back, they handed me the key right away and showed me around the place.
I got the rundown on the shared kitchen, the shared bathroom, and the laundry room. Nothing special, really. Keep it clean, tidy up after yourself, that sort of thing.
The room was very large, and the shared spaces had plenty of room as well. Above all, it was all very clean and tidy. The air conditioning was cranking, too.
I left my suitcase in the ground-floor storeroom. I’d carry it up once the room was ready.
And inside the storeroom there were several bicycles for guests. Not electric ones, but there’s the advantage of borrowing them for free. I’d heard there’s a place in front of Akune Station where you can rent electric bikes, but if you rent there, you end up having to walk back to your lodging after returning it, right?
A bike borrowed from where you’re staying has the other advantage that you can ride it all the way back.
Until the room was ready, I decided to borrow a bike and look around Akune. I went here and there, had lunch, and only came back around three in the afternoon to pick up my bags and go up to the room.
So that’s about four hours on a bicycle.
Except this choice came with… an irreversible, major mistake.
I’d overlooked how good the weather was. The sun was beating down so hard it went past hot and into painful. Without thinking much about it, I got on the bike without properly putting on sunscreen. I was even wearing shorts. I hadn’t put any sunscreen on my legs at all.
After about four hours riding in the blazing sun, my whole body came back… bright red. A mild burn, basically.
The aftereffects — all the exposed skin turned dark — are still with me. ㅠㅜ
There’s a neighborhood supermarket less than five minutes from the hostel by bike. I bought water, drinks, ice cream and so on, and put them in the fridge.
You can also look at vegetables and fruit that are a bit different from Korea.
For what it’s worth, late at night it’s not that far to walk across the bridge to the FamilyMart either.
When you stay somewhere like a hostel, there’s that fantasy of having a drink with the other guests and talking about this and that, isn’t there?
But while I was there, there was no manager around and no one else staying, so it was simply a quiet, tidy place to rest properly.
If there had been another traveler, I might have bought sashimi from the fish shop I’d had my eye on and had a drink back at the hostel.
Getting friendly with the person in the next seat on a train, getting friendly with the people you’re sharing a hostel with, getting friendly with another customer at a bar you happened to walk into — the things that happen all the time in films and novels may not actually happen much on our own trips.
Hmm…
No, actually, in my case, “getting friendly with another customer at a bar you happened to walk into” is one thing that does happen fairly often.
