The Shikoku Mountains is a place with various small infrastructures correspondent to small places. The cable car at Hotel Iya Onsen is one of them.
A cable car exclusive to the Hotel Iya Onsen connects the main building on the hillside with the open-air bath at the valley bottom. The landscape of the Shikoku Mountains consisting of a steep valley and a mountainside, where houses and fields are dotted, is attractively recreated in the hotel. The height difference between the valley floor and the main building is 170m, about the 50th floor. Riding a cable car to get to the open-air bath is amusement like another short journey. That is different from going down to an underground bath with an escalator at a usual hotel.
The surprise was the steep gradient inside of the cable car. The inclination angle is 42 degrees. It must be one of the cable cars with the steepest inclination in Japan. It is just the landscape of the Shikoku Mountains.
I followed my friend from abroad. A hotel staff told me that one or more foreign tourists stayed every day. That was in 2013. It's a place pretty inconvenient to go. The impact of foreign tourists had reached this pointd
The appendix is the examples of small infrastructure in the Shikoku Mountains. Kazura-Bashi (suspension bridge made from vines), monorail to tour the woods, and Yaen (cabin to cross the river).
Click here for your impressions
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