Beppu is a super popular destination for Japanese people for a very good reason it's home to many natural hot springs of all possible colors and it is also in Kyushu, which has many national parks, their own food specialties and it's close to the jungle island, Yakushima.
We've spent two days enjoying these hot springs both inside as a sightseeing opportunity as well as a bathing opportunity, since many hotels have hots springs facilities such as the budget ryokan where we were staying (link coming).
Top things to do in Beppu
1. The Hell's tour of Beppu
The ticket includes the visit of 6 different hot spring locations and a crocodile farm with different natural colors due to the clay and other mineral properties.
Of course you can also use the water for other purposes such as getting a hot bath for your feet ^^
See this very short video for how the bubbles are actually making smoke!
Or even use it to cook some eggs and some buns as we did during our visit :D
You also get to see a crocodile farm with the ticket.
To see all the 7 different locations you will need to use a bus (number 16) to transfer between 5 of the locations and the other 2. In one of these 2 locations there is a Geyser that only exerts water every 45 minutes, so if you want to see it you need to go by its schedule ;)
2. Eating the famous Toriten of this region at the best Toriten restaurant in Japan To enjoy such a traditional and special form of tempura chicken, you should go to one of the best restaurants in the region. We would recommend this restaurant for Toriten. We loved it so much that we went twice in two days ^^
Here you have the link to the place in Google maps. It's very popular among locals, so you should expect to wait about 10 minutes. You just have to put your name on a paper list and wait there. Since they have two floors with tables, the waiting time is not very long.
3. Visiting the monkey park of Beppu.
It's just a 10 minutes ride from Beppu's train station and it costs 520 yen per person. It's really worth it because there are many many monkeys and they are not as curious with people's objects as in Bali, where we saw the monkeys stealing water from people, opening the bottle and drinking from it...
In the case of Beppu, the monkeys are just there and they do their lives, checking whether they have insects within the hair (and eating them), playing around and every half an hour eating the food that humans give them.
But they are free to go anywhere. In fact, you're the one that is behind a fence that protects the feeding area of the monkeys.
4. Enjoying a public or private onsen at your accommodation
We did both the public and the private. The public onsen is with separate women and men but for the private you can enjoy the place together. At our hotel you could have the private onsen for 500 yen (3€). The onsen was really cool, with beautiful mosaic. But it was also as hot as beautiful. The water was more than 42 degrees and it was hard to stay there for longer than 15 minutes haha
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