Matsuyama: Onsen Thuggin'.

Matsuyama has a mild climate with warm humanity. Street cars run at a leisurely pace in the city where Matsuyama castle towers overs the skyline. Time flows slowly in dogo, the oldest hot spring in Japan.

But first: A moment of silence for the Australian Peso.

Matsuyama is the biggest town on Shikoku and is famous for a few things – it's the scene of the classic Japanese novel Botchan and it's also home to the Dogo hot springs onsen – the oldest in the country.

Nothing is more Japanese than sitting in a boiling bath with a dozen other naked Japanese dudes. It's a daunting event for a first-timer, this being my second time I'm just out of rookie status. I've never really been down the with public nakedness thing, but here it's part of the culture and what better place to start than somewhere where nobody knows you?

Our hotel, the lovely Hotel Patio Dogo was meters away from the onsen entrance, meaning it's no big thing to be walking around outside or hitting the tourist trap bars a cafes in your yukata, towel and soap in hand. Funnily enough the hotel had the biggest bathroom out of any business hotel we've stayed in Japan but it's probably the least used one being that it's across the way from the bath house.

After we hit the bath house we went to Matsuyama to wander around and get some dinner.

We hit Goshiki to try some of the region's 5-colour somen.

Eventually we stumbled across a little basement bar/restaurant called Kokon. We picked pretty much cos it seemed less seedy than some of the other places in the bar area (I got drunk and forgot to take a photo of the outside. Here's the business card...)

We ordered a drink and were presented with this little dish split into three. Top to bottom that's chicken innards, baked tuna, little shellfish which I think were still alive. You had to get the lil buggers out with a tooth pick. They were black on the inside.

Now straight up I can say that ha d a I known it was chicken guts for real (I had a suspicion) I probably wouldn't have eaten it. But goddamn it was good. Kind of like the best chicken you've ever had.