We woke bright and early and thought we would spend the best part of the day exploring Beppu but it was raining and so after a quick couple of hours, most of which were spent shopping in a dry mall, we decided to have one last soak before returning to our usual game day stomping ground, Yufuin. It is no surprise that weather influences the way you remember a place and so Beppu will always be a damp and sulphurous location for me.

Thank goodness we decided to set off for Yufuin in the daylight, because the journey, although only an half an hour, turned into a real test of nerves for the driver. The cloud base was so low that visibility (or lack of it) was genuinely frightening. We crawled through the mountains to Yufuin and breathed a huge sigh of relief when we arrived in one piece. We were in a Ryokan for the Friday night as we needed to be up, clean (so easy access to bathing facilities) and on top form for the England v Australia game the next day in Oita, something I should have kept firmly in mind, before we headed out to play that evening.

I think the relief that we had emerged unscathed from the rather hairy journey meant we set off at quite a crack in terms of Friday night beers. We started at Yufuin Burger, a great, but tiny (seats about 8 people max) burger joint, for beer & burgers and then crossed the road to a quirky (again tiny) bar which was serving beer and showing the 2013 World Darts Final, something I only cottoned on to when I remembered Phil ‘The Power’ Taylor has retired. As the time passed more and more Westerners began squeezing in to this small space, all using Yufuin as their base for the weekend, all looking for a beer. It was fascinating to hear all their stories, who they were supporting, where they had travelled from & what they all did. Bizarrely it made one lady’s night that the darts was on, and she cheered Phil on very noisily, getting properly upset when he wasn’t doing well, even though she knew the result as she’d been there on the night in question.

We decided after an absorbing hour or so of this, that we would just take a quick look at the local drum performance before an early night. The group of drummers were apparently quite famous locally and had been brought in by the local authority to entertain the RWC visitors. There was more food and beer, but most excitingly, there was Sauvignon Blanc, actually after 4 weeks of largely beer and the odd gin, it could have been any wine, I would have been delighted. So I drank it, in fact I drank them out of it (there was only 1 bottle) and on top of everything else it did not make for a lively, ready to take on the day start to Saturday. The only upside was I didn’t care that I was again on a tatami bed with a rice pillow – I was very quickly unconscious.