Kii-Katsuura, Tuna Boats and Waterfalls

Kii-Katsuura is a working fishing town wrapped around a deep, island-studded bay on the southern tip of the Kii Peninsula, and its mornings start earlier than yours. This is Japan's leading port for fresh tuna landed by longline rather than frozen at sea, and from a viewing gallery above the market you can watch the auction from around seven: hundreds of chilled bodies laid out in rows on the concrete, buyers crouching to cut a sliver from the tail and rub it between their fingers, then a bell and thirty seconds of shouted bidding. Breakfast afterwards is inevitable and it is a maguro-don, a bowl of rice under overlapping slices of the fish you just watched change hands.

The town's other peculiarity is that some of its baths sit inside the cliffs. Boats shuttle guests across the harbour to a hillside hotel whose cave onsen open straight onto the Pacific, so you soak in steaming water while the swell booms into the rock a few metres below. Nothing about it is manicured, and that is the appeal.

Inland, a short bus ride up a wooded valley, is one of the defining images of Japan. Nachi Falls drops 133 metres in a single unbroken thread, the highest single drop in the country, and beside it the three-storey vermilion pagoda of Seiganto-ji stands so that photographers get both in one frame. The waterfall itself is the object of worship at Kumano Nachi Taisha, one of the three grand Kumano shrines, and the last stretch of the pilgrimage arrives here by Daimonzaka, a moss-edged staircase of old stone slabs climbing through enormous camphor trees. Come on 14 July for the Nachi fire festival, when giant burning torches are carried beside the falls. Few small towns in Japan pack in this much.