Welcome to Part VI of my blog series on Japan. On our first day in Hiroshima, we spent our time touring historic Hiroshima, visiting the Peace Memorial and Hiroshima Castle. Our second day in the Hiroshima region, we journeyed off the coast of the main island to a smaller island called Miyajima. We "slept in" until about 7AM that morning, but since we went to bed the previous night around 8PM, we had plenty of sleep. (Remember, we were up around 4:30AM to catch the train from Shin-Osaka to Hiroshima, so we were exhausted that evening.
After going one stop in the wrong direction, we made our way to Miyajima by taking the JR ferry. I've mentioned before how great the transportation system is in Japan. This continued to be true in Hiroshima. Our JR passes weren't only good for city metros and intercity trains, but also for this ferry ride that took us to a completely different island.
As our ferry approached the dock of Miyajima, we saw this awesome tory gate in the water. The ferry driver explained that in low tide seasons, you can actually walk out to it, but alas, it was underwater as we approached.
Like Nara, the presence of tame deer shocked us! We saw them everywhere, and they passed us without any hesitation or alarm. Unlike Nara where little old ladies sold deer "cookies", we didn't see any deer food for sale, but the deer still didn't fear people like they do in the USA. We also noticed that finally, the cherry trees were blooming everywhere! The first 7/8 of our trip had barren trees and mostly cloudy skies, so it really excited us to see some blooming trees, even if only for a few days.
We made our way to the Miyajima ropeway (think ski lift sans snow). Miyajima has a small town at the base of the mountain, and then hiking trails throughout the rest of the place. We'd been walking all over Japan for almost two weeks now, so our feet hurt every day, and our legs ached (want a secret way to lose 10lbs in 2 weeks? Eat only rice and noodle bowls for your meals, and then do nothing but walk for miles and miles everyday. I'm kidding! Although this is what we did, I don't recommend it for a long term diet solution. Haha!). On a normal day, we would have welcomed a nice long hike, but fatigue kept us from channeling our inner adventurers. Instead, we took the ropeway to the top of the mountain and enjoyed roughly a 1.5km hike down.
One of the first things we noticed as we began our descent were the signs warning us against vipers. Vipers? Yes, the slithery, venomous snakes. Uh...on second thought, maybe we don't want to go for a hike. I don't like snakes anymore than Indiana Jones! But we convinced ourselves that we're only in Japan once, and that as long as we stick to the established path, we'll be fine. We actually did see a snake (not entirely sure what kind), but it was off in the grass and moving in the opposite direction of us. It's a good thing too, because if it were moving toward us, I would have completely freaked out.
For those of you who are metric to english conversion experts, you know that 1.5km is roughly a little over a mile. And since we were walking downhill the whole way, we didn't expect the hike to take us too much more than 20-30 minutes. That is, of course, until we got lost.
Up to this point, we didn't have many problems with the language barrier. Ordering in restaurants proved to be our biggest challenge...until we went hiking on Miyajima island. We assumed incorrectly that all paths led down. Well, maybe not incorrectly, but we misunderstood how to take the shortest path down. We had no reliable map, and all of the signs we encountered along the way, looked like this:
But as long as we kept heading down the mountain, we assured ourselves that we would eventually reach the bottom. After a full 90 mins of hiking downhill, our legs shaking, and our tummies rumbling, we saw this sign and completely lost all fatigue. Our laughter became uncontrollable and the sign forever cemented our love of this place. Now what you have to realize is that up until this point, we constantly chuckled at the misinterpreted signs throughout Japan. Wanting to be helpful, they would often try to translate Japanese signs in English, but they would lose just a few words that made the whole translation terrifically comical. This sign took the cake as our favorite.
We finally reached the bottom, and the only thing on our minds was where to find food. We picked up some french fries and shrimp cakes from a food truck along the path back to town. We then stopped to visit the worlds largest rice scoop on our way to get some ice cream (chocolate and cookies and cream or as the Japanese lady said, "cookie and vanilla").
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| World's Largest Rice Scoop |
We headed back toward our hotel around 3pm, and stopped at the massive Fukuya department store for some souvenir shopping and to find dinner. Aside from the horrifying dinner we had in Osaka, our dinner this particular evening was also pretty bad. We wound up at an Indian restaurant purely by accident and ordered chicken curry. This literally meant a bowl full of goo, about 4 small bites of chicken and a bunch of rice. It's not that it tasted bad, it just wasn't much food besides the rice.
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| See anymore chicken in the dish? Nope? Me either! |
After dinner, we picked up some breakfast for the next morning and headed back to our hotel. A high speed bullet train the next morning would take us back to Tokyo for the last 2 days of our trip. I would say they were 2 of our favorite days, but the whole trip was so amazing, it's hard to say which days we liked the best. The last two days, however, were pretty awesome! You can read all about them HERE.
Thanks for reading!
- Foxy the Traveler
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