Miyajima and Hiroshima

This blog's turning into a travel blog... so far this year I've done short trips to Niigata, Izu, Seoul (South Korea), Okinawa, and now Hiroshima and Miyajima. Still on the list are Nara/Koshien (I want to see the baseball), Yakushima, and Hokkaido/Furano, in summer.

Day 1

There's always something exciting about setting off on a trip, and knowing that within a few hours, you'll be somewhere totally different. I was particularly glad to be eschewing airports this time; I like trains (and there's something very cool about getting on a train and hearing 'the next stop will be Nagoya', rather than 'the next stop will be Kozukue'). Even though the shinkansen was a bit more expensive than flying, it's worth it not to have go to the airport. Shin-Yokohama station is not so far from my house, so I was able to hop a shinkansen (bullet train) pretty conveniently.

Once I got there - and the scenery got increasingly overcast and gloomy-looking - I left the station, full of confidence. I thought to myself, every time I travel, I do less and less research before I leave. Today, I don't have a map, don't even know the names of Hiroshima's famous sites, and have no idea where to go after I leave the station or even what exit I should take. But now, I know Japan, and I can always ask someone in Japanese if I want to. It's nice to be a seasoned traveller and be able to get your bearings and enjoy discovering a new place from scratch!

With such congratulatory thoughts it was inevitable and predictable that I immediately set off and got very lost.

Even after asking at an information desk, and getting maps!! I really am a sad case. And the reason I didn't ask for directions was because I was *following* the street names and had no idea I was lost until I suddenly caught site of the name of the 'chome' and realised I'd walked in a very neat, 45-minute square around the station!

Very disgruntled to walk for 45 minutes and find myself back at the station entrance. >_<

What I had been looking for was 'Okonomi-Mura' (Okonomiyaki Village). As I've mentioned, every Japanese place is famous for some kind of food, and Hiroshima is famous for Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki. Okonomiyaki is a kind of vegetable pancake (usually with various meat/seafood too), and the Hiroshima variety is made with noodles. After failing so spectacularly to find Okonomi-Mura, I gave up and with a bad grace ate some okonomiyaki at a restaurant near the station. It was nice, but I was in a bit of a grump, as the afternoon was starting to wear on, the weather was still looking bleak, and so far I'd gotten nowhere.

Anyway, after this, I asked the information desk (who must have been surprised to see me back so soon) where the interesting shopping part of town was and took a streetcar (tram) to Kamiya-cho. Hiroshima has a *lot* of streetcars. In Kamiya-cho I immediately located the nearest Starbucks (^^;) and wandered around some shopping streets. I looked around a bit (I enjoyed it, but most major Japanese cities tend to look the same after a while...)

I noticed a large amount of Carp merchandise. The Hiroshima Carp are the local baseball team. There are a *lot* of Carp souvenirs, posters; even the sewer caps are painted with Carp pictures. You can buy Carp curry, Carp noodles, etc. I couldn't help myself; I bought Carp toilet paper. Some respect they show for their team!

I did think the sheer volume of Carp souvenirs was quite amazing, though. Like, surely most of the people buying Hiroshima souvenirs are people from other cities, right? And those people are highly unlikely to be Carp supporters, but rather, supporters of their own home teams, right? Why would they want to buy masses of their 'enemy' team's goods?

Well, whatever...

Anyway, I headed down to Miyajima. If you do go to Hiroshima, I recommend that you stay on Miyajima, and if you can give yourself a full day and two nights there, so much the better, especially if the weather is good. Hiroshima itself is okay - and I really recommend the Peace Park area - but for the most part it seems to be kind of an unremarkable, ordinary Japanese city.

Miyajima is an island in Hiroshima prefecture, a little south of Hiroshima city. It's a big tourist draw, and its most famous structure is the large red torii (shrine gates) that stand in the ocean as an 'entrance' to the shrine there, Itsukushima. The whole island is considered sacred. The plants and animals are all protected, so the island is full of nature. Most notable are the deer which wander all over the place, even in the shopping streets.

Miyajima is often described as one of the 'Three Most Beautiful Views of Japan'. As I took the ferry in, I couldn't agree. It was raining lightly; the whole sky was dark with clouds, and the island was dull and indistinct. The island was a huge mass of trees and greenery; thickly wooded; I thought that it would probably be very beautiful on a sunny day. I saw the famous torii from a distance and felt glum. (I spent quite a lot of money on this weekend trip.)

However! As soon as I arrived on the island, my bad mood finally stopped, and I super enjoyed the rest of my trip. For a start, I checked into my ryokan (traditional Japanese inn).

Now, there is nothing like a ryokan for relaxation. I love them. You come into your room and there's a hot teapot waiting there for you to enjoy some relaxing tea while sitting on the zaisu (floor-chair - a chair with a back, but no legs, so you are sitting on the floor). Tatami mats are comfortable under foot, and you know that later that evening you're going to have a multiple-course banquet brought out for you, and there'll be a hot, steaming Japanese-style bath you can enjoy. ^_^ And you can walk around happily in yukata and slippers.

The ryokan I stayed at had a little observatory room on the top floor - a cosy room full of comfortable chairs and 360 degree windows, so you could see the town from above, a mass of Japanese-style roofs, a tiered, red pagoda rising up behind them, and the ocean stretching out for miles.

Soon after I checked in I had dinner. The proprietress brought me dish after dish. I had raw salmon, horse mackerel and flatfish; conger eel; asparagus; sea bream in cheese and miso sauce; deep-fried tofu in soup; a kind of custard-y nabe; steak in blueberry sauce; miso soup; pickles; rice... and finally, mikan (tangerine) sorbet. Everything was sooo delicious. ^_^

After dinner I went walking on the island. By now it was night, and all the shops were closing; it was dark and very few people were around. I saw a shopkeeper's cat eating its dinner; the cat's owner came out to toss a few scraps to some deer waiting outside her door. I walked down to the torii, which was gently illuminated. The light rain stopped. In the darkness, it didn't matter if it was overcast. It was beautiful. The tide was high, and, peering into the ocean, I could see quite a few fish, as well as a manta ray, swimming.

I walked quite a long way, and there was nobody around at all, only a few deer; it was completely silent except for the sound of a running river, and the occasional frog.