David @ Tokyo

Continuing with my summer holiday saga... up to Day 7 now!


We woke early on Friday in Beppu with the aim of getting ourselves to Hiroshima before the best part of the day was gone. We were again rewarded with a beautiful view from our hotel room balcony as you see in the picture above. We didn't have the best of weather for our time in Beppu, but this view left me with an overall good impression.

A train ride from Beppu took us through to Kokura, where we transferred to a Bullet Train, which promptly saw us leave the long Kyushu leg of our summer holiday behind as we arrived in Honshu by mid-morning. We had just one day planned here, so aimed to squeeze in the two main attractions: Miyajima and the Hiroshima Peace Dome and and museum about the nuclear bombs.

We aimed to visit Miyajima first. In Japan there are three scenic spots ("nihon sankei") which were for some reason selected as "the three most beautiful" in Japan. Miyajima is one of these places. Matsushima in Miyagi prefecture (Northern Honshu) is another, which I have visited twice, and the other is a beach in Kyoto, I hear. Matsushima was quite good I thought, but I've heard the one in Kyoto is "over-rated".

Miyajima is an island near Hiroshima where there is a famous shrine which is built in shallow waters of the Seto inland sea. It was easy to get there from the city center, just take the JR line to get to the ferry port, and you're there pretty fast. There are JR ferries coming and going pretty much every 10 minutes so there's no need to worry about the schedules, and it's just a quick hop over to the island.
Besides the shrine, today there are also huge volumes of tourist shops selling "momiji manju" and other local souvenirs, as well as heaps and heaps of little deer. During our time in Yakushima, Kana had told me that the deer there were really cute compared to the ones in Miyajima. That's a fairly accurate description, as the ones in Miyajima are basically scavengers waiting for doting tourists to give them a snack, and the place is covered in pooh as a result. They are much easier shots for the camera than the critters on Yakushima though, being accustomed to human activity (above).

The most well-known site of Miyajima, at least in my mind, is the Torii entrance to the shrine, situated in the sea.

Besides the Torii, there is the main shrine beyond that, which also sits in the water as well. Apparently when the tide goes out, you can actually walk around in the sand, but we found ourselves there with plenty of water about to prevent us. Instead we walked around inside the shrine complex (quite large too), and took lots of photos like all the other tourists:


We eventually headed back to the streets of tourist shops where I sampled a cream momiji manju. Very good it was too, and so I bought a box of them as a souvenir to take to the office.

It was probably around 2pm by the time we arrived back at Hiroshima, and we found ourselves walking from a train station along the tram route, over a bridge and then along a scenic walkway beside a river. The point of all this was to go to the Peace Park, see the memorial and museum there. As we came closer we could hear a thunder storm drawing near as well, and just as it started to rain a little we found the building with the dome which was apparently directly under the point where the bomb was detonated. The thunder storm was starting to get ominous, so we hurried to the museum.

There is not much that needs to be said here. No more nuclear weapons please, and let's get rid of what we've got.

After I guess 3 hours in the museum, we found that the rain had stopped and so took another look at the Peace Memorial monuments in the park, and then headed back to the city.

That evening we first checked ourselves into our hotel (which was quite cheap and reasonable), and asked the reception man about where we could find some nice Okonomiyaki restaurants. Okonomiyaki is one of my original favourite Japanese cuisines, although lately I've been steering more towards fish based dishes. The reception guy told us of a couple of places: one close to the hotel, one that was really tasty, and another building which was had nothing but okonomiyaki restaurants inside (probably where all the tourists go). We decided to go to the latter, which was probably a 15 minute walk from the hotel to the other side of town.

When we got there, indeed we found it was a building that was full of okonomiyaki restaurants. "Okonomiyaki Paradise". With so many shops to choose from, how to decide which would be tasty? We went to the 4th floor first, and took a look around. Some of the shops were full of people already, where as some were almost empty, and the staff were beckoning us inside. Would you take up such an offer? I wasn't that hungry just yet, and convinced Kana that we should check around on the 3rd floor first. Eventually we decided that the shops on the 4th floor were probably a better bet, and we picked an almost full one, thinking the taste should be ok. The staff were some middle aged guys who looked what they knew what they were doing, where as the staff at some of the other emptier places were a little dodgy looking. They whipped up our orders in a jiffy:
Hiroshima-style Okonomiyaki: basically a mix of cabbage, soba, some other goodies, okonomiyaki sauce and onions. Yummy!


We got back to the hotel and checked with reception about how long it would take to get to the ferry port from there. In the morning we planned to head over to Kana's hometown of Matsuyama. "About 30 minutes" we were told by the reception guy, but he didn't seem like he really knew what he was talking about. And indeed, that was the case as we found out the next morning...

Labels: Kana and I, Summer Holiday 2006

Our overnight bus from Kagoshima arrived in Oita on the morning of Day 6 around 06:00. I remembered waking up multiple times during night, and found that the bus was stopped somewhere, not moving. I don't know whether it was traffic lights, or the driver stopping to have a smoke, but I remember wondering if we were actually going to get to the other side of the island at that rate. So, it seemed a little odd to arrive schedule despite my recollection telling me that we had hardly been moving at all during the night.

Anyway, from Oita we jumped on a train and headed to Beppu, one of the most famous hot spring towns in all of Japan - the Rotorua of Japan to you New Zealanders reading this.

On arrival first priority was breakfast, but at this time of day in a tourist town there aren't all that many places to eat. We headed east from the station towards the waterfront area, lined with hotels, in search of some kind of morsel. Eventually, after coincidently locating the hotel where would stay this evening along the way, we found a Gusto store, which Kana tells me is basically a 24-hour restaurant chain that you can always depend on in such times of need. Yay for Gusto! After having a nice cheap breakfast there, with lots of orange juice and milk tea, we headed back towards the station, in search of a public bath. The lady who served us at Gusto told us that we could find one back towards the station which should be open at this time.

Sure enough we found it, and got washed up. It was just a plain old standard bath, nothing flash at all - only about 200 yen or so. I was amused by another foreign tourist guy who turned up there just as I was getting out. It seems he was looking for something a little more classy, as he spent but 30 seconds in the washroom before leaving, with a mutter of "this sucks" on his way out. You can't please everyone! I was happy for the bath after the night on the bus.

Anyway, after cooling off on the 2nd floor of the bath house for an hour, we headed back towards the train station. From here we'd take a bus to the other side of town, where there are a range of hot spring type attractions and little mini zoos.

This is Beppu's famous "Jigoku-meguri". There are 8 different attractions, each with their own hot pools (just like Rotorua, but these places were mostly concentrated together in walking distance).

Many of them also have animals. We saw crocs (or alligators?), elephants, hippos, not to mention man-eating piranna fish and some others as well. There is a pass ticket with which you can see all 8 attractions, so we bought that planning to go around and see the entire lot. Along with souvenir shops, there is also the occasional foot bath to enjoy as well. In shorts and sandals, I took advantage of each opportunity.

To the right - "beauty and the beast".

That was the Hippo's best pose. Mouth open, waiting for potatoes from tourists.

I found it to be somewhat pitiful watching these animals reduced to feeding in an almost brain-dead fashion on whatever food it was that the tourists were able to purchase to give to them.

The elephant too just stood around sucking up the biscuits thrown to it, or in the case of tourists with long arms, hand fed.

I decided (again) that it was much more enjoyable watching animals in their natural environments, as was the case back on Yakushima. There, people could observe the animals in their natural environment, yet the animals were fending for themselves, rustling around for food by themselves, living a normal animal life in their habitat.

Still, it's always interesting to see such "wild"life.

It's quite a different style of hot pool here in Beppu compared to Rotorua - the surrounds are all quite heavily developed as you can see. No massive geysers here like Pohutu in Rotorua either - just lots of hot pools.

Later that afternoon, after we had made our way around 6 of the attrations, we heard a storm approaching and took shelter in a little restaurant, hoping that the rain would subside in the meantime.

It didn't, so we gave up on visiting the final two attractions which we further away from the 6 we had just been to, and took a bus back to Beppu station, and went to check into the hotel.


We arrived at our hotel a little bit on the early side, having again having had a long day got washed up in advance of dinner.

Our room was a sea front one, but due to the stormy weather we didn't really have such a great view in the evening.

We took a stroll outside along the waterfront to kill time before our appointed dinner time.



As you can see, it was quite a flash dinner. After chowing down, this being a hot spring town we had another bath before retiring for the evening. We'd leave early the next morning to catch a train so that we could spend the best part of the day in Hiroshima, back on Japan's main island of Honshu. Stay tuned!

Labels: Kana and I, Summer Holiday 2006

Day 5!!!


After running around like tourists for the first 4 days, our plan for today was to basically take it easy, and do the "city thing" in Kagoshima. This evening we were scheduled to take a night bus from 23:00 all the way from the south of Kyushuu to Oita in the north-east, arriving the next morning by around 07:00, so nothing too adventurous was on the cards today, just relaxation.

It was a great day though, although not so much to write about from a tourist perspective. After a big late breakfast with lots of orange juice, we left the hotel in Ibusuki at around 10:00, taking a cab ride to the station, where (conveniently!) some local alcoholic beverages and some not-so-local alcoholic beverages were available. I decided that we should sample a little of both, to keep us amused during the 1 hour train ride back up the harbour to Kagoshima city.

Southern Kyushu is famous for "imo-jochu", which is basically Japanese whiskey made from potatoes. It's pretty popular up here in Tokyo as well, but it was of course my duty to sample some nonetheless. You know, to pour some tourist money into the local economy.

After the train arrived in Kagoshima, we first found our way from the station back towards the city center, where we had come back on Day 1.

I mentioned at the time that Kana had spotted some "shirokuma" dessert which apparently originated out of Kagoshima. Kana loves her sweet food (and french fries too actually), and I wasn't adverse to having some either on a hot day like this, so after looking around the city centre and shopping malls etc. we found our way back to the shop which apparently started it all - the home of the polar bear dessert...


How about that... Of course, the dessert isn't quite that big - but still massive. We were having a late lunch around 14:00, so we had some ramen again (and I thought it wise to sample the lunch beer), before tucking into some of this fancy dessert. In the meantime, lots of people came into the shops and ordered shirokuma themselves, and despite being massive big things these kids were woofing them down pretty fast.

And then, it was our turn...


Yessireee, this was a big dessert, and a mighty tasty one at that. Having just had lunch, we decided to share.


This statue is the one of Saigo down in Kagoshima. There is another famous one in Ueno park here in Tokyo - obviously a man who had a lot of influence at the time.

Later that night around 18:00, we went to a recently released animated movie from Japan's equivalent of Disney, which had a nice theme song, but was otherwise pretty disappointing for Kana. I didn't really think it was that great either, but then my expectations were not as high, not having been brought up with the movies from this studio.

We then had a light meal at a Warawara restaurant (a cheap drinking / eating chain that you can find almost anywhere here in Japan) before heading to the bus station to get ready for our night ride.

When we woke up the next morning, we would be up on the other side of the island. Our next stop was Beppu, famous for hotsprings and stuff like that - the same as Rotorua in New Zealand. See you again!

Labels: Kana and I, Summer Holiday 2006

Finally it's time for Day 4 - some changes have been being made at Blogger, resulting in broken photo uploads, which delayed me from uploading all of the pictures from Day 3. It's done now though, as well as all the pictures from this, our final day on Yakushima. Read on!

Labels: Kana and I, Summer Holiday 2006

Early morning on Day 3! (If you missed Day 2 it's here)

We had our alarm clock set to get us up by 04:30 so that we had plenty of time to get to the nearby bus stop. Getting up was not such a hard job as we hit the sack early the previous night, and had already been woken up by the people in the room next door when they left at 03:30 - they made a huge noise opening and shutting a closet or something.
Anyway, out we ventured into the early morning darkness, and after a 10 minute wait the bus chugged along, pretty much right on schedule at 05:20 or so.

The bus ride back up the east coast and then up into the mountains took around an hour from our location on the south at Onoaida, and at the last stop we picked up some breakfast and lunch boxes from "Asahi bento". We had told the guy at our minshuku that we were planning to get up early and climb the mountain, so the previous night he had called up this place to arrange for our breakfast and lunch to be waiting for us at the second to last bus stop. As we wound our way up through the mountain on the bus to the hike entrance way, we got another view of a nice sunrise. The road was pretty nasty so I was happy to not have taken the car, although cost wise the price on the bus was about 1160 yen, so overall it might have been better to go with the rent-a-car at 4,500 or so a day.

Once we arrived we could see that there were quite a few people doing the climb. Our bus was basically full, and the car park had heaps of vehicles.
We chowed down on our breakfast, before it started to rain, and rain pretty hard as well. A work mate of mine had told me a bit about his time in Yakushima, and they say that when it rains it rains hard, but only for about 30 minutes at a time. That's how it turned out - after about 15 minutes of waiting under shelter we said "hey let's go" and by the time 07:00 came we were 15 minutes into our hike and the rain had basically stopped.

Basically the entrance to the hike path is actually something like an old station. The first 7 or so kilometres of the hike is on a tiny little railroad track. At the entrance they have a whole load of rusty looking equipment there. It seems like they built this track into the mountain, where they would go and cut down cedar trees, and then transport them back down. After we had walked along on top of the track for about an hour or so, we heard some loud horn type noise coming from behind us, and as we passed a guide leading some other tourists up the hill he told us to get off the track - the horn was apparently that of a little locamotive that was coming up the hill. It was a dinky little thing too, with about 3 guys sitting in it.

We kept walking, and eventually came to fork in the tracks. I guess the little locamotive went off to the left, but the line veered across a river to the right, which was apparently the path to the Jomon Sugi. Here the photo shows the view from the top of the bridge - there are masses of massive rocks like this all over Yakushima it seems.

Over on the other side of the bridge was the site of an old Junior High School. We didn't notice that until on the way back down, later in the afternoon actually, and we wondered who in their right mind would send their kids to school in a place as remote and hard to get to as that - which is why the school shutdown I suppose :-) Presumably it was for the kids of families who were working on the mountain in past years.

There was an interesting sign board too about how the cedar trees grow - click on the picture to get a bigger view.

The next picture seems to show just such an example of one of these hollowed out cedar trees. I can't really remember this actually, but I think you could walk around inside this guy. He's a big boy, that's for sure.

To the left is a picture of the dinky little train tracks, with Kana chugging up them in the lead. These train tracks went on forever really - 7 or so kilometres, uphill, is pretty tiring stuff. But... this was the easier part. It got a whole lot harder after that...

[UPDATED 8/30]

Another thing about Yakushima (and I guess other places too) that you don't get back in New Zealand is lots of large fauna. So many of our native birds are sadly endangered, but on Yakushima there are heaps of monkeys and cute little deer. Apparently in Japanese religion deer are considered to be messengers from the gods. We had seen some deer on the bus ride into the middle of the island earlier in the morning, and then also as we made our way up the mountain on foor we frequently came by one foraging for food. There's actually one in the picture with Kana just above, and here is another up a bit closer: Eventually after about 2 hours of walking, we reached the end of the rail track, which also had plenty of place for resting. There were toilets here too, which were quite interesting, as they were completely self contained. So as to not spoil the nature, the toilet block apparently has some kind of treatment functionality built into it, and the human effluent is re-used to the maximum extent possible as toilet water etc. Of course, this meant that the toilets absolutely reeked like anything, but one could really appreciate the thought for devising such a thing, so as to have the minimum possible impact on the great nature.
Another great thing about the hike was that there was really no litter at all. The whole walk was absolutely spotless, so it gave the impression that the people with the spirit to walk 7-8 hours up and down the mountain also had respect for it as well. No photos of the toilets I'm afraid, but there was another nice waterfall to be seen here.

Where to from here though? The rail track ran across the bridge from which we took the photo to the above-right, spotting in a dead end at the toilets, and it was then that we realised that the next part of the hike was up these dinky little stairs that we had seen on the other side of the bridge. These little stairs were steep, giving us the impression that the final 3 km to the Jomon Sugi would be tough going, and indeed this was no deception. From here on we would often have to take a look around to figure out where the path had gone, as it was no longer completely obvious.

Still, there were many more beautiful sights and cedars along the way to enjoy. We took the opportunity to indulge in some tree hugging, who didn't seem to mind.


Around half way through this second phase of the hike we arrived at the "Wilson Cedar". I'm no cedar expert, but from what I can tell there is apparently some type of cedar named after a chap known as Wilson, and anyway, there was another large area here where people were resting and taking photos. The Wilson Cedar itself was again a big hollow fellow, who you could walk inside. A little minature shrine was present inside the hollow.





Looking straight up from inside the hollowed out cedar, one could also spot a love heart shape if you turned your head and camera at the right angle :-)

But onwards we had to go! The climb continued, scrambling up over branches and rocks, where there was no foot path.

Along the way we found a "World Natural Heritage Area" sign board. Kana, having travelled extensively has apparently taken her photo alongside many of these signs, so she added another to her repotoire.

At some point earlier on the second phase of the hike I asked some guys who were coming back on their way down how much longer would it take us to get to the Jomon Sugi. "Maybe 40 minutes, if you're fast!" they had told us. 40 minutes came and went - apparently we were not so nimble.

But getting there we were, when we came across another fairly famous site on this hike route - a pair of cedar trees that are apparently husband and wife. They are connected together by the branch you see. A durable marriage it seems.

Finally, after more than 3 hours climbing (not including time taking resting and taking photos), we finally arrived at our destination:

That's it! The Jomon Sugi - somewhere between 2000 and 7200 years old, depending on who you want to believe. We got there at around 10:50, having started out at about 6:45 am. Was it worth it? For all that we saw on the way, most definitely. There was another rest area nearby, where we took another 30 minute break for lunch, before we started our descent back down...

An amusing episode about 10 minutes after we had set out again was as we gave way to another couple making their way up the path. "Why did you go and bring me to Yakushima to climb up this hell of a path?" moaned the exhausted looking lady. "It was you who said you wanted to come here!" retorted her male companion with a smile of irony on his face as they went by. Ah - true love!

By 13:15 we made it back down to the rail track area and took another break. At this point, and further up the path there were springs of water to quench the thirst, so there is no need to carry a massive 2 litre bottle the whole way up the mountain with you. We took a couple of 350ml guys, and probably filled up a couple of times each along the way.

We took a rest, sitting on the rock beneath the rail bridge, enjoying the waterfall (and the fact that we were 3/4 of the way through the day).Summoning a little more strength, we set off back along the loooooong rail tracks. We reached the hike entrance at around 15:30, giving us 90 minutes to kill before the 17:00 bus came to take us back to Onoaida. This was a time it would have been nice to have the rent-a-car, but just splaying out in the car park, taking in the sun and blue skies was a more relaxing way of finishing off the afternoon.

Labels: Kana and I, Summer Holiday 2006