Miyajima 宮島

10th October

This was an excursion by boat from Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park but I thought it appropriate to keep it separate from the last blog.

We caught the small boat upstream and arrived at the sacred island of Miyajima (translates as ‘peace island’) at lunch time together with everyone else in Japan! A mobbed narrow street led past endless eating places each with a tiny number of seats and each with an impossibly long queue out of the door and around the block.

We put our name down at a random pick and waited for our turn to sit on the floor inside. Pauline had a Katsu chicken curry and I had breaded pork cutlet with rice and salad. Basic but good and cheap.

The Japanese are so polite. Here a very orderly queue waits patiently for their turn at a busy bar.

After lunch we beat our way through the crowds to catch a glimpse of the famous floating Torii gate said to always have water around it too deep for mere mortals to pace through the arch.

I was not really feeling moved to conversion and the whole experience was all a little lame.

Patrick came up with a cunning plan and said that we should set off for the temple at the back of town called Daisho-in (the one in the distance in the photo above). Why not? Said the ‘well always walk up any random hill for the sake of it’ crew.

It was well worth the trip as not only did the extra exercise weed out the less hardy visitor, there were also a number of quite different religious artefacts to see.

Here we have the Buddhist gnome collection where hundreds and hundreds of individuals are remembered in little stone figures each carved with the characteristics of their familiar. The red bobble hats are for luck in the next life and also to provide flat areas for people to put money on🧐. Check out the guy with the sombrero looks as though too many tequilas might have been the route to his demise.

There were prayer wheels too. The cheats way of getting through a stack of mantra reciting is to spin the lot as you walk up and down the steps.

To really make sure that you reach enlightenment though you’d probably have to read each of the sutras out loud from the engraving in the impressive hall at the very top of the temple complex. Good luck with the Sanskrit!

Perhaps this little chap got some words wrong and came back as a crab. Mind you, he seemed pretty content eating his lunch from the mossy rock outside of the hall. Perhaps he got it right after all?

One last photo opportunity at the Torii gate.

We returned to Hiroshima the long way round on the big ferry because we had missed the last ‘pleasure’ cruise back to the Peace Park. It gave us another view of the floating gate and an unwelcome opportunity to sit on a packed tram for over an hour.

It seems that everywhere we go in Japan each location has a speciality food dish. Hiroshima is no different but here the speciality type of restaurant called Hiroshimayaki is very different. Described by Patrick as a a kind of pizza it consisted of a layer of batter with, what seems like, loads and loads of layers of other ingredients including cabbage, kimchi, bean shoots, egg, cheese, noodles, seaweed, bacon, spring onions etc etc. So not really anything like a pizza except that it was a kind of round shape.

Some members of our group. Left is the ‘I’m pretty underwhelmed by that’ Aussie and next to that is Ely woman who has that really patronising and annoying habit of saying ‘yes’ in a way that suggests a absolute certainty of knowledge about the subject whenever you are talking to her.

Patrick getting stuck in. Doubtless he will be feeding some to his Tamagotchi later. At the back is the US citizen who always insisted on including his surname whenever there was a round of introduction. It sounded slightly Irish but no one ever seemed particularly impressed with the gift of having the extra detail.

A good end to another good day on tour that had provided a wide range of emotion, good company, some great food and an abundance of exercise. It’s the last day of the tour tomorrow and then we are off by ourselves. It’s going to be a very different experience I think.