The Road Less Traveled

Hiroshima, Day 3: Miyajima

Friday, November 7th, 2008 by Rintaun | Uncategorized

Woo! I’m finally getting to the last of the Hiroshima story! And only almost 3 weeks later! Sorry for the wait. Homework, projects, and studying kanji have just been piling up, and I haven’t had time for much else. Also, at least in the past week, I’ve been spending more time at the arcade playing an awesome game called Jubeat, which I have pretty much become addicted to. :/

Anyway, that’s completely unrelated. So, Hiroshima! On to Day 3: Miyajima.

Sunday was our last day in Hiroshima, and at least to me, it was by far the best. Our hotel was right on the coast, less than 100 feet from it really. Right across the bay is Miyajima island (I believe the actual name is Itsukushima island, but everyone in that area calls it Miyajima). So the plan for Sunday was to get up early, eat breakfast (an odd but rather good combination of breads and rice balls), and hop the ferry (pretty much right next door to the hotel) over to Miyajima at 9am.

When we got on the ferry, Dr. Thompson showed us where to sit so that we could get a good view of the Torii gate at Itsukushima shrine, one of the most famous places in Japan (pictured left). Honestly, we couldn’t see it very well from the water (the best view you can get is from the land), so while we snapped pictures happily, none of them were really very good. Oh yeah, I almost forgot to mention… going across the bay to Miyajima, we noticed something…. there are TONS of jelly fish in the water there. I couldn’t count them, but we literally probably saw 2000 jelly fish. It was pretty crazy. I found out that apparently Japan has a major problem with jelly fish… they just can’t get rid of them, and their oceans are pretty much being taken over more whenever they try.

Anyway, moving on. We finally arrived at Miyajima, and anticipating the extensive use of my camera (which I definitely lived up to), I bought 4 brand new AA batteries. Right after we reached our last destination on Miyajima, the second pair of these died, so I clearly needed them.

Once we were at Miyajima, we noticed a couple things very quickly. First of all, there are deer everywhere. And they just walk around, not caring a bit about people. Except when people have food, and then they follow you. And pretty much, you can just walk right up to any of them. It was rather odd, but in a good way I guess. There’s one picture of a deer in my online photo album just standing in the middle of the road. When a car came, it just continued to stand there like an idiot, but the car just went around it. I guess people on Miyajima are used to it. Anyway, the other thing we noticed is that the town by the ferry on Miyajima, fueled by tourists I guess, was pretty lively. There were tons of shops and restaurants of pretty much every kind.

The first place we went was Itsukishima Shrine, which was pretty amazing. It’s been there since the 12th century, and honestly, I can’t even think of words to describe it. While we were there two different interesting events were happening at Itsukushima Shrine: a wedding, and the dedication of a baby. After Itsukushima, we went to some other shinto shrines and buddhist temples (I didn’t mention it before, but “Miyajima” literally means “shrine island”; there are tons of shrines all over it). One of our group, Ike Hurst, went off to climb to the top of the mountain, while the rest of us went to lunch at a place Dr. Thompson’s been going for many years and then take the easy, quicker way to the top: the ropeway.

It was a bit of a hike to the ropeway, and all uphill too, but if we thought that was bad, we had no idea what was coming. Anyway, I’ll get to that in a bit. So we hiked up to the ropeway, and after a bit of confusion after we got separated from the rest of our group, we finally made it and got on. There are quite a few pictures of our ride and the amazing view in the photo album I mentioned above. The ropeway was two steps; the first one was by far the longer of the two, and we went up for probably a good 5 to 10 minutes. Then we switched to the other ropeway and we were finally at the top (or so we thought). There were monkeys everywhere. Yeah, monkeys. D: Honestly, they were pretty much just loud, annoying, and stinky. Not really anything you’d want to have as a pet. :/

So we were at the top of the mountain, finally. And then we were told that we weren’t actually at the top of the mountain, and that we’d have to walk nearly another kilometer (up a mountain) to get to the peak. So we went, and it was amazingly tiring. But once we got there, it was definitely worth it. You could see so much in every direction… it was crazy. I’m pretty sure it’s the most beautiful place that I’ve ever been, by quite a bit.

At the top of the mountain were several more shrines and temples. The one temple holds a flame which was lit in the 8th or 9th century by Kukai, the buddhist monk who founded the Shingon sect of the religion. It’s not one of those natural gas eternal flames either. It’s just wood-fueled, as far as I know, and it’s still burning today. Anyway, time to wind down this long story.

After we hung out at the top of the mountain for a while, resting, we made our way back down (which was way easier than going up) back to the ropeway, which we took back to the bottom and into the town by the ferry. We got some souvenirs, ate some snack foods, and got back to the ferry at 4pm (if I recall correctly, anyway). Then we started on our trek home. We got on the train, took it to Hiroshima station, switched to the Shinkansen, which we took to Osaka, where we had to switch to another Shinkansen several tracks away (in like 3 minutes). We all ran pretty much as fast as we could, and we made it with very little time to spare. We took that Shinkansen to Nagoya station, switched to the JR line, and took that to Kozoji, one stop after we normally get off, since the buses between Chubu and the closer station, Jinryo, had already stopped for the night. Then Dr. Thompson used our program funds to get us a taxi back to the university.

And that pretty much ends the story of Hiroshima. Of course, if you want to know any more details, feel free to leave a comment (I love getting them!). But now, I think it’s time to close this arc of my adventure here in Japan. Next time, I’ll write about Kyoto! Hopefully, this time, it’ll be a shorter period of time between posts. XD

Bye!

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