The end of the hols

The last week of the holidays is upon us, and though we’re feeling a bit sad, I’m satisfied that we’ve given the holiday period a jolly good shake. This week Ruby is actually meant to be practicing with the brass bandat school every morning but she bravely fronted up to her teacher and said that she couldn’t make it. (Admittedly the practices this week are designated “voluntary” although we all know what that means in the Land of Fitting In and I’m sure that everyone else will be duly turning up in the mornings.)

So we took the opportunity to host a couple more friends from Australia for a few days and do a bit of island hopping, putting the cars on the ferry over to Ikuchijima where we all went for a swim on Sunset Beach, an accredited beach resort (this means it has tinny music blaring out of speakers all day long and you have to pay for the showers) with views of the mountains in the distance which impressed our friends no end.

On Thursday we zoomed down to Miyajima, that place with the big red ancient traditional cultural gate thingy in the water, touted as the most photographed site in Japan (How do you measure that anyway? Do they stop people at random and go through their cameras?). In the finest Japanese tradition, the gate itself has already been rebuilt eight times and judging from the decrepit state of the wood near the bottom I suspect an upgrade to Version 9 is due pretty soon. The whole area including Gate 8.0, the shrine and the nearby forest, is World Heritage listed but you can wander around at will.

We stayed at a really great ryokan inn tucked away literally in the middle of this World Heritage forest. Such a wonderful place to stay. Plus our room had its own private pond complete with big fat slow-moving carp, Felix’s favourite fish:

The national park is full of little nature trails and cultural thingies such as this bridge, located on the walk up to the ropeway.

The top of the ropeway is Mt. Misen, I believe the highest point on the island, where you can get stunning views of the Seto Inland Sea — possibly even better than the views from our very own Mt. Fudekage at Sunami, which caused me to experience a minor dose of View Envy. The kids decided that it was appropriate to utilize the scenery for some wacky perspective shots such as Ruby holding up an island:

And Felix with an island up his bum:

Us Orstralians, we know how to appreciate Culture.

The idea of staying overnight was to appreciate two aspects of the big red gate thingy; tide in and tide out. In the afternoon on the first day the tide was out so we were able to wander right up to the hallowed object.

After a while Ruby got bored and wandered off to do a Lady of the Lake impression:

For some reason everyone tries to throw rocks up onto the horizontal crossbar. No idea why.

That night we found a local pub type restaurant where all the men were drinking out of this amazing beer keg tower thing:

It looked like fun but unfortunately only Kaz and I were drinking beer so we couldn’t try one out for ourselves.

Here for no particular reason is a photo of our meal (I kind of like the overhead shot):

After dinner we wandered back in the dark to our forest hotel and I attempted to get some arty shots with our shiny new camera:

(NB: Eleni’s back is still hurting hence the pose.)

This one actually shows the kids sitting on the sea wall. You can hardly make them out but hey, it’s an Arty Shot.

The temple scrubs up pretty well at night-time:

The following day we wandered around a bit more and went inside the temple and I would love to be able to show you 10000000 more shots of the Red Gate surrounded by water at high tide but tragically the camera battery went flat. (The strain of the Arty Shots must have worn it out.) However our friends took heaps of photos for us so don’t fret, they’ll be up here one day.

Miyajima is just one and half hours away from home so we plan to come back again, at least for a day trip if not an overnight stay. Apart from the cultural stuff it is actually a really nice place for walking and I plan to give Mt. Misen a go when (if) the weather finally cools down.

Click here for more Miyajima photos.