Golden Week Trip (Day 3)

We slept in again pretty hard, making for another very long sleep. Since we'd been going to bed around the time it started getting seriously dark and sleeping in well into the morning, we probably averaged over 12 hours a night while on this vacation. Part of that was losses due to sleeping on the ground, but I'm sure we also paid some sleep debt.

We took the shuttle bus into town, and for the first order of business we visited a ryokan to hit their public onsen (hot spring) and get clean. This would have been pretty weird when we first arrived and I must report that no qualms remain about this method of public bathing, at least when I needed to get clean as much as I did after a day of hiking and a campfire. Getting clean again was definitely worth the $5 per person cost to use the onsen, and the male side was totally deserted, which was pleasant.

After that, our plan of action was street food and shrines, and since they're all tangled together in the town that worked pretty well. We had roasted oysters and fried oysters and giant fried flavored fish cakes and ice cream while wandering the town, then bought tickets to the famous Itsukushima Shrine. Itsukushima is a World Heritage Site and the Japanese all have warm fuzzy feeling for it, but our investigations indicate that while the structure is large it is also almost entirely empty aside from the bajillion Japanese people visiting it. It is a very famous place and quite pretty on pilings on the tidal plain, but not breathtaking.

Grilled/roasted oysters

More fried oysters

Deep fried cylindrical fish cakes - pretty edible actually

Ice cream

Miyajima is a good place to go for pagoda appreciation.

Itsukushima, from the shore

I did like the texture of the thatched roof and the detail work on the shrine

Itsukushima is also home to the famous giant torii in a bay, which is often shown in tourist materials for Japan and the like. The tide was going out so we sat for an hour or so and read our books while we waited for the water around the torii to get shallow enough to wade out. When it was time, the tidal plain proved to be covered in very small live snails and other forms of life that we had to walk across. I'm certain neither party enjoyed this. When we waded out the water was easily less than knee high, but a few hundred (at least) Japanese dutifully waited for the tide to go all the way out, standing on dunes adjacent to the torii for hours.

Look at them all waiting...

Wading out...

Taking pictures under the torii while most of the Japanese were still waiting...

The torii pretty much wrapped up our explorations of the town, and so we ventured across the bay via ferry to look for new restaurants on the other shore. Turns out there wasn't much there at all aside from souvenir shops on the road between the station and the ferry (dog track, parking garage, etc) so we turned around and went back, dining at a less upscale place than the day before. Ana got cucumber sushi rolls, which are her favorite, but unfortunately they added the wasabi to the rolls themselves instead of putting it on the side. This made Ana sad and she fed all the ones with visibly a lot of wasabi to me so that I could experience the sinus-tingling sensation, instead of her. I ordered a fried fish set, which was quite good. The pickles and so forth were all standard issue Japanese cuisine, but I could have eaten a lot more of that fried fish. I suspect the fish was fresh and local.

Cucumber rolls of wasabi-flavored sadness

Fried fish of excellence

After that, we retired to the campground and read and hung out for a while before it was time to sleep. The next day we would leave Miyajima and visit Hiroshima proper.