While Not Working

The 25th floor turned on a sumptuous feast for breakfast. After nearly 3 weeks of Japanese breakfasts I was ready to put down my chop sticks and indulge in something a little different, and here was my opportunity. Cereal, croissants, pastries, fruit salad, bacon, eggs, plus all the Japanese breakfast dishes, there were even my friends the fermented soy beans. I left the slimy little things alone and had another croissant instead.  We started our first day in Hiroshima with a lap around town on the Hiroshima Loop bus. We complicated the procedure a bit by jumping on the wrong bus and then spending some time dithering at Bus Stop No 2 on the south side of the station when we should have been at Bus Stop No 2 on the North side. Once we got the geography right we were all systems go for a lap around town and very nice it was too, mainly because the bus was heated and it was cold outside. This is the correct bus. Finally. We had a deadline because at 2pm we had to meet a guide for a wa...

The day was cold and clear, or as clear as it gets in this part of the world anyway.  We had our last Hotel Dogo breakfast: having covertly observed our fellow diners the preceding day, I had a better idea how to handle my fermented soy beans with their slimy cobwebs and tendency to slither away from chopsticks. (Mix them in with the rice. Although they'll make the rice slippery too. You have been warned). Farewell shiny hotel lobby. We caught the Iotetsu train back to Takahma and jumped on a little bus which took us to the Matsuyama Tourist Ferry Terminal to catch the car ferry to Hiroshima. From the train. Our ride. There were not a lot of people waiting for the ferry. For a little over two hours the ferry chugged through the islands and channels of the Inland Sea and city ran around taking photos from the upstairs deck, taking refuge inside whenever the cold got too much outside. We passed through the Ondonoseto Strait, under the First and Second Ondo Bridges. Obviously engineer...

Our hotel was barely 200m from Dogo Onsen, reportedly the oldest hot baths in Japan. Fed by volcanic springs, the water was carefully mixed and curated to always provide a bath of 43C. The hotel provided every guest with yakuta, obi, jacket and clogs to facilitate bathing and the onsen did a busy trade in domestic and overseas (primarily China and South Korea) tourists. Given that neither of us wanted to spend our time in a queue waiting to get into the onsen, we determined that the best time to go would be early morning when there would be enough people for us to copy, but no waiting time. The morning saw us getting into our yakutas bright and early, and preparing to step out of our comfort zones. The yakuta were a good fit but the clogs were a wee bit small for my heffalump-sized Australuan feet. We fumbled our way through buying a ticket, hiring a towel, and then I was on my own in the ladies' room. I attempted to discreetly follow the woman in front of me, leading to a moment o...

Trees are bursting into blossom all over Japan and we're lucky enough to be here to see the blossoms and to have time to appreciate them. I didn't realise until I got here how big a deal the blossom season was not only for visitors but even more so for the Japanese themselves .  We spent the morning exploring Mutsayama Castle, a 500+ year old fortress which had survived the centuries largely intact, quite an achievement for an ancient building built largely of wood and therefore vulnerable to fire. Not to mention battle attacks back in the days of warring Japanese fiefdoms. In a very touristic introduction to such a significant monument, we caught a chairlift to the bottom of the castle fortifications, saving ourselves the walk up the hill. This was both exciting and somewhat scary, perched on a slippery plastic chair swinging above the ground while more sensible people sailed past in a fully enclosed gondola. Traffic. From the chairlift we wound our way up through the defensiv...