Now I Am Become Death, The Destroyer Of Worlds

Our hotel in Hiroshima (ANA Crowne Plaza) is a bit posh. I felt out of place. The room, however, was pretty small and cramped, but the buffet breakfast made up for that, and then some! I took full advantage of the eat as much as you like (my translation: eat as much as you can) on both days that we were here.

We spent the afternoon and evening in the nearby Peace Park. It didn't seem all that peaceful, as it was a fairly small park bordered on all sides by busy roads, and was full of local schoolchildren on their school trips. However, they try their best and the whole city is promoted as a peace icon, with an obvious anti-nuclear weapons bent. Given the complete and total destruction of the city on 8th August, 1945, it has been rebuilt and reinhabited very quickly. It is obviously a modern city, and feels a lot bigger than Kyoto, at least in part because Kyoto buildings are not allowed to be too tall, whereas Hiroshima had many high buildings and modern shopping and business areas. They have left one of the surviving buildings from the bombing, the iconic domed building which sits on the bank of one of the rivers amongst the modern architecture and is an effective and poignant reminder of the bomb.

The peace park contains various monuments and a couple of museums. For lunch, after our struggle to find something local that we were able to eat, and our disappointment when we had to settle for pasta or pizza, we both brightened up considerably when we found a very extensive bakery. And we both ignored the fact that it was a Danish chain. But we managed to buy a very nice picnic lunch comprising the sort of things that seemed to be relatively Japanese - sweet potato bread, pumpkin tart, Japanese apple slice etc. All very nice, albeit possibly not all that healthy.

Despite the multitudes of children around the park, our lunch was only interrupted once by one group of very polite children with their required forms to fill in - the questions of our names and where we lived were easy enough to answer, but the need to come up with an on the spot ‘peace message to the world' was a little more challenging! I was reminded of the first Bill & Ted film, and came up with a very similar message to theirs – their ‘Be excellent to each another' was replaced with my ‘Respect one another'. I wouldn’t want to be accused of plagiarism. I decided not to finish it off with a 'Party on, dudes!'.

The museum was pretty good. It managed to cover the details of the bomb, and the after effects, without laying specific blame at the hands of the Americans, or the Allies. It was anti-nuclear weapons rather than anti-American (compared with the museums in Vietnam at any rate!), though it didn't make any mention of Japanese atrocities during the war. It did pull at the heart strings by using clothing and items from schoolchildren much more than adults, but it did get the message home, and the recordings of brief interviews with people who survived the bomb were very moving – their descriptions of the day itself very thought provoking.

On to Thursday now, and a trip to the island of Miyajima. A short train trip followed by a quick ferryhop across to the island. The island is home to the iconic torii, the entrance gate to a Shinto shrine, which is very tall, very orange and stands on the beach - in mud at low tide and in water at high tide. It’s one of the most photographed things in Japan, so I felt I had to photograph it. Along with every other tourist, western and Japanese, who had made the trip to the island. So trying to get a photograph without hordes of people in the picture too was a challenge. One which everyone was attempting.

After spending an hour or so trying to get a single good photo - it would have been a lot easier just buying a postcard - we decided to get to the top of the nearby mountain. A relatively cheap cable car ride took us most of the way, and as it was another really glorious day, the views were really good, if a little hazy. For some reason the cable car did not go all the way to the top, so a 20 minute climb was needed to get to the very top and to take in the 360 degree views that the summit offered. The paths to the top of the mountain (500m high, so I think can be classed as a mountain rather than a hill) were good, though the summit felt a little disappointing, topped as it was with a building (and toilets) that only served to allow you to sit and view the surroundings from a bench rather than a much more natural rock.

The journey back down was a little more laborious, with an hour of walking down concrete steps. We were just glad that we hadn't decided to walk up the mountain as well as down it! The signs showing the dangers of snakes proved unfounded, at least on our trek, as no vipers were spotted, despite both of us keeping a keen eye out for them. In fact, wildlife of any kind seemed very lacking, not even birds being evident, nor birdsong. Only a few spiders were seen. These spiders seem to be everywhere. Quite scary looking when you first see them, as they have very long legs and fat, brightly coloured bodies. We are getting quite used to them now though, but I still wouldn’t fancy one of them crawling on me.

A view of the torii gate as the Sun was starting to set and the tide was high proved another tourist draw, though many groups were starting to head home so it was slightly quieter, and then we headed back to Hiroshima. After sitting on the train for a while, after our hill descent, our legs were starting to stiffen and the walk back from the station to the hotel was tough. We wanted to walk though, as we were hoping to find a recommended place to eat dinner. We missed it at first, but backtracked and found it quickly (not quickly enough for our poor legs though!). This was a traditional place that served okonomyaki – a popular Japanese dish that is a speciality in Hiroshima, apparently. It consists of a sort of pancake mix, topped with beansprouts and lettuce and usually some meat or fish, and some fried noodles, and another pancake, cooked on a hot plate in front of you and looking like a great tower of food until it cooks down a bit and is squashed down a lot. The whole thing is then topped off with some sauce (plum sauce?), and some dried green herby stuff, then just moved to the bit of the hot plate in front of you for you to cut and eat. The ‘restaurant’ (Okonomi-mura) was actually a floor of open kitchens – you picked one and sat down at it and they served you. There were some westerners there, probably due to the place being mentioned in the Lonely Planet guide, but also plenty of Japanese. After handing our ‘we are vegetarian' card to a couple of friendly ladies in an empty kitchen, and responding to the obligatory ‘what about pork? What about seafood? Fish sauce?’ questions, and waiting for the few moments while they absorbed the fact that they were stuck with weird westerners who didn’t eat proper food, they set to work with a smile and made us vegetarian okonomyaki. It was a hearty meal, tasted pretty good, and we felt good for eating a traditional Japanese meal.

The following day we were moving on to the ‘highlands'. We made use of the reputably excellent luggage forwarding service in Japan to enable us to send our big luggage on to Tokyo, while we just packed a couple of day’s worth of stuff in small bags and headed out on another bullet train towards Tsumago. Forwarding our two bags of luggage cost only £20 or so – well worth it, especially as we were very much underspending our allotted £100 per day between us. I think we are used to budgeting a lot on holiday and probably spend a lot less than other tourists!

We had to change trains a few times on this journey. One major benefit of the Japanese trains being always on time, to the minute, is that it makes it really easy to find get on the right train. If the train pulls in just before the allotted time, it is probably the right one. If you are still sat on an unmoving train a minute after it is supposed to have left, you are on the wrong train (and have missed your train!). Also, even in the smaller stations, key information is displayed in English. It’s all very easy, and not the great culture shock we were expecting.

Tsumago is an old postal town in the mountains that became more and more neglected as people and technology moved on. In order to try to rescue the town, and the area, the locals turned the town, and a connected town – Magome – into ‘old Japan’, retaining and renovating the old fashioned houses and streets and banning visible modern influences like electricity pylons and satellite dishes from the main streets. They are now very popular tourist attractions for both westerners and Japanese.

Local hotels are generally Ryokans – traditional Japanese inns with tatami mats in the rooms, no shoes in the houses and are generally small ‘bed and breakfast' places, but also usually provide dinner too. Apparently it was difficult for Audley Travel to find us a place to stay in Tsumago itself, partly because we booked late and there is limited availability in town, but also because of the difficulty finding somewhere that would accommodate a vegetarian diet. So our ryokan was a little outside the town – a taxi ride from the station, and a 15 minute walk from Tsumago town itself.

Hayana Ryokan was very nice and seemed very traditional. As the first Ryokan we have stayed in we have little to compare it with, but it had an authentic feel. Friendly staff, slippers to change into at the entrance, tatami  mats in the rooms (you take your slippers off at the entrance to your room), comfy beds (high ceilings, which was a nice surprise, though low doorways, as Emma’s forehead will attest!) and very nice food. They did a very good job of providing nice vegetarian food for dinner and breakfast, and we had different food for each meal (we stayed two nights), though breakfast on the second day was more ‘continental’, even then it had nice Japanese touches like being served in separate dishes, with some Japanese fruits. I even tried the shared bath (onsen) on our second afternoon there – reading up on the protocol beforehand so I didn’t make a complete fool of myself, though since there was only one other westerner in there at the time, protocol embarrassment would have been minimised at any rate. I think I got it all correct though – enter naked, except for a small flannel, shower thoroughly before getting into the big bath etc. The bath was very hot, but refreshing after our walk on the second day.

Tsumago was a nice enough little town. Quaint, I guess would be the label attached to it if in the UK. The buildings down the main street were mainly food shops, souvenir shops or Ryokans. We saw it on another very hot and sunny day, which added to the quaintness of the town. The chestnut ice cream was really nice (I thought. Emma was less impressed). In fact, chestnut seemed to be a common theme in the food around there, despite me seeing no chestnut trees anywhere.

On our second day (our only full day) in the mountains we caught a taxi (the buses ran only every 2 hours or so, probably to keep the taxi drivers in business!) to the next town, Magome, which was similar to Tsumago, though we found it a lot nicer and more interesting to walk along. It probably helped that we got there quite early in the morning, when there were few other tourists, and the quietness added to the old-Japan feel.

After a browse around the town, we headed off on the very well signposted hiking trail back to Tsumago. More of a brisk walk than a hike, but our bodies were quite happy with that. Only around 8km, so didn’t take all that long, and walking in the direction that we did meant a short but a little steep uphill walk initially, then a nice gentle downhill stroll for the rest of the walk. The walk took us through woods, small farms and along a river with waterfalls and the like. Another lovely day, so a really nice walk. We were again surprised at the lack of much wildlife around. Very few birds, no squirrels or any other mammals, though bears are supposedly not uncommon, as evidenced by the regular ‘bear bells' to be rung to scare off any nearby bears. We saw no bears. Maybe the bells work. We don’t even know what sort of bears they have around here. I think we'll never know. Nor what other animals they may have. Even insects seem in short supply (which may explain the lack of birds!). In fact, the most impressive insect we saw was back in the Ryokan – a rather large centipede type thing crawling up the wall. Large fish (carp are common in the frequent ponds at the front of houses), but other than that wildlife seems uncommon here. Other than those scary spiders.