The Wandering Chocoholic

A day to remember

Woke up this morning in Hiroshima and looked at my watch only to realize the date: November 11th. Remembrance Day. Although for us Canadians, the day specifically honours WWI veterans, it has always had a broader connotation about remembering the victims of all wars – military and civilian. How ironic to be in Hiroshima today, and in another way, how fitting.

Off to an island

An early start today, to take a day trip out to Miyajima Island. Getting there involved taking a streetcar to a train to a ferry. Miyajima is famous for a lot of things, but perhaps most notable is the floating Torii gate, which is one of the most photographed sights in Japan. It’s also famous for its wild deer, which run around the island eating tourists’ maps, passports, railpasses and – according to one particularly amusing sign – babies. I don’t believe the last one; the deer we saw seemed pretty tame, if a bit too used to people.

The entire island of Miyajima is sacred ground, as designated by the floating gate. You’re supposedly not allowed to give birth on the island, nor are you allowed to die. With the number of tourists passing through there every day, and the difficulty of some of the hiking, I really wonder about the latter part. If someone should die on the island, do they throw their body overboard and institute a massive cover-up? Hmmm…

A shrine and a gate

On Miyajima, I was able to see the famous 5-storey pagoda, the Itsukushima Shrine, and of course, the floating gate itself. Plenty of tourists were gathered around taking photos of the gate, including – you guessed it – Japanese tour groups. Yes, they exist even in Japan. If anything, there are more of them, and they can be found at every famous tourist spot. We finally got a vantage point on the gate that wasn’t blocked by people, and proceeded to photograph the heck out of the gate. It’s only famous because it floats; if it were on dry land, it would probably be unremarkable.

View from the top

To get to the top, we had to take a shuttle bus to a cable car to a second cable car. That was impressive enough, but that just took us to the lower observatory. The peak observatory of Mount Misen, at an altitude of 535m, required another hour’s hike… straight up. If that sounds brutal, it’s because it was. Partway up was a famous shrine with the Hall of Fire, containing an eternal flame that is supposed to have been burning for 1,200 years. Fire from this flame was used to initially light the eternal flame in Peace Park in Hiroshima.

The rest of the trail passed by some cool views and rock formations, but the very top was really where the action was. The observatory really felt like being on top of the world. Oddly enough, there was a small cafe at the top where you could buy noodles, ice cream, and even beer. Because, of course, a beer is just the thing after an hour-long hike up a mountain.

Getting down was much faster – only about 30 minutes – but tough on the knees. By the time we reached the town again, I was already in about twelve different kinds of pain. Yep, I guess I thought I was in better shape than that. To be fair, I was starting off at a disadvantage, since I already had an injured foot and an injured knee from this trip. Travel is hard work!

The non-floating gate

At the bottom, we noticed that the floating Torii gate wasn’t floating. At low tide, the water level recedes enough that the gate is on dry sand, so we were able to walk right up to it and take photos from underneath, which was pretty cool actually. The whole bottom of each leg of the gate is covered in sand and dirt from where the water line reaches, and they have had to rebuild the gate 8 times in the past thousand years or so because of erosion of the wood. The current version of the gate is about a hundred and twenty years old, which isn’t half bad when you consider that it’s constantly in the water.

Oysters and maple leafs

Miyajima is famous for oysters, so we stopped off at an oyster bar to sample the goods. Well, I didn’t have any. But I’m told they were very salt-watery and quite good.

Another specialty of Miyajima is this cookie that’s shaped like… a maple leaf. Are we in Japan or in Canada? Actually, the maple is a symbol of Miyajima, and the cookies, which can be filled with chocolate, almond paste, bean paste and other such things, are sold everywhere. I did try a couple, but, unfortunately, like the hockey team of the same name, they weren’t all that good.

Back to Hiroshima

We caught the ferry to the train to the streetcar back to Hiroshima, after having spent basically the entire day on Miyajima. I was completely exhausted by that point, but it was definitely worth it!
Up next: Hakone and Mount Fuji.