Aoshima

What a difference a week and several hundred miles south make. When we arrived in Kobe, it was about 40 and windy. When we got off the train today in Aoshima, it was 65, sunny and beautiful. The palm trees didn't hurt, either. There's not much here in Aoshima, but when you have the ocean, sandy beaches, and hardly anyone around, you don't need much more!

Oh, yeah...

Being very off-season, there was hardly anyone here, making it difficult to find something to eat (all the shops closed early), but giving us the beach and the islands mostly to ourselves. After we arrived, we rented some amazingly bad bikes from the hotel and trundled off to the nearby island of Aoshima.

Aoshima Island. Population: 0

It's a tiny island (only 1.6 km in diameter), and the center is mostly a nature preserve that we're not allowed in, but it has some pretty unique things on it. One of the oldest shrines in Japan resides here. When it was first constructed, no one knows, but there are records of it being REBUILT around 700 AD. Today's structures are Buddhist and far more modern, but the site has been a continuous place of Shinto spirituality for over 1300 years, and the location is perfect

Not quite as big as Miyajima

Tiger guardians at the ancient shrine

Ignore all the merchandising...

The temple itself is pretty impressive, a combination of Buddhist and Shinto ideals.

Beautiful dragon head fountain

Apart from the temple, there is a curious geological structure called The Devil's Washboard (鬼の洗濯板), long straight striations of basalt that look man-made, but are naturally occurring here and elsewhere along the Nichinan coast.

Afterward, we biked up and down the mostly deserted, but beautiful coastline. Very relaxing, and very unlike the Japan that most people experience. Even in rural areas, you are rarely alone on a stretch of road for very long. The population density is just too high.

For dinner, we didn't have a lot of choices, since most places were closed, and so we braved our hotel restaurant. You see, as many of you know, I can't eat fish without it coming back up, usually quite a bit  faster than it went down. As many of you also know, Japanese are of the unfortunately misguided belief that adding fish to anything makes it better. Ice cream? Put some sardines in that! Beef and potatoes? Coat it with dried fish flakes! How about a squid and crab milkshake?* So when you end up at a nice resort hotel, the restaurant will most likely be pretty nice, with very well prepared seafood, and little else. So, knowing this, we still decided to give it a shot. I mean, they've got to have SOMETHING that's not fish, right?

Right?

It was a rather odd all-you-can-eat buffet. Juice, wine, beer, liquor, tea, coffee, rice, tiny desserts and miso soup(in a heavy fish broth) were all set out buffet-style. The main dishes were prepared for you, but you could order as much as you like. The main dishes, with the exception of a very tasty, but very fatty, pork dish and "pizza" all contained large to insane amounts of seafood. They brought the "pizza", topped with zucchini, some form of mushroom and bell peppers out two tiny pieces at a time, and it took twenty minutes for that. The pork was so fatty (which probably was very desirous for the Japanese), I couldn't take more than one serving. That left rice, juice and dessert....

Needless to say, we tried everything they put in front of us (though I passed on the crab and salmon, knowing what the likely result would be) before escaping to the vending machine at the onsen and our room where I had a packaged apple pie and some potato chips. Ah, well, it was worth a try, right?

After a nice soak in the open air onsen they had (free for hotel guests), it was back to our room to log in and get our work done (wait, this IS vacation, right?). Tomorrow we have four hours or so on some trains heading up the coast to Beppu, where Hell awaits us....



* I'm not making any of these up. They do exist.