Over the river(s) and through the concrete jungle to Miyajima

We some sadness, we prepared this morning for our last ride of the vacation. Packing everything up into our backpacks one last time, we checked out of the hotel, climbed aboard our bikes, and set out for the ferry port on the far southwest side of town. Since we had until 3pm before we could check in to our hotel in Miyajima, we decided to stop at Hiroshima Castle, which we had yet to visit.

Impressive, and under construction

The old castle was destroyed by the bomb, though the foundation was still solid. The current castle, built in 1951, is a mixture of the original design and some modernizations to make it a good museum. Inside, there were a lot of exhibits showing the history of the region of Hiroshima, as well as the castle history. One of my favorite bits of knowledge from this visit is that during the Shogunate, merchants in the castle-town of Hiroshima were taxed based on the width of their shops. This resulted in a lot of very deep, very narrow shops. Gotta love medieval merchants gaming the system!

After the castle, we wove our way through the city. Hiroshima has, in my best estimation, 468 rivers flowing through it, and each one has only two bridges, and those bridges are not connected by any single road. I'm fairly certain we crossed each one at least once on our way out to the ferry port. As expected, it took several hours to travel the 17 miles to the ferry port. We arrived, sweaty and sticky (it wasn't raining, but the humidity was still near 100%) and desperately in need of some nutrition. The ferry station had...

Mango/Orange and Momiji Manju Soft Cream. That's nutrition!

Peach Coke? Well, peaches are nutritious...

Momiji Manju is a local specialty of Itskushima (the region we are in). It is a cake shaped like a maple leaf and filled with red bean paste. The ice cream had both red bean and maple in it. It was amazing. The peach coke? Well, I had to at least try it. I can now say I've tried it. We decided to wait on a real meal until we get settled in at our hotel.

Boarding the ferry with our bikes was surprisingly painless, and soon we were on our way to Miyajima! It's a short, 10 minute ride from the mainland.

Happy to be almost there

The torii (gate) of the Itskushima shrine is partially submerged during high tide

Arriving at Miyajima, there were a lot of tourists...

Waiting in line for a tabl...wait, what?

and deer. The Miyajima deer (Japanese Deer, much smaller than the North American White-Tailed Deer). They are all over, and they are not afraid of people. Luckily, they are friendly and curious, but they also know people have food, and are not smart enough to realize your paper map (or money!) is not food, since it looks like leaves to them.

We checked into our hotel, Sakuraya, cleaned up, then turned around and headed back to the mainland for dinner. Miyajima is a tourist island, and the food is both expensive and almost entirely seafood, so really not much in the way of choices for two slobs with nothing but biking clothes. So we rode the ferry back across and walked a few blocks to Cafe Gusto, a chain restaurant. Sumi ordered spaghetti, because that's what you do in Japan, and I ordered their "Beef Cut Steak", which is thin slices of beef that you grill yourself.

The garlic sauce was strong, and yummy

Feeling full, we headed back to Miyajima to watch the sun set. It was a peaceful, intimate affair with about 50,000 of our closest friends and their children. Actually, there were a number of overnight school trips, and they ALL needed their pictures taken at the gate. Luckily, we got there early enough to enjoy the sunset before being invaded.

Tomorrow is entirely dependent on the weather. Rain is in the forecast, but depending on the amount, we may or may not get to climb Mt. Misen and visit the shrines at the top.