Sunday, May 21, 2006
Back Up The Line
After a couple of days in Hiroshima we started to make our way back east in the direction of Tokyo. We had a few stops to make before reaching our next main stop in Kyoto, but some of these only involved a few hours in one town before moving on to the next. These short stops were really easy as every station in Japan has storage lockers which cost a couple of pounds a day, so as long as you're traveling light (which we were for once) you can just jump off the train and dump your luggage for a few hours while you check out the town.Okayama & Kurashiki
We didn't find a great deal at Okayama, although it has a castle (of course!) and one of the three finest gardens in Japan (which was closed by the time we got to it!). A few minutes away by train is the smaller town of Kurashiki, which has a very attractive old town area. We stumbled across what looked like a rehearsal for a festival so for an hour or so we followed the two small groups as they paraded around the town before meeting up by the river.
Himeji
After another short train journey we stopped for a couple of hours at Himeji. It's another very impressive looking castle, but again it's had a great deal of renovation. In some cases it's difficult to tell how much of the work has been renovation and how much has been outright rebuilding, but whichever it is these places do all look very impressive.
Kobe
This wasn't part of our original plan but we decided to make it an overnight stop to give us a few hours to look around. We briefly considered whether we should try the famous local beef whilst we were in town, but in the end we opted to save the money and instead headed off for an exciting 'dining experience' in the local night market. Half the fun was in identifying what you were actually eating, although in many cases we were only able to narrow it down to 'Land Mammal' or 'Marine Life'!
Before leaving the next morning we visited the earthquake memorial and then decided to do the full circuit on the local 'tourist' bus as the weather had turned somewhat 'monsoonal'. This turned out to be one of the least effective tourist buses ever, as the announcements were only understood by Japanese speaking tourists, all the seats faced inwards, the windows had steamed up, and everyone else in town had had the same bright idea as us so it was a bit overloaded!
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