Hiroshima and Beppu

Nagoya, 31st July 2008

We left Hakuba in the morning for Nagoya, a stop only made to hunt out the Nagoya branch of the No.1 Travel office to book our flights out of Japan. After waiting around the office for a good few hours, we managed to get our flights sorted (Japan - Hong Kong and Hong Kong - Ho Chi Minh City) and then headed out for some dinner, a wander around Nagoya city and then back to the hotel we’d booked for an evening of playing around in the complimentary kimonos! Not the most exciting of days, but definitely necessary.

Hiroshima, 1st - 2nd August 2008

Hiroshima, the city where the first ever atom bomb fell in 1945 is a beautiful spaced out city that understandably promotes peace in a world full of violence. We only got to spend 2 days there but we managed to pack in quite a lot during that time.

We stayed at the Hiroshima International Youth Hostel, which was found on the top floors of the Aster Plaza Building, a huge white building that housed conference rooms, a library, music studios and of course our accommodation for the night. The hostel strangely only had single rooms (to be honest it was more like a 3* hotel than a hostel) and that night was the first night since the girls arrived in Shanghai in June that I slept in a room alone. It was quite weird not getting ready for bed in the same room as the other 2, a little lonely even and I soon found out the others were feeling the same when I knocked on mine and Amy’s adjoining wall we had a little wall knocking conversation and then later she called me on the room phone to sing me goodnight!

We visited the A bomb museum, which gave an overview of the events of the war that lead up to the dropping of the atomic bombs and of course the mass destruction that was caused and its after-effects. In school history lessons we had been taught about what went on during WWII but from only reading textbooks and watching the odd documentary, being so far removed from the situation and never having experienced anything remotely similar, I never really grasped the enormity and brutality of what went on just only 80 years ago around the world. Its only now after visiting countries and various areas that were badly affected and still scarred by the events of WWII that I realise how much people (most of them innocent bystanders) have suffered during their countries fight for power or freedom.

The peace park is a beautiful serene area in Hiroshima that was built on the site of where the atom bomb hit as a memorial to all the victims. The ruins of the only building to have survived the blast, the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotional Hall, although now called the A-Bomb Dome, stands to one side of the park, an ever present reminder of that fateful day but also a quite praise for the strength of the survivors for rebuilding Hiroshima into the gorgeous city it is today. We were in Hiroshima just days before the anniversary of the bombing and all around the park were inhabitants of Hiroshima promoting peace. We got chatting to a group of school children who were getting visitors to the park to make paper cranes with them so that they could make a huge collage, containing around 30,000 paper cranes, which they’d done every year for the past 6 years. Our contributions weren’t the best examples of paper cranes you’d see, but they were happy with our little origami cranes nonetheless. There were also exhibitions around the park with the life stories of survivors and victims of the bombing, as well as stories of the soldiers who were sent to war, which were all pretty tough to read and our hearts went out to everyone who had been affected.

Even though its recent history hasn’t been so pleasant, Hiroshima has moved on and has turned into a fantastic city with so much going for it. We found a fantastic sheltered shopping street which had a huge variety of shops and restaurants. Much to her delight, Stacy discovered the world of Japanese Arcades and she became very excited at the prospect of winning lots of cuddly toys. She won a whole family of baby hamster toys and was devastated when after many attempts she didn’t get the giant hamster toy to protect her baby hamsters. Myself and Amy did point out that it was probably for the best as she would have had to chuck out a good proportion of her backpack just to house giant hamster and his hamster family!

We also got our first taste of authentic Japanese food in Hiroshima, as so far all we’d eaten was festival food (pie and chips), food we’d cooked for ourselves at the Hakuba hostel (jacket potatoes, stir fry, spaghetti), and sandwiches from convenience stores. Japan does an awful lot more than just sushi, ramen, soba noodles and tempura, such as squid balls - small pieces of squid cooked in a ball of fish tasting batter, covered in mayo and topped with some sort of brown flaky stuff that moved! Still not quite sure what the flakes were but we figured that moved not because they were possessed or alive (our immediate thoughts!) but because they were heat sensitive! We also tried a noodle-y omelette dish as well as the amazing delicious Mochi cream deserts.

Beppu, 2nd - 4th August 2008

We headed to Beppu on the South Island after our time in Hiroshima and we stayed at the Khaosan Beppu Hostel, which is part of the Khaosan chain of Japanese hostels. The hostel was great, friendly and relaxed with a decent kitchen and its own onsen, and was really close to the station, shops and the sea. Japan is known for its hotsprings and Beppu is a well known destination for both onsens and jigokus, the hotsprings you can bathe in and the hotsprings you just look at.

We visited “The Hells” on our first full day, a collection of 8 natual jigokus just outside of Beppu and I was amazed at how different they were from each other and how they had come to being. There was the mud jigoku that reminded me of ‘the bog of eternal stench’ from the film ‘Labyrinth’ in the way it bubbled - and it did smell a little eggy too! The read and bright blue jigokus were among my favourite, as well as the geyser jigoku which spouted hot water every so often.

The local people use the heat from the hotsprings to cook various simple foods, like boiling eggs and steaming vegetables such as corn and sweet potatoes, as well as making an egg and milk dessert that’s very similar to crème caramel. I’m not actually sure how many of the locals actually use the hotsprings regularly to cook food at home as it seems they cook food there for the tourists, and being tourists it would have been wrong not to have sampled some hotspring cooked food. So we tried the hotspring boiled eggs, which unsurprisingly tasted just like normal boiled eggs, though the egg white was actually a little darker in colour than normal egg whites and we ate them with salt and soy sauce as shown by the lady selling them. They were delicious!

Myself and Stacy tried a hot-sand bath at a local onsen which was definitely an experience! Once stripped down and wearing only our hot-sand bath kimonos we entered a huge room filled with sand, where we were lead into little pits, told to lie down in them and then covered up to our neck in hot sand! It was a little strange at first, but after a while I got used to the weight of the sand on top of me and relaxed into to heat. We stayed covered in sand for about 10 minutes, but it felt much longer than that. When I wiggled my toes I could feel my blood pumping through my leg and feet, which was a little strange, and by the end of the 10 minutes I was drenched in sweat, but it felt good. After the hot-sand bath we went back to the changing room, where we shed our sand covered kimonos, washed any excess sand off ourselves in a freezing cold shower and then jumped into the boiling hot onsen. The hot-sand bath and onsen bathing was so refreshing at the end of a long day of walking around in the hot hot sun and its defiantly something I could have gotten used to on a regular basis… if only we were staying in Beppu longer!

Amy desperately wanted to get some beach time in so we headed to a nearby beach, but were thoroughly disappointed. Being so pleased with Japan’s cleanliness as a whole, the beach was a huge letdown as it was quite dirty. So instead of beaching we spent the afternoon relaxing in the small park that overlooked the beach, which was far nicer.

We also had time to go to the Mount Takasaki National park to see the monkeys, and there were loads of them up there living and playing. The little climb up to the main platform where the monkeys stayed did nothing to prepare us for the vast number of monkeys there and when the keepers threw out food for them all over the floor, we were literally surrounded by a few hundred hungry little (although some of them were quite big!) monkeys. I got especially engrossed in watching a group of little baby monkeys playing on a chain railing - they were so unsteady on their little limbs and kept falling over each other in the most adorable way!

And so ends our time in Beppu. Time to move to our next destination - Mount Aso.

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