Explosive Hiroshima

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Our trip to Hiroshima was an incredibly eye-opening experience. Having been to Pearl Harbour as a teenager and reading about how bad the Japanese were, seeing the other side of the story was somewhat more compelling and balanced out my perspective.

Hiroshima city is a really beautiful place, and in September it was still quite warm and humid. The giant park that is a shrine to the victims of the bombing is green and full of life, both in terms of plant-life and locals, including many local school children who approach us and want to talk to us in English to practice their English skills. Many of them are doing school assignments on what Hiroshima means and why tourists visit. We spend some time talking to the kids.

We took the train to the ferry and a short trip over to Miyajima Island, a small island with floating temples and an interesting hike up to the top to more temples. The scenery is brilliant although there is cloud cover which prevents us from getting a great view of the Japanese coastline. The island is full of little monkeys with red bums which provide us with some entertainment on the way up to the top. It was quite a warm day, so we enjoyed a few cans of beers once we got back on the mainland, out of vending machines of course, the only way to drink beer in Japan!

The city itself is buzzing at night and we head to one of the many little restaurants where everyone sits around the hot plate and they cook your food right in front of you and you eat it off the hot plate. Talk about no regard from OH&S. In any case the food was amazing and the Asahi's went down well with it. After a couple of days in Hiroshima, it was time to get back on the bullet train to Osaka.

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Photos

A-Bomb Dome
The only building left standing from the 1945 Atom bomb drop on Hiroshima - it was at the epicentre

A-Bomb Dome in 1945
At the very sobre Hiroshima museum