Hiroshima to Miyajima island

After a hearty continental breakfast in our hotel this morning, we packed up and walked down to the pier to catch a boat over to Miyajima, opting for a more expensive but scenic river cruises leaving a short stroll from our hotel rather than the ¥200 ferry that required a train or two to get to it.

We were on the island reasonably early, so dropped our bags off at our hotel and set off for the day. This island is a haven for day trippers, so we did a bit of reconnaissance down to the waterfront to see the most iconic thing on the island, the red torii gate in the water, Otorii.

There is a cable car which takes you up in the mountains with fabulous views, from which you can then walk to the summit of Mt Misen. If there is a mountain to climb, we feel compelled to climb in, but this one was relatively easy when all was said and done.

Time for food! There is a famous maple leaf shaped pastry on the island called Momiji Manju, which comes either fried or baked with various fillings, and since we were overdue a coffee, we combined the two. Mine had a custard filling and Lynette went for chocolate. I also had a beef and oyster curry filled friend pastry thing. Strange combination but it seemed to work. It was quite a sweet curry, but good street food! If you are into oysters, this is your island. They are farmed extensively in Hiroshima Bay, so EVERY shop sells every possible type of oyster thing. I did not know oysters with grilled cheese was even a thing until today.

We donated ¥300 yen each to the upkeep of the main shrine and to walk the slow 10 minutes through it to the other side. Entry fees to things in Japan so far have been ridiculously inexpensive. We had a bit more time to kill before check-in so went for a walk along the main length of the village to the outskirts and back again. We then bought the baked version of our special maple leaf pastry for Ron.

Check in was a bit of fun. We got to choose our yukata from a wide variety of patterns and styles, our obi colour, and then were given a little dilly bag to select a range of amenities like body lotion, hair bands, thong socks etc. We were then accompanied to our room (bags already here, bargain), and the gentleman noticed that the room was missing a pair of room slippers, a set of towels and a haori jacket. Off he toddles, and then comes back with the missing stuff, but notices that there is now a missing complimentary maple-leaf pastry (I promise we did not eat it). He disappears again, and at this stage we have just left our door open. Some time later, two older ladies jabbering away to each other in Japanese wander into our room, start looking around in the bathroom, poking around in the room, take the one maple-leaf cake that was there and leave two packets of some flat things and jabber off again. Lynette and I have discussed marauding marauders more often than you would think possible in the last 10 days, so I asked her if she thought we had just been scammed out of our special maple leaf cake by cleverly disguised marauding marauders... She agreed we had.

Anyway, there is an onsen footbath at this hotel, so we got changed and went off to soak the tootsies, came back and went off to use the inside and outside onsen (the outside one had water which was at a much more tolerable temperature), came back and got changed to go out for dinner. Earlier reconnaissance had shown us that not much was open late, so an earlyish dinner was on the cards, after which we went back to see the torii gate at night and wander a bit more with basically the island to ourselves.

Oh, and this island has wild deer wandering around the village, so we also found it necessary to take lots of photos of them and include more than a fair share of "no idea" jokes across the day 🤭Read more