Some places in Japan you might not have heard of!

Our 7-day Japan Rail pass started the next day, so we took advantage of it to take the "shinkansen" bullet train down to Hiroshima with the 350 or so kilometres covered in an easy couple of hours. Our first stop though was Miyajima Island, which has one of the "three most photographed sites in Japan". I'm not sure how they determine the ranking, or why the Japanese have "top 3" lists, but the object in question was the "floating" torii (the entrance to a Shinto shrine). The afternoon was spent in Hiroshima itself. I had been wondering how the old shrine had survived the bomb blast, but it turns out that the Hiroshima bomb only destroyed a roughly 2 kilometre radius around the explosion centre - today's bombs would of course destroy massive areas, which was the reason for my surprise. Anyhow, the Peace Memorial Park is a nice place, showing some of the buildings that somehow survived, and providing lots of first hand accounts about what it was like on the ground. It was also refreshing that we weren't subjected to the same almost hysterical anti-American propaganda that we couldn't avoid in Vietnam - the point was that these weapons should never be used again, without focusing solely on the past. Anyhow, we again caught the shinkansen back to Kyoto that evening.

The next day, we left Kyoto and went to Takayama, a pleasant little town with some shrines and nice walks in the forest. I managed to get "lost" a couple of times, and cross paths with a pretty large snake (hopefully the snakes in Japan aren't poisonous, but I didn't know for sure and that snake sure didn't seem to be afraid of me!) but it was nice to get some exercise out in the fresh air, even if I wasn't sure where I was going a lot of the time!

After a couple of days in Takayama, we went to another town called Matsumoto, which doesn't have much more than an old castle. Of course it's not really that "old", since the Japanese are fond of rebuilding historical buildings and calling them "original".

Finally we ended up near Nagano, the site of the 1998 Winter Olympics. The highlight there was the "snow monkeys", who appear to enjoy the thermal baths, although I suspect the fact that the operator provides food impacts on their happiness to linger....

So, a few pleasant days through the Japanese countryside, although the sights could really have been compressed into a single day, were it not for the difficulty of getting from place to place on the trains. But now it's on to Tokyo, a place where I've been for business and love, but never really had a chance to explore as a tourist...