Asian Travels Pt 1 – Japan (Shikoku)

As many of you know, my parents have visited me over here in the past few weeks and we went traveling a bit. Our first few places were right here in Japan. While I was with them we traveled around my island of Shikoku, and then for a week after while I worked, they went to Kyoto and Tokyo. On Shikoku the first day we had someone from my ward here show us around Kochi, the city, and we went to a place called Katsurahama. This is a really famous place around here because it is the scene of some happenings for Ryoma, a guy who helped change the Japanese government from the feudalistic era. Anyway, it is down by the beach and quite pretty.   And yes, that last in this first bunch of pictures is a square watermelon lol. 

 

After that, we went back and ate at the Hirome market place in town where it was super crowded and we got to see them cut up a huge fish (bonita I believe it was) in front of us, get some sashimi from it, and eat it. It was good. Here I have some pictures of the guys doing it.

Oh, before we went to Hirome and ate we went to the castle in Kochi and here’s some pictures of that.  For the rest of the time on the island we rented a car and I drove. Now, getting around in Japan is not at all like getting around in America. For one thing, a lot of the streets in towns and cities just don’t have names, lol. On top of that, if there is a street name or sign, it’s all in Japanese. Plus, you could be going along a perfectly sound looking road, and then all of a sudden it turns into what looks like an alley street, or it just kind of ends. And you have to pay attention to your driving because while you might think it would be ingrained to stay to the left when driving after 8 months of driving that way, when you are distracted by looking for the right streets and signs and stuff, it is easy to just all of a sudden realize you are pulling onto and driving on the wrong side of the road. Anyway, luckily our car was equipped with a GPS unit. Unluckily, there were no English options. When we rented our car,

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the lady showed me what buttons did what for the basics, and then we were sent off to fend for ourselves. It’s kind of cool here that because the addresses can be vague and stuff at times (lack of street names and all), that the GPS does phone numbers as well. You just have to enter a phone number of a place and it just knows the address. I was impressed, lol. Anyway, I was surprised to find out that I understood most of what the GPS would be saying about toll roads, amounts we need to pay, gas stations coming up,  what lane to stay in, which way to turn, etc. So that was kind of cool.

Our first place we went to was Imabari which is on the top middle part of the island (I am towards the bottom of the island on the right). It’s right on the coast and there are huge bridges spanning little islands in the sea between my island and the main island, Honshu. We drove around Imabari for a little while trying to find the hotel with the GPS, which proved to be a little difficult because of the construction they had going right around our hotel, but we found it and then the next day we went to Imabari castle, which had a huge moat, and like all Japanese castles, extremely steep stairs, and drove across all the bridges to the main island and back. It took a while, and cost quite a bit because of the toll ways, but it was pretty and when we got back we went to Matsuyama.

   

In Matsuyama we went to the castle which was really cool and had trees  in bloom and quite a few foreigners as well as people dressed up in traditional Japanese clothes, posing with you for free. To get to the castle was a chore since parking by the castle was full and parking in Japan is kind of scarce anyway, we had to park at a supermarket a ways away and go in and buy a candy bar just in case before taking a cab over to the castle. Since the castle is on a hill, you take a lift up to it and it is like the coolest thing ever and would never fly in America. It’s a bunch of single chairs, like chairs you would find at the desks for kids in a school, hanging from the lift to take you up – with no bars or seat belts or anything like that. Just you, hanging in a chair, being taken up to the castle, lol.

Anyway, after that we went to a shrine which was kind of hard to find because we didn’t have any phone number or address to plug in on the GPS unit, and I had no idea what the Chinese characters were to be able to look for a sign, but eventually I saw a sign back behind some buildings on a wall that had characters that might have been for the shrine, and we backtracked back to the place, and we found it! It was really big, but hidden in all these trees on the hill and looked in bad shape, not cleaned up at all. After leaving it and driving toward the Dogo Onsen where we went next, we of course found the front entrance right along a main road we had gone back and forth on several times, lol. We had to park way up on the top of what seemed like a mountain and travel down a million steps and traverse a few streets before we got to the onsen, but eventually we did. The onsen was really cool, and we didn’t really get any pictures of it since everyone’s cameras were left in the car or out of batteries, but it was all lit up at night and we got a private changing room and after soaking we got treats and water (we were automatically brought tea with our treats and I had to tell a very disbelieving lady that no, we really didn’t drink tea). Anyway, by then it was really late at night and we finally made the trip back to my little town and the next morning I was dropped off at work and my parents drove the car themselves back to the rental place in the city and caught their train for Kyoto. The next time I saw them, it was in Korea a week later.