Hiroshima

I’ve spent the last couple of days in Hiroshima at two UNESCO World Heritage Sites. They couldn’t have been more different!

The first day was spent on the island of Miyajima. This is quite a famous island in Japan, and is considered holy. There are a heap of shrines and temples.

There are also heaps of really tame deer around. Here’s one nonchalantly wandering along the road.

And some others just hanging out, unfazed by my presence.

I’ve been getting complaints that there aren’t enough photos of me (despite the several hundred daily photos here), so here’s one of me in one of the many roadside mirrors that exist in Japan. Note my white gloves!

The big thing to do on the island is to climb Mt Misen, a 535 metre peak which offers great panoramic views back to Hiroshima and of the surrounding water. There’s a gondola you can take to near the top, but there are also several walking routes. Being cheap and a bit of a tramper back home I decided to climb up. It was quite steep, and especially the descent was hard on the body. Needless to say, my body is much more used to using cycling muscles than walking ones at the moment and today I’m struggling to walk up or down any stairs!
Here’s a bridge on the way up:

Some views from the top:





Looking back to Hiroshima:

On the way down:

The best time to go is at high tide, but I slept in too late and missed it. When the tide is in there’s a Torii and shrine that are surrounded by water so they look like they’re floating.

Before I go on, here’s a nice photo of a river in the city..

The second day (today) was quite different. I visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. This is the memorial to the atomic bombing of the city on August 6 1945.. It was pretty harrowing really, especially the museum which goes into a lot of detail about the immense suffering of the inhabitants of the city. It’s easy to read the history books and analyses that give the reasoning for the bombing that it would save a lot more lives than trying to invade mainland Japan. This rationale seems to make it easier to forget that somewhere in the order of 100,000 people died, and many more suffered terribly in the aftermath of it.

One of the real icons of Hiroshima is the A Bomb Dome, a western style building that was a few hundred metres from the hypocentre of the blast. Because it was so close most of the force was from almost directly above meaning the walls survived the forces better than those who took the force side on. The building had a large dome on it which was destroyed, and everyone who was inside the building died. The remains of the building have been preserved like they were after the explosion as a symbol of the devastation caused.

I also visited the hypocentre, the ground-zero of the explosion where it exploded 600m in the air. It’s a couple of streets over from the park.

There were school children everywhere, especially in the museum. Here are a group of them at the Children’s Peace Memorial.

There’s also a cenotaph and a memorial flame that will keep burning until atomic bombs are no longer a threat to humanity (which might be a while away unfortunately)..

As I mentioned, the museum was intense and harrowing. It’s hard to express in words, but it’s a place as many people should get to as possible.

So yeah, a mixed couple of days. One of hot, sweating walking on a beautiful island, and the other visiting one of modern history’s most harrowing locations.

I booked my ferry to China today, so I’ve got just over a week left in Japan. I’m heading to Nagasaki to get the ferry, and that’s only about 3 days riding! I’ll do another blog post before I leave!