Hiroshima and Fukuoka

We spent a good few hours in the Peace Memorial Museum on our first morning in Hiroshima. This covers the bomb dropped on Hiroshima and the aftermath. It’s hard to write about this, but it was very harrowing. I think the museum did a good justice to a difficult topic. It probably goes something towards describing it by saying that it was one of the busiest museums I’ve been in, but you could have heard a pin drop nonetheless.

We lightened up later in the afternoon by visiting Shukkeien gardens. These were nice. There were nice views and a surprising number of crabs, including this happy fellow:

In the evening we walked to the A-Bomb Dome (the preserved shell of a building destroyed by the bomb) and the Peace Memorial park.

We went to Miyajima on the next day. This is an island just off the coast of the mainland with a shinto shrine and a mountain. We didn’t have time to climb the mountain, and the iconic gate for the shrine was under construction. Nonetheless, it was a nice to wander round the island and enjoy the amazing views back to the mainland. We came back and watched some rugby in the evening.

We had planned to travel to the Kumano Kodo trail again, but once again we had to cancel. This time, the storm was brewing in my corneal epithelium. I’d been visiting an eye clinic in Hiroshima the last couple of days but I still needed further treatment, so we opted to stay nearby instead. We planned to do a shorter trip to Fukuoka the next day. With an extra day in Hiroshima at short notice we went for a walk in the town, including a short hike up a hill.

We explored Fukuoka town the next day, starting with some temples and then heading to a gallery dedicated to Asian modern art. One of the temples was the home of both soba and udon noodles in Japan (they came from China), which was suitable marked my a monument. I really liked the gallery in particular, which had a lot of things that were new for me. In general, I liked Fukuoka quite a lot. It probably helped that we got a great pizza in a branch of Pizzeria Da Michele that night.

On our other day in Fukuoka, we hiked up a mountain nearby. This day was a national public holiday (the enthronement day for the new emperor), so there were quite a few locals on the trail as well. We climbed two peaks and as usual got some great views.

The next day we went back to the eye clinic in Hiroshima, and luckily I got sign-off to continue with the holiday. We went on to Osaka after that, where we would fly out from two days later. That left one day spare in Osaka, which seemed like the perfect opportunity to visit Spa World. Suitably relaxed, we flew over to Seoul the next day.