Day 17 in Japan: Miyajima



Life seems to have happened to us today and I'm out of time, so this will be short. A month ago we went to Miyajima, an island near Hiroshima that is home to the Itsukushima shrine with the famous orange Floating Torii that features on many a screen and fan. We got there by a very long metro train ride through great tracts of suburbia, and then a ferry with many other holiday-makers, many of whom were local families visiting the aquarium on the island. Today, Penny must have said at least 20 times, 'We'll have to go through these photos and get rid of a whole lot of them.' The thing is, the shrine is wonderful, but very hard to capture in a photograph, because the beauty of it is in how way leads on to way -- there's an intricate series of verandahs and small 'guest shrines', to use Johnny Hillwalker's terminology, and all of it floating above the water.



So here's a selection of Penny's photos:

The Floating Torii at high tide when we arrived,



and low tide as we were leaving


The intricacies of the shrine:



Then, because it was there, we rode the 'rope car' up Mount Nisen, over primaeval forest, and went on a long, asthma inducing stroll past spectacular views of the Inland Sea, to a small shrine on top of the mountain, where most of the other visitors seemed to have climbed for similar motives to ours, but people lit incense and at least one woman knelt reading from a scroll in total concentration. There were two parts of the shrine -- one of them contained a fire said to have been burning continuously for many hundreds of years. The eternal flame in the Hiroshima Peace Park Cenotaph was lit from it: it filled its small room with smoke that didn't do my asthma any good at all.



Back at the bottom of the rope car ride we had some lovely slurpy noodles and marvelled at the way the demands of fashion could override other considerations so that a fur hat and ugg boots could seem appropriate for this sweltering day. Up on the mountain, we'd seen more than one pair of elegant high heels negotiating the rocky stairs.


Posted: Wed - October 1, 2008 at 09:54 PM           |

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