Hiroshima to Nagasaki

Friday, 4th April, 2014.

After visiting the Hiroshima Museum and Peace Park, we walked back past the colourful shops to our ryokan to collect our luggage.

 

Here are Carol and Kazuko walking on ahead while Frances and I trail along behind taking pictures.

 

Uniformed workers weeded the footpath, keeping everything clean and tidy.

 

We said goodbye to Kazuko and our host and hostess at the ryokan, took a streetcar to Hiroshima, then a shinkansen (bullet train) towards Nagasaki.  We had to change onto a non-bullet train at the very cold and windy station of Shintosu, but the train was still very comfortable.

Here is our shinkansen arriving at Hiroshima station.

The scenery between Hiroshima and Nagasaki was often very beautiful.  Imagine a combination of hills sprinkled with cherry blossom trees, vivid green rice fields, pretty villages and lots of bright blue sea.  Sometimes we would be directly over the sea on one side of the train, with a steep hill on the other side, as the train hurtled along a narrow ribbon of track at the base of a mountain which fell into the sea.

 

After arriving at Nagasaki station, we followed very clear instructions to reach our hostel, e.g. “Take the only street without a tram track.”  (Street names in Japan are rarely marked, and I’ve only seen one so far in English). 

Just before our hostel, we came across the first tulips I’d seen so far on the trip – a vivid splash of colour.

 

For dinner that night we had a local Chinese-inspired dish called champon, a bit of a mixture of seafood, maybe chicken, vegetables and noodles.