Matsuyama to Himeji

Had another great bath this morning (I'm finishing this Monday morning so the tenses are a little mixed up and I don't have time to make everything uniform, sorry) then our group met for a sit-down breakfast in the same room where we had dinner last night. This was a change from our usual breakfast buffet so I was looking forward to something different and it was very good. I've bored you with too much food talk so won't spend time on this breakfast other than to say it was like a mini-kaiseki which we enjoyed very much and it got us off to a good start on the sightseeing for the day.

As we boarded the bus three of the girls who had taken care of our group were at the curb waiting to see us off. They (and the manager) stayed there bowing and waving as we drove out of sight.

A large ceramic devil (oni) wishing us well and inviting us again.

Before lunch we stopped to visit an old shrine featuring a camphor tree said to be three thousand years old. When I see an old tree like this I imagine the stories it could tell if able. Perhaps one day technicians will be able to extract and isolate the images and maybe even words impressed into the wood by passing samurai and ninja as the tree observed them over the years. Sounds crazy but who would have thought we could do the amazing things we now do with DNA.

Lunch at a nearby restaurant was a self-grill with tasty seafood and veggies.

3,000 year old camphor tree

Shrine goers buy fortunes and tie them on trees for
notice by the gods.

We traveled the famous shimanamikaido (string of bridges connecting Shikoku and Honshu Islands) this afternoon. After the first three bridges we stopped to visit the Ikuo Hirayama Museum of Art. As a child Hirayama-san survived the Hiroshima bombing and that experience combined with his experiences growing up on an island in this area helped shape his life's work. I especially liked his renditions of the camel caravans on the old Silk Road.

After a 90-minute visit we crossed the rest of the bridges to Onomichi where we boarded the Kodama bullet train for Himeji.  While we were in the station a couple of express bullet trains came through at near their top speed of 200 mph. It seemed like they were traveling around 350 mph as they blew through the station. The shinkansen trains are able to run at 275 mph but their schedules call for them to travel at 200 or less.

Our train, although fast, made several stops between Shin-Onomichi and Himeji so is considered a local.

The Japanese mass transportation system does a good job of moving people. Not counting air transport there are the bullet trains (shinkansen) that connect the large cities, the local shinkansen that connect to the smaller cities along the route, the express surface trains that connect main stations not served by the shinkansen, local milk run trains that connect the smaller stations and finally the buses that serve areas surrounding all the stations. And, of course, there are the subways in the larger cities, although many of them are local trains that work underground in the larger cities and then surface once they get out where there is more room.

Traveling by bullet train gives a certain observational advantage since most of the tracks are elevated so we could see things not normally seen from the roadway.

From the bus I had seen banks of solar panels but from the train I could see there were many more. Probably a quarter of the houses and more than fifty percent of business had solar panels on south-facing roofs and I  even saw fields (admittedly Japanese size) dedicated to rank on rank of such panels. However after we left the islands of the Inland Sea I didn't see wind farms again. Speaking of utilities, almost all Japanese houses have a solar water heater on the roof. A good idea although I'm not sure how they would work in Seattle where we have clouds a good part of the year.

We arrived at Himeji without incident and checked into another of the Nikko Hotel chain. No ofuro tonight so I'll just have to suffer through a regular shower.