Roving Japan

Day 5 Photoset

The rental car place picked us up at 8am sharp, and by 8:30 we were on the road and heading to our first destination of the day, Udo Jinja.

Udo Jinja is built inside a shallow cave on the coast, and like most shrines in Japan, is famous for having some kind of specific blessing. In this case, it is the power to bless women with easy child birth. The old folk story of this shrine is that the rocks represent the breasts of Emperor Jimmu’s mother. The water that gets collected from the cave is called Ochichi-mizu or “Breast Water.” Drinking it will bestow upon you the blessings of the shrine.

If drinking rock boob water isn’t your thing, there are other options. You can pay a dollar to get 5 little clay balls which you throw off a cliff and into a small pool of water. If you can get all 5 into the pool, your wish will come true. I tried, and I only managed 2.5 out of 5.

When we were done at Udo Jinja we decided to go check out the castle ruins in the town of Obi. On paper this was supposed to be a simple case of, “there used to be a castle here, now its a small museum and some old walls. Spend 30minutes and continue on your way.” We didn’t get out of there for 4 hours. Obi is a wonderful little city!

Like Chiran, Obi has a well preserved Samurai neighborhood. Several of the houses are open for viewing, but unlike in Chiran, you can actually go inside these houses. It was really fun wandering the old traditional Japanese houses and trying to picture what each room might have looked like when people lived there. It’s a little hard to guess what a room was used for, since in many cases the rooms are almost all the same size. Was this room a living room or a bedroom? Where did the master sleep? What’s the bathroom like?!

Obi is particularly proud of their most famous resident, Jutaro Komura. I had never heard of him before today, but he was a major player in the rise of Japan on the world stage of politics. He successfully negotiated an end to the Russia-Japanese war, and helped increase ties with America and Great Britain in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. We learned about all of this while wandering around the Komura Memorial Hall. The lady who worked there thought that Risa and I were an interesting couple, so she came over and asked if she could take our picture to put on the Memorial Hall’s website. So without further adieu, I give you our first taste of celebrity! It’s not quite a newspaper article, but its getting closer!

Walking around Obi was a lot of fun, and we were seeing lots of cool Japanese history, but we eventually had to leave. That is, until Risa found out that for $3 we could shoot a traditional Japanese bow and arrow. We couldn’t leave without trying THAT!

We each paid our $3, and the helpful man showed us how to fire this particular bow. The bow we were going to shoot required us to be sitting, and the target was going to be about 30ft away. It sounded easy, but it was actually pretty hard!

The arrows are super long, and when you first load them, the front point bounces around everywhere. You have to be very still, and then just sort of aim with the tip of the arrow and hope you have the right angle. We also weren’t given any arm guards, so the first couple of shots resulted in some nice bruises on the inside of our left forearms as the bow string snapped forward. But once we learned the proper wrist rotation to get the arm out of harms way, the target practice was really fun and much less painful.

In case you are wondering, more of my arrows hit the target, but Risa was the only one to get a bull’s-eye!

Aoshima Jinja was our next stop. Not too much to talk about with this one. Its a pretty shrine that is built on an island next to the town of Aoshima. I guess the Tokyo Giants baseball team visits this shrine before every baseball season to pray for victory.

We are now back in the hotel and doing our laundry. We want to start walking up the coastline tomorrow, but we might end up staying one more day here. I guess we will figure it out in the morning.

Day 4 Photoset

I felt a little guilty about taking a train today. But the blister on my left foot reminded me that we had always intended to occasionally take a bus or train. We are going to spend at least 2 days in Miyazaki, then we intend to start walking up the cost towards Beppu. So the walking will continue!

However, before we start the next walking segment, we need to rest up and enjoy this new area of Kyushu. Rest comes first, so we didn’t do too much today. We checked in to a hotel (another awesome bargain discovered by Risa!), then went to the grocery store across the street where we bought a ton of really awesome food at rock bottom prices.

It’s really hot here, so we sat in the hotel room for a few hours while we waited for the sun to go down a bit. Then we left the hotel and started to explore our new city.

The first things we noticed was all the great little restaurants around our hotel. Besides the amazing grocery store, there were tons of cheap little places with delicious looking local specialties like Chicken Namban, Mehikari, and Reijiru. Our first impression is that we love Miyazaki!

After being impressed by the food selection, we walked down to the river and followed the shore for a while. The river that bisects Miyazaki is huge, and has an amazing path along the shore that includes a mini river, and large open grassy areas. The river seems to be the main place to walk your dog, or go for a run. I can’t say that I blame them. The temperature was perfect, warm but with a cool breeze. We love Miyazaki!

Our dinner tonight was at one of the local places we past by earlier. We ordered the local specialties and were not disappointed. Everything was fantastic! Did I mention that we love Miyazaki?

Tomorrow we are going to rent a car. There are several major attractions south of the city that are considered a “must see” so we are going to see them all! Oh, and I know that there are a couple of you who hear, “rent a car in Japan” and you think of THIS. But in reality, we are getting one of THESE. Sorry to disappoint!

Day 3 Photoset

The wind shifted at some point last night. We went from a pleasant breeze in the evening, to feeling like we were camping on a pig farm by 3 or 4am. The smell was terrible! We both hid in our sleeping bags until first light, then we quickly packed up and started down hwy 2 towards Miyakonojo.

The highway was pretty, and this segment was mostly downhill. In the morning we walked past a house and a lady asked what we were doing. When we told her the plan, she was really surprised and she asked for our names. She thought that maybe she would read about us in the paper. I hope she was thinking we will be in the news, and not in the obituaries.

The highlight of the day came when we spotted a 100yen coin on the sidewalk, which we later used to buy an ice cream cone. Simple pleasures.

Yesterday we were thinking that the campground might be far enough, but we decided today that we would walk all the way to downtown Miyokonojo. When we got to the neighboring city of Takarabe, we stopped for an hour or so at their tourist information building where we spent our time looking up hotels for the night. Risa has gotten very good at finding us good deals, and she did it again! We got ourselves a good deal at a business hotel.

A note about Miyakonojo. Its the biggest city with nothing to do that I have ever seen. Its the biggest city in the Miyazaki prefecture, but it didn’t even warrant high-res satellite photos on google, so that’s got to tell you something. For dinner, we walked all over a 4 block radius and couldn’t find a single ‘real’ restaurant. Everything was Izakaya’s. I know that Izakaya’s can be a lot of fun, but they are generally very expensive, and don’t give large servings. We ended up at an Izakaya and for $20 our dinner was about 6 pieces of beef and 10 pieces of chicken.

After 30km today (and about 75km total so far), I think we are going to take a rest day tomorrow and possibly the day after. Also, now that we know Miyakonojo has virtually nothing to offer, we have decided to use our rest day as a chance to just jump on the train to Miyazaki. Miyazaki is a 2 day walk, or a 1 hour train ride. We are choosing the train.

We’re excited about spending some time in an exciting city. Back in the day, Miyazaki was Japan’s honeymoon hot spot. It’s referred to as Japan’s Hawaii.

Day 2 Photoset

Today was much better than day 1. We left our camp at the shrine outside Kajiki around 6:30 and started down the road to Kirishima. We first followed hwy10 over a little hill, then left it for hwy471. 471 is a nice little walk. We spent the next few hours walking past farms and watching as every farmer in the area was out cutting down overgrown grass and bushes. Seriously, EVERYONE was out cutting grass. We think it might be some kind of special city beautification day.

Kirishima is a small town, not much to talk about there. We walked into the center then followed hwy60 north. The plan was to take a mid day break at an onsen, but when we arrived, the place was closed. Dang!

A ways further north we stopped at another great ramen place specializing in kurobuta (black pig) ramen. I posted the photo on the photostream. Since we were heading into the mountains we needed the energy.

Our idea was to follow the 60 until we can head east on the 2. From there, we would walk until we got the Ookawa campground. We needed to stock up on food, so at the last convenience store on the road we stopped to buy some dinner and breakfast. The nice ladies at the store gave us some free potato chips for our journey!

After following the 60 and making the turn on to the 2, we realized that there was no way we could make it to the campground today. The road was too steep for us and we had already walked like 15 miles. So we decided to stop and camp. We found a great little shrine off the highway that has decent toilets and some running water. I don’t know if the water is safe to drink, but its clean enough to use for a quick towel bath and face wash.

Tomorrow we have about 7 miles to the campground, then another 4 or 5 to Miyakonojo. Depending on the campground, we might stay there tomorrow, or push through to the city and find a hostel or something.

Day 1 Photoset

Our first day on the road was not without problems. It started out fine, albeit a little late. We left the hostel around 8:30 and started walking towards the pier before turning left on hwy 10 and going north.

Along the way, we stopped in at a “Chyambo Mochi” place. The shop keeper was a nice lady and we chatted a bit about the road ahead. Unfortunately hwy 10 has no shoulders and you can’t really walk on it. We decided that since we didn’t really have another option, we would give the road a shot anyway.

Whoops.

Hwy 10 is basically suicide. Constant stream of big trucks and buses driving pretty fast with little or no shoulder for people to walk on. We kept going, but it didn’t take long before it was basically impossible to continue on foot. We stopped at a little neighborhood and talked to an old man about another route, but he explained that the roads up the hill from us were pretty complicated and hard to walk on as well. But we were in luck because there is a bus stop on the hwy right where we were and we should just take the bus to the next town. So, rather than kill ourselves, we jumped on a bus and took it to the city limit of Shigetomi.

From there, we just walked through town to our present location at a shrine outside of the town of Kajiki.

We met one other interesting person today. While eating lunch I was giving Risa a shoulder massage, when a man came over and explained that I was doing it wrong. I needed to put my fingers behind her shoulder blade and move her arm like so. He demonstrated a few times how to do it properly, then also showed me how to stretch her back. We think he might be a chiropractor who happened to walk by, or a crazy old man who likes to give random people messages.