Adventures in Miyajima - Super Birthday Edition!!!

Exciting day! Thusly, long post (or, more precisely, 3 posts, because of all the pictures!) Ok, so yesterday I mentioned that I was planning to head down to Miyajima finally, and this time I got around to actually doing it. For those of you that don't know, Miyajima is one of Japan's "3 top views", which is a list given by some guy a long time ago, kind of like the ancient wonders of the world. It's famed for it's "floating torii". I'm not sure of the exact details, but from what I've read, the island was considered an island of god back in the day, and regular folk weren't allowed on it, so they made a temple and torri in the water (at least during high tide) for people to pray. That's all I really knew about the island going in.

To begin this morning, I got a one day streetcar/ferry pass. It lets you take any streetcars and the Miyajima ferry as many times as you want for the day. Miyajima is the farthest stop on the longest streetcar line, but it was an interesting to see more of the suburbs and residential parts of Hiroshima. Once there, I got on the ferry and floated my way across to the island.

(This is looking back the way we'd come from the ferry.)


Miyajima has all these rocky outcrops and tons of little shrines and temples and statues all over the place. The combination is quite striking. I didn't really know where I was going or what I was doing, just kind of wandering and checking things out.

Another interesting point - there's deer EVERYWHERE in Miyajima. The roads are almost all strictly pedestrian, and the deer just wander along with the people. The energetic ones would follow anybody with a bag hoping for treats, but most were content to just curl up and nap wherever they could find some shade.

Yay rickshaws. I just thought it was neat because the guy had all the traditional clothes and hair. The contrast between the rickshaw and the old woman with the walker wasn't intentional, but I'm going to pretend it's some meaningful comment on society.

Part 2 coming shortly!