Torii at Sea

Today will be our last day in Fukuoka. And that also means we are entering our final leg of the trip. And from here we will be travel halfway across the country back to Tokyo. This will be a 6 hour train ride with a transfer inbetween. It's going to be a doozy.

Thankfully yesterday the gang decided to do something a bit more relaxing and did a day trip to Hiroshima. Kathleen and Marise split off from the rest of us while we took the shinkansen to the city of Hiroshima. There we decided to make the island of Itsukushima as our main focus as we had skipped it last trip.

The island was a place where the original adventurers had visited on our first time 4 years ago but at the time we had crammed it into the very end of our Hiroshima visit that time. Which resulted in us rushing through the island.

On the island we visited the main attraction, the Itsukushima Shrine. Famous for the floating Torii gate, the location is known as a holy shinto ground. At low tide, one is able to walk up to the giant Torii gate but on both our trips we had only visited during high tide. The Shrine itself is also home to a famous Noh Theatre where plays are done throughout the year.

After going through the shrine, the group decided it was time to eat all street vendor food the area can off. So we went through the souvenir street where all the shops sold some sort of merchandise that tourists overpay for. There we would end up eating oysters, famous manjus, famous manjus that are deep fried, sweet potato ice cream, Hiroshima Cola and matcha ice cream cornets. I'm surprised we were still hungry afterwards.

From there we took the ferry back to the main island and journeyed back to the are of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. While the Peace Memorial has been a highlight in our previous trips, we have decided to pass on the Memorial this time around. The reason we went back is to hunt down the great Hiroshima Okonomiyaki restaurant we found last time.
Nagata-ya differed from the other okonomiyaki restaurant as they cooked the pancakes for us. Aside from that it served the okonomiyaki pancakes Hiroshima style which means instead of lettuce the pancakes were instead made with soba or udon noodles. We hunted this restaurant down as it offered an indepth vegetarian options that allowed Colin and Ambernay to eat their fill.

Once we had our fill, we decided to mill about in the area before going back home to the airbnb. It gave us the opportunity to take some really nice shots of Hiroshima Atomic Dome at sunset.

I'll end today's entry here as we will be leaving soon. From here on I believe we will be spending our last day doing the most touristy thing, buying ALL THE SOUVENIRS.