The morning after my massive walk around Kyoto, I was naturally pretty tired - but no rest for the wicked. Overnight the weather had turned for the worse and it was really bucketing down outside - and the train station was quite a long way away. The guy at the hostel suggested I bus it back to the station, so a short wander up the road to the bus stop and 150 yen later I was back at the train station and on my way to Hiroshima.
I'm not going to add any commentary about Hiroshima itself, I'm pretty sure everyone knows its history. All I'll say is that I had one hell of a rush trying to pack as much of the place into one brief afternoon.
As I've mentioned earlier, I didn't really plan this trip all that well - there are a lot of things I'd do differently now. If I had any single regret about my trip to Japan it's that I didn't get enough time at Hiroshima. I was very lucky that the hostel I was staying at was so close to the Peace Park so I managed to see quite a bit of this area.
Without a doubt the most impressive sight here was the A-Bomb Dome, but there were also quite a few different shrines to the many different people who died here. It's a sobering area to walk around. I can't help the feeling that some of the psychopaths who are in power of the various governments around the world could do worse than spend an afternoon here so they can see first-hand the unnecessary pain they inflict upon ordinary people.
Sorry, that's as political as I plan to get. Back to the action.
With the light starting to fade, I walked as fast as I could up to Hiroshima Castle to take a look here. This place was originally built in the 16th Century and was destroyed by the atomic bomb. The recreation was completed in 1958 and is now a museum.
It's a really nice area here and the castle outside is quite impressive, but by now I was starting to have a bit of Temple/Shrine/Castle burnout. I took a bit of a walk around the streets for a while, but I was still pretty tired from the day before so I decided to head back to the hostel for the night.
The next day has already been fairly well documented already, but I'll cover it briefly again - I caught the Shinkansen from Hiroshima to Osaka and managed to check into the wrong hotel. What I haven't talked about yet is my extreme regret that I didn't just skip Osaka completely and stay in Hiroshima for another night.
While I was at the hostel, a couple of the other people staying there were planning a trip in the morning to Miyajima - which, I'd been told by another traveller, is considered one of the three most beautiful areas in all of Japan. Rather than spending a tranquil day looking at these fantastic sights, instead I was stuck in yet another city - but this time, it didn't appear to have any of the redeeming features of Tokyo or Kyoto.
Osaka is the only place I stayed that I didn't enjoy. Mistaken hotel incident aside, I found the place dirty, smelly and generally unpleasant. It was also the only place in my entire trip where I actually felt threatened by any of the locals - everywhere else I only ever felt welcome. I went for a walk after I'd checked into the correct hotel, but by this time it was dark and I was nowhere near any of the sights worth visiting.
Thankfully, the next day I was heading back to Tokyo - which I did as early as possible. Along the way, the Shinkansen travelled past Mt. Fuji so I took the time to take as many pictures as I could.
That's about all there is to tell really. After this, I took the Narita Express back to the Airport and stayed overnight in yet another hostel, then in the morning caught my flight to London via Frankfurt.
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