Day 75 - Torii

If our 7am wake up time was ambitious to start with, getting home two hours prior to that made it an impossibility. As a result, we decided to delay our plans to visit Hiroshima until after our trip to Naoshima and spend the morning in Kyoto, before heading to the artsiest island in Japan. Feeling surprisingly fresh due to a rare “phantom hangover”, we grabbed another excellent breakfast at the Apprivoiser cafe before heading to the Fushimi-Inari temples, which Michelle had told us we had to visit before we left.

The hilly trek through the thousands of red torii, each donated by a Japanese business towards Inari (the god of rice), was refreshing and just about challenging enough to get our legs warmed up for the Kumano Kodo trail, which we will partly tackle in about a week’s time. The different shrines and temples (which we have started referring to as “shremples” to avoid the need to differentiate the two) were actually quite similar and, as we were starting to worry about our logistically complicated trip to Naoshima, we stuck to the one at the top of the mountain and breezed past the others.

The bullet train from Kyoto to Okayama was absolutely rapid, sticking to a speed of 199kph for the majority of the way while Pete and I played estimation whist, a card game that would later become very popular amongst the guests at our Airbnb for the night. After arriving in Okayama, we quickly transferred across on to a bus to the Uno port and about ten minutes after arriving there we were on a ferry to Naoshima. Despite the quick transfers we still missed our rendezvous with Yoshio, our Airbnb host who also acted as the boatman that was going to ferry us across to the smaller island of Mukaejima, a few hundred metres east of Naoshima. As he asked us to grab dinner in the main island and then meet him at 9pm we did so at a very cool American-themed diner before catching the bus to meet him.

The Airbnb we are staying at was one of the few options still available when we decided to attempt a last-minute trip to Naoshima, and we mostly decided to book it because we were too amused by the description to pass up on the opportunity to stay there - our favourite bit is the warning that “the house is not clean because old”, which has led us to start using the justification “because old” for pretty much anything that comes our way. As it turns out, and in comparison with most other places I have stayed at on this trip, the house is clean and modern enough for our standards and we spent a pleasant evening in the common room, surrounded by art books and Japanese movie posters and playing estimation whist with our fellow guests - a Spanish family who lives in Singapore and two middle-aged Brits. Russell ran away with the win following the zero-trick strategy, which is built on the principle that it is easier to throw a good hand than to win a bad one. I guess you cannot replace a good dose of experience…

Cheers,
J-Wowww