Ordinary weather on holidays. Always a little disappointing, but it's an ever present possibility, and something easily planned around and accommodated. Today was forecast to be raining and quite miserable in all accessible directions from Kyoto today. There are literally thousands of activities we could elect to do comfortably on a rainy day in Japan.

So, naturally, being the experienced Japan travelers that we are, what did we choose to do today? That's right...we chose to travel to an island inhabited by a bunch of wet, frozen deer, and walk around in the pouring rain. Obviously.

It was, in the end a very long and tiring day, and by all rights we should have had a terrible time, but it was a lot of fun.

Miyajima is a small island a kilometer or thereabouts out from the Hiroshima coastline. It is a fairly touristy place, but for very good reason. It is incredibly beautiful. Being named in the top 3 most scenic places in all of Japan from what I've seen is entirely justified, and is no small feat considering the array of scenic wonders this country has to offer.

Knowing that Miyajima is a substantial commute from Kyoto, we set out early.

Upon leaving the apartment, a quick check of the cherry trees near our hotel revealed that as expected, there was still no movement in their blossoming. I'd estimate that Kyoto is still 4 or 5 days away from the buds opening. I don't think we're going to witness it before we leave Kyoto on the 5th April. We're back in Kyoto later in the trip however, so we'll hopefully get to see them in some stage of bloom.

Aside from the odd businessman rushing to get to work, Japan in the early morning is a very quiet, and very different place. We caught the subway in the direction of Kyoto station at around 6:45am, and we had the subway platforms, and the subway itself, all to ourselves.

Kyoto station itself is a different story however. I've never seen Kyoto station uncrowded. From what I've experienced, the sea of humanity occupying Kyoto station fluctuates between "busy" and "insane". In the early morning, is is merely busy, which is very manageable.

Aside from the rain, first setback of the day was "Sorry sir. Shinkansen to Hiroshima all sold out". While this sounds like a show-stopping problem, it isn't as bad as it would seem. It simply means that we weren't able to book reserved seats on the Shinkansen for our journey. Every Shinkansen has a number of non-reserved carriages, which are cheaper for the average commuter, since they don't come accompanied with a heavy seat booking fee. As a result however, the non reserved cars invariably seem to be full.

So after working out which Shinkansen we needed to catch, and which were the non-reserved cars, we visited a variety of stores for some delicious looking bento boxes (a mandatory accompaniment to any bullet train trip) and took our place at the front of the queue of a non reserved car and waited for the train to turn up.

Our plan of attack for this situation is "if you find a spare seat, just sit in it, and we'll sort out who is sitting where once the train is moving". Luckily for us, this wasn't an issue today, and there was a few banks of spare seats which we grabbed, and settled in for the always comfortable bullet train trip to Hiroshima.

The closer we got to Hiroshima, the worse the rain got. Weather reports said 1 to 2mm of rain expected today. No. Unless that was being measured per minute.

But, having come this far, and considering the train rides and ferry trip over to the island was completely covered by our JR passes, we pressed on. A quick stop at the first 7-11 convenience store we came across to purchase umbrellas and plastic ponchos in a desperate and rather ambitious attempt to stay somewhat dry, and we were soon on our way to boarding the ferry over to the island.

I have not been as cold as I was today, since the last time I was in Japan 3 years ago. It was literally freezing. While waiting for the ferry to turn up, we stood on the pier which was almost entirely open to the elements, except for a sad canvas roof. The roof did very little, since the driving rain was being delivered with a considerable tailwind, and as a result was coming in hard...and almost horizontally.

The wind was so cold that, to our amazement the rain was being blown in, hitting the plastic guide barriers we were queuing between, and forming balls of ice before the water could run down to ground level. I could have quite easily scraped up enough ice off the ground to make myself a considerable snow cone if I so desired.

The other amazing thing was, considering the weather, clearly we were not the only idiots around. The ferry port was surprisingly busy. In weather like today, nobody but us should have been stupid enough to undertake an activity like this on a day like today. But no, many hundreds of other people all thought that a sub-zero, rainy windy day would be the perfect day to go an visit an island famous for it's outdoor scenery and nature walks.

Piling onto the ferry, every single person headed for the comfort and protection of the heated indoor areas of the ferry on the upper decks, except for Charlotte and myself. We stayed down below, at sea level, on the vehicle parking level. And I thought the ferry pier was cold, but once we got out into the bay en-route to the island, we had to reassess our definition of the concept of cold. I have a waterproof and fairly warm jacket, which did absolutely nothing. I've trekked through snow in previous trips, but I can't remember feeling cold like I did on the ferry trip across to Miyajima today.

We disembarked and made our way through the ferry terminal, and onto the island itself, for what is now a familiar stroll through the touristy streets of Miyajima's merchant district, towards what is one of the main events of the island...the "floating tori" and the Itsukushima shrine.

The rain did not let up for a single second for our entire journey today. Rain fell, consistently, from the moment we left the apartment this morning, to the moment we returned home tonight. Quite simply, we just accepted the fact that today, if we went outside, we simply got wet. Once we'd accepted that, the day was a lot easier to deal with.

The walk through Miyajima's narrow streets revealed the first mini highlight of the trip. My first encounter with sakura in person. A single tree, with its buds obviously just started to open, standing alone and being completely ignored by the passing tourists. Perhaps I'm just easily amused, but for me this was a significant item ticket off on the Japan bucket-list.

The tourists, and Japanese natives alike seemed more interested in chasing around the few wet, sad and semi-frozen deer that were standing around on the island. We however, have seen deer wandering around on all previous trips, so while Isabelle briefly oohed and aahed over a couple of them, even she too quickly tired of them and diverted her attention elsewhere.
Browsing a few shops on the way through the streets, you could easily spend considerable amounts of cash souvenir shopping. These shop keepers have obviously become very adept at separating visitors from their cash.

Miyajima is also famous for 2 foodstuffs which were out in abundance today. The first is maple leaf shaped taiyaki, which is a waffle-dough cake thing, with a sweet filling inside, like chocolate or vanilla custard, or the ever popular red bean paste. The second popular item is oysters. This region is famous for them and it wasn't uncommon to see portable hibachi grills loaded up grilling huge round shelled oysters almost the size of baseballs on the grill, for around 500 yen each.

We grabbed a selection of the taiyaki's to try, and they were magnificent. The oysters however did not tempt us today. Somehow swallowing a scalding hot bbq'd oyster the size of a computer mouse in the pouring rain did not appeal.

Being cold, not uncrowded, and extremely wet, we made it as far as Itsukushima shrine, before we decided to abort the mission, turn around and return to the ferry port. It was pretty, and the wandering through the shops on the island is always great fun, but not today.
Naturally, the next obvious choice on the way back to the ferry port on a freezing cold day would be ice cream, right? At least we didn't have to queue for this one.

I spotted the familiar sign on the way in, and made a promise to the girls that we would stop there on the way out. Cremia, is an ice-cream developed in Japan using a painstaking trial and error recipe, is billed as one of the best ice-cream's in the world. Every detail, from the origin of the milk and the percentage of milk fat used to make the ice-cream, to the texture and flavour of the cone, was apparently meticulously developed over many, many years until the recipe was perfected.

And the verdict? Honestly, it was good, but given the hype, I was underwhelmed. It was absolutely creamy, and I'll give credit to the cone, which was hands down the best ice cream cone I've ever had, but the ice cream itself wasn't life changingly magnificent like I expected it to be. It was very, very good, but I've had better.

So with daylight getting away from us, not much was left to do but to repeat the morning's travel process in reverse. We caught the ferry back across to the mainland, followed by a train back to Hiroshima station, then, once again we were told that the Shinkansen was completely booked out on the way back to Kyoto, so we again chanced our luck with the unreserved carriages.

While waiting for the shinkansen tickets (or lack thereof) Charlotte was video-ing the making of red-bean filled round taiyaki's across the corridor from the JR ticket office, since it was a pretty interesting process. This shop was ultra popular. The line stretched for 30m or more snaking through the shopping arcade and train station. These things must be good.

One very nice man saw Charlotte video taping the making of these sweets, and added an extra one to his order and got it wrapped separately, and gave it to her to try. For no other reason other than he thought it would be a nice thing to do. She thanked him very much for his generous and thoughtful gift, even though she absolutely hates the sweet red bean paste filling. After trying this on the way home, so do I. I usually like the red bean paste, but this was "coarse" red bean paste. It wasn't paste. It was basically roughly crushed red beans used as filling. It was grainy, beany and horrible. Just unpleasant.

Since we hadn't had lunch we visited the 2nd floor of the "Asse" building attached to Hiroshima station, which is famous across the country for it's array of fantastic Hiroshima style okinomiyaki restaurants in very close proximity to each other. Okinomiyaki, in my experience is a hit and miss dish of a savory "pancake" dish consisting of cabbage, meats, egg, onions and pancake batter fried up, covered in various sauces and mayonnaise, and eaten scaldingly hot straight off the hotplate using a small spatula. Done right, they're delicious. I have had some examples in past trips that were very ordinary examples though.
Unsure whether this was what we all actually wanted to eat, we decided to go and check out what was available, and the restaurant floor very quickly made up our minds for us. All of the restaurants were packed, since it was definitely "hot food, eaten straight off the hotplate indoors" kind of weather, so we had no chance of getting table without a considerable wait.

Luckily, the Asse shopping complex is also home to the single most magnificent food court shopping floor I've ever seen in my life. Every single variety of bento, sushi, fried, baked and otherwise prepared food you could ever imagine, all under one roof. You could visit just this floor of the shopping centre for breakfast, lunch and dinner for a month and still not eat the same kind of meal twice. I was in awe.

So with bento's purchased, we were on our way to the bullet train platform.

As luck would have it...we got on the wrong Shinkansen. The train we got on was going in the right direction, but it only took us as far as Osaka, which is only 3/4 of the required distance. In addition to this, we caught the "Super Express" Shinkansen. Sounds fast right? No, it isn't. My definition of Super Express and the Japanese definition for this train were very different, for this "Super Express" train stopped at literally every single station between Hiroshima and Osaka. As a result, the scheduled time, which should have been around an hour to get to Osaka, was destined to take 3 hours.

After some searching, we planned our attack to rectify our mistake, which was to jump off our current train at an upcoming station, run across the platform and get on a different shinkansen which would be leaving the station a minute after our train arrived. Get this wrong, and we would be left with both trains leaving the station without us on them, and an uncertain wait for the next train to come along. Despite the risks, we pulled off the maneuver with ease, and we were soon settled into a faster and even less crowded shinkansen heading for Kyoto.

At least once a day, Japan does something which blows my mind. We were traveling along, admiring rows of newly flowering cherry blossom trees being covered in light rain, before the train plowed into a tunnel. When we emerged on the other side of the mountain, we were in the middle of a blizzard. Snow was falling quite heavily outside, coating the landscape in a blanket of white. We didn't expect to see snow until much later in the trip, and up in the Japanese alps. Not in the lowlands outside of Hiroshima.

Tomorrow, Charlotte's birthday, is another clean slate. The rain is apparently gone, and there is nothing set in stone on the agenda. We'll probably leave it to her to dictate how she'd like to spend the day. There aren't really any wrong answers considering what we went through today.