Miyajima Island

Then I found the ferry terminal and bought a ticket. I think only 400yen for a round-trip ticket. The trip only took about 15 minutes and you were there. I pushed past the crowd as I was walking about super speeds to cover all I want to see before my train was to leave himeji at 6:20. The dear are the first thing you see and at first it is really cool. They are everywhere. They are here and not bothered as they are believed to be messengers of the gods. You can buy stuff for 150yen to feed them but then they will follow yo forever. They are friendly and can pet them too. Then I went to visit the Torii shrine or floating shrine. Except it wasn’t floating as it was low tide and you can walk out to it, although through pools of water, but luckily for me I had my cool Teva mandals! :) It was REALLY impressive. The fact they built this hundreds of years ago with the tools they had. The Island was once sacred and no outsiders could visit. If they did they had to take their boats through the gate. That how big it was. I took many pics as this was the one place in Japan I most wanted to visit.


I also saw a shrine that it said in my book was neat. I saw a large tour group going in and sort of blended in as best I could since they were all Japanese and old. I walked past the ticket takers since she thought I was with them I guess. It was OK. Their was a marriage going on. I guess in high tide the water comes right up to it but not so much during my visit. I then was off to take the cable car up Mt. Misen to see the view. Its supposed to be great and there’s many monkeys at the top. I walked about a mile to the base and the a sign said, "No rope way, wind blow hard". That sucked, so I found a big pagoda and checked that out then walked through a tourist shopping center and then relaxed and ate some peanuts buy the water. Great view and great weather. A deer walked up and would not leave em alone until he got some peanuts. He ate them quickly and sat next to me. He was cute!

Then I boarded the ferry and headed back to the train station to get to Hiroshima station to catch the train to himeji. I bought the cheapest ticket again as I knew my plan would work sometime. It was SUCH a long ride home. And I was SOOO tired and my Ipod was dead. I had to listen to Japanese conversations for 4 hours. No fun to eavesdrop that way. I got to Himeji and told the lady I lost my ticket. She asked where I came from and I said 2 stations down.. Only 400yen! I saved 35$. I had to because I only had 8 $ left at the end of the day. It was 1:45 at night and I was exhausted. As a as side note, they do not accept US $ anywhere in Japan. And all the trains stop at midnight and begin at about 5:30. They use the time in between to clean and inspect all the tracks. In all Japans history of the trains they have never had an accident. Good to know....