We were up early the next morning at 6am, and out on the hotel bus to catch the 8am train back to Nagoya. Our previous trip up to Takayama had been in bright sunshine but this morning the clouds were low and it was drizzling in the hills. The forecast thunderstorm the night before hadn’t hit Takayama – or we might have been too tired to notice – but the rivers were up from two days previously. Not a lot but enough to add a bit of spice to the trip.
Our tour notes had stated that we would need to make two changes on our way to Hiroshima, one at Nagoya and one at Shin-Osaka. Before we’d left home we had accessed a Japanese website, Hyper Dia, which gave us print-outs of the various train schedules around the trips we had planned. That site had stated we could go directly from Nagoya to Hiroshima without a change, our preferred option given our luggage. A check at the JR desk at Takayama and we were told we would have to change, and then a check of the train information boards at Nagoya showed the direct route. We opted for the simplest approach and got to Hiroshima without any difficulty at all: 695 kilometres in 292 minutes.
Our hotel in Hiroshima was attached to the main station which made transferring an easy problem to overcome. By this time Robyn’s big suitcase had one wheel pointing almost sideways and was therefore next to useless. I was basically dragging the thing across the floor most of the time. There wasn’t a lot we could do about this except put up with it, so a short drag to the hotel – through a station being heavily renovated – was appreciated. The Hotel Granvia Hiroshima was the best of the hotels we had been in so far but the triple room was rather tiny, practically filled by the three beds in a row. We hadn’t planned anything for the first afternoon as we weren’t sure how tired we would be when we arrived or even when we would actually get there. But we decided to wander out from the hotel to have a look around and found a tourist bus – one of those that stops in a regular route around the city and allows you to jump on and off as required – right outside the hotel and which was covered by our Japan Rail Pass. We jumped on and got off at the Atomic Bomb Dome, a major spot which was directly under the bomb blast in August 1945.
Atomic bomb dome
Robyn reads the description
Memorial for children
We were feeling rather lazy so we just wandered around the Peace Park for the bulk of the afternoon, had a look at the Hiroshima Castle and took the tourist bus back to the hotel by the long route. We tried a Japanese pancake, the local specialty, for dinner. Will thought it was rather bland but Robyn and I enjoyed ours.
Cooking pancakes
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