15.07.
So, as we've got quite an action packed week ahead (we've now got our JR rail cards so have planned to zooooooomm around the country on the bullet trains), we thought we'd update the blog every couple of days, saying whats we've been up to.
Yesterday, we headed to Amanohashidate, and got off to a good start getting to the station early for our train, this lead us to foolishly believe that if we caught the eariler Shinkansen (bullet train) we'd be ahead of ourselves all day...WRONG! We stopped at every station and after 5mins we watched in horror as our train whooshed past!
Having missing our connection, we finally arrived in Amanohashidate about an hour later than we'd planned, but as normal (with any of the Staffords) walked at a amazingly quick pace to draw back the time we'd lost! Amanohashidate is a large spit of sand (approx 4kms) connecting two parts of the same town. So we walked across the spit in the wind and rain (obviously the after effects of Typhoon Manyi) and made it to the far side. After a quick ride up the fernicular railway, we did what every tourist is supposed to do and put out heads between our legs (we haven't lost the plot completely, you're supposed to do it for some reason - but the reason wasn't given in English!!). After the excitement of that was over, we had some Japanese curry (a favourite lunchtime meal for us) and ran to catch out ferry/train.
We then headed for Kobe, arrived just in time to go out for the local dish of the day, Pizza with clingfilm, which earnt us a massive 50p reduction, for a minute I thought they would charge extra!!!
16.07.
Waking up nice an early, catching breakfast and a bus all before 10am we had a fairly easy trip to Naruto, across Awaji island...crossing the world`s longest suspension bridge on our way! How very exciting!
Naruto Strait is basically so narrow and the tide so quick that it creates massive whirlpools underneath the bridge. We took a boat out to see them - quite a daunting thought, but it actually didn`t move that much at all, except when the caption was swinging us around to see the whirlpools! They were quite impressive, up to 20m diameter sometimes!
By 12noon we were all done only to notice there was no bus stop on the other side of the road - flipping typical!! So this involved a trek through Naruto-Koen (park) to the town, where there was a bus in about 1hr30!! We took the opportunity to go for a quick paddle in the sea, but weren`t impressed when the driver told us we would have to pay gbp20 for the bus back (it was free with our JR passes on the way.....). Not happy AT ALL!!
We did (eventually) arrive back in Kobe at goodness knows what time after we left. Had a little sleep and then had a spare of the moment trip to Kyoto for the evening on the Shinkansen....very nice indeed!
