The beach downtown

Ena and I cycled into town to see the seaside Momochi area with its nice beach:
Its a really great place, it took us about an hour of pedalling to get there (all part of the fun)!

The Fukuoka Dome is along the beach too. I'm not a fan of Domes and prefer outdoor baseball stadiums, but I have to admit this one has a great location. Ena found a lot of cute seashells for her collection right in front of it:
Fukuoka Tower is also on the beach:

The water wasn't too cold:

We also had some ice cream:
And we capped it off by walking out onto this concrete breakwater and posing for pictures:


All in all it was a very fun day.

Hisayama

I took a bike ride by myself to Hisayama, a town a few kilometres east of Fukuoka last week. I found this little temple with some cherry blossoms in full bloom:
After that I came across a shrine built in the traditional pre-Chinese influence style nestled in the mountains:
There was a little waterfall next to the shrine:

After that I followed a little mountain road that ran along a small river. It was quite picturesque and there was almost no traffic. The road stopped in an abrupt dead end after several kilometres, which was a shame as I wanted to keep going and going:

At the beach

It was a warm and sunny day today, which resulted in two noteworthy things happening: North Korea was able to launch a ballistic missile over Japan and I finally got the chance to take Ena over to Shikanoshima. It is the latter of these earth shattering events which this post will deal with as I don't have any photos of the missile launch to share.

The water was warm enough to go swimming but we just settled for putting our feet in, given that neither of us brought bathing suits:
The sky was quite clear so we had a good view of the Fukuoka skyline and Nokonoshima.

Ena got to do some beachcombing and found some nice shells to add to her collection:

After spending a few hours on our bikes we returned home to dinner and some very cute cakes I got at the local bakery:

Return to Sasaguri

On Monday it was a nice sunny day so Ena and I biked down to Sasaguri to do a bit more exploring. This was the place that I had stumbled onto while cycling around on my own a couple months ago, its got an 88 temple pilgrimage route through the mountains and thousands upon thousands of little statues that are absolutely fantastic to look at. Just walking around the mountain trails between each of these little temples (none of them except the first one are particularly large) is a really fun experience.

The most famous site at Sasaguri is its reclining Buddha statue, which according to the pamphlet they provide is the largest bronze statue in the world:
Personally I think its a bit garish but given the fact that they don't charge admission I certainly can't complain. Its only about 15 years old and thus not of any historical interest so its not in any guide books. This is Ena with Buddha's toes:



Much more enjoyable though are the mountain trails and country roads that run between the smaller temples on the route. We took one that ran up the mountain to temples #58 and 88 on the route (the numbers of the temples bear absolutely no relation to their location relative to each other). It took us through a beautiful bamboo forest:

There are thousands of Jizo, or small buddhist statues, to be found all over the place in Sasaguri. They are quite cute and photogenic:
We also got to see a lot of cherry trees that were in full bloom:

We got around to about 10 of the temples on the route and I've decided to make it my mission to do the whole 88 by the time we leave. These are some pictures of the typical small Sasaguri temple:

Stairways leading up to Temple #13:

Ena in front of Temple #13:
The alter in Temple #31:
Inside Temple #58:
A little statue with some pilgrim's sandals at Temple #72:

Genkai Nada beach

On Friday afternoon we biked over to Wajiro on a whim to see what the coastline was like over there. It turns out there is a nice sandy beach that runs for kilometres and has some great views:

The beach is covered with lots of interesting things. We found this starfish:
It started running away- very slowly - when Ena touched it so after we followed it around for a little while we decided to leave it alone.

The beach was also littered with hundreds of these:
If you can't tell what that is, it is the corpse of a blowfish ("fugu" in Japanese). These are well known as delicacies in specialized restaurants, though they have to be prepared by a properly certified chef as the blowfish contains poison that is lethal to humans and an amateur chef might not know what part to take out before serving it.

I don't know why there were hundreds of dead blowfish on the beach, I guess that is just where they go when they die. These ones were porcupine-type blowfish with spikes all over their body that stick out when they inflate their bodies, allowing them to do serious damage to any predator that tried to eat them.

There was also a reasonably attractive stretch of rocky coastline:
Lots of people were out collecting shellfish along this part of the coastline. The island visible in the far distance is Ainoshima, which has a small village, some ancient ruins and some attractive natural scenery on it. There is a ferry that runs out there irregularly, I think this summer we'll hop on and spend a day out there.

Cherry blossoms in Fukuoka

On one of the last days of my parent's visit my dad and I went into Ohori/ Maizuru park in Fukuoka to look at the cherry blossoms. The ruins of Fukuoka castle are in the park. There isn't much left of the castle except the stone walls, but its got loads of cherry trees and good views from the top of the city.

The cherry trees spread out over a wide area. The bits of blue you can see under the blossoms are tarps that people having hanami parties are sitting on:
This is a view of Fukuoka Tower and the Momochi area from the site of the former main tower of the castle:

Cherry trees lining the top of one of the castle walls:
We also stopped in a Japanese garden by Ohori Koen which was quite pretty:

Mount Aso

During our trip to Kumamoto we also made a side trip to Mount Aso, which is (by some measure) the world's largest volcano. It isn't particularly high (about 1500m) but the caldera is massively wide and has five active peaks, one of which we went to the top of via a cable car.

The water pooled in the peak is boiling on the surface and more than a thousand degrees deeper down, so it is quite dangerous. It also spews out poisonous gas and the peak is routinely closed due to this. We were lucky in that it wasn't too bad ont he day we visited and it was a clear day so we got a pretty good view of the crater. As indicated by my facial expression it was pretty dangerous though:
According to the guide book there have in fact been numerous fatalities among tourists at the top due to mini eruptions, one of which destroyed the previous cable car to the top and killed a dozen people in it. They built these concrete bunkers for everyone to hide in if the thing blows its top during tourist season:
The smell at the top of sulpher was overpowering:
I can add volcanoes to the list of things that Ena looks cute standing in front of: