Dazaifu

It was a really nice, sunny Sunday today so Ena and I rode our bikes all the way down to Dazaifu, the ancient capital of Kyushu. I cycled down there by myself last fall, but Ena has been pretty excited to give her new bicycle a spin so we made the big trip.

It is actually not a particularly nice bike ride to get to Dazaifu, through a lot of ugly urban sprawl, but once you get there it is a great place to go for a bike around.

We stopped at the ruins of the old government headquarters from the 7th century, its in a really beautiful setting with a lot of trees and flowers:
There isn't much left of the buildings, just the foundation stones. Ena thought the lotus flowers were the best part:

After that we went to the two neighboring temples, which are really nice and also date from the 7th century. Because they are a bit off the beaten path they get spared the crush of the tourist buses that hit the main shrine in town and are pretty pleasant, quiet places even on a beautiful Sunday:
Our bikes out front:
We also stopped at a little hilltop shrine:
After that we went into central Daziafu and stopped at Komyozenji, a really beautiful little Zen temple with one of the most beautiful gardens I have ever seen. Its a pretty quiet place despite being in central Dazaifu and you can just sit and enjoy the tranquil garden:
Wouldn't you like to have a room with a view like this in your home:

One of my favorite things about Dazaifu is that everywhere you go there are these tremendous ancient camphor trees with massive trunks. Some of these must be close to a thousand years old. This is Ena in front of one of the bigger ones:
We made an obligatory stop by the main shrine, Dazaifu Tenmangu, which was packed with people. I really like the gate to the shrine:
Through which you can see the main building at the other end of a big courtyard:
This guy is in the gate's guardhouse:
There are some picturesque arched bridges on the way in to the shrine:
After a day cycling around Dazaifu we came back to Fukuoka and decided to have dinner in town. We stopped by Canal City, which we hadn't been to in a while. We went in through an entrance we hadn't used before and saw something really cool: 200 TVs displaying a bunch of random crap:
And we had a camera, AND we had sunglasses! Oh the fun we had posing for pictures:
Great way to end a great day!

Iki Island Part 2

(Continued from Part 1)

We began the second day of our trip early, having breakfast at the hotel and then heading off to explore the southern part of the island. The weather was a bit cloudy, but still warm and the forecast didn't call for any rain. Our intention was to stick to the coastal road and follow the southern coast all the way to the eastern part of the island, which is where some of the best beaches in Japan are reputed to be (and which are the island's main draw in the summer).

Once again our journey took us through some really lovely countryside:
We came across a number of small cattle farms. These black cows are another thing the island is noted for:
Country roads in Japan often have makeshift wood stands where locals sell their produce. These operate under the honor system and you just drop the money in a box. We bought a bag of oranges from one for 100 yen and stopped at "dolphin nose", a prominent cape (shaped like a dolphin nose) with a lighthouse on it, to eat them:
We then swung down to the small fishing village of Haze, which has some really nice cliffs and spectacular views of the coastline:
After that our plan to make it all the way to the beaches on the eastern side of the islands kind of came off the rails. We didn't realize it when we started out but after leaving Haze the coastal road we were on turned into an uphill stretch for a few kilometres that basically took us from sea level to the highest point on the island. In addition to leaving us completely exhausted (we walked our bikes up most of the way), this also ate into a lot of our time. Once again I found myself cursing the Lonely Planet guide and wondering if its authors had ever even been to this island. Mindful of our need to catch the last ferry back to Fukuoka at 5:45PM, when we reached a fork in the road near the highest elevation, we decided to take the one that led us back to town instead of trying to force our way to the beaches.

This area had some nice views too, which we were able to appreciate after taking a little rest:
There was a little viewpoint at the official "highest point" on the island, which also offered some good views:
On the way down we passed by the Matsuo Kofun, an ancient burial mound more than 1500 years old. There are more than 200 of these burial mounds on the island, an indication of its importance in ancient times when Kyushu was the centre of Japanese civilization. It kind of reminds me of something out of the Shire in the Lord of the Rings:
Remembering her experience at the Kurozaki gun battery, Ena refused to enter the kofun with me:
After that we were back in town. We ended up with some time to spare before the ferry left so we wandered around a bit. The town had an almost deserted feel to it, I'm not sure if its always like that. We stopped at this souvenir shop to buy some stuff:
After that we got to talking about how nice it would be to settle down in a pleasant, sleepy town like this. Surrounded by pretty nature and the laid back lifestyle, it would be fun to run your own business or something. We came up with this great idea to open a girl bar with a really flamboyant, flashy exterior and give it some outlandish name like "Bitch". We got really excited about this and were starting to jot some preliminary plans down on paper when we discovered that someone had already beaten us to it:
So our hopes were kind of dashed, but we'll try to find something else to do.

We had a bite to eat at a cafe with a less colorful name and then headed over towards the ferry terminal, taking some last pictures in town on the way:

After buying our ferry tickets we stood on the pier and waited for our chariot to arrive and whisk us back to Fukuoka:
On board we took a seat outside on the stern of the ship (yes, I did look that nautical term up so I wouldn't look stupid saying "the back of the ship") so we could watch the sunset:

They were great seats and as the ship steamed for home we watched as Iki island slowly faded into the distance in front of the setting sun:
A little over two hours later the lights of Fukuoka welcomed us back and we were home again:
It was a really great trip, one of the best we have had in a long time. Hopefully we'll get to take some more on the weekends this spring and summer.

Iki Island Part 1

Golden Week has officially come and gone, and everybody in the country has returned to their regular lives after the long holiday. Ena and I spent the last two days of our Golden Week taking a 2 day trip to Iki Island in the Japan sea.

Iki island is, along with Tsushima, one of two major islands in the sea between Korea and Japan. Tsushima is closer to Korea, while Iki is closer to Japan. Both can be reached by ferry from Fukuoka and as this was our first trip we chose the closer of the two this time round.

We had a really great time. Taking the ferry is a lot of fun, and ideal for cyclists like us as you can just ride your bike on and off at both ends. As soon as we got on board we ran up to the upper deck where we could sit outside and enjoy the view:
We got seats right at the front of the ferry, which had the best view but wasn't very popular with the other passengers, presumably because of how windy it was:
The weather was warm and sunny, with the daytime high being 27. The only problem was that the region was getting hit by a "yellow sand" event. These events are one of the problems associated with living close to China. Basically, sandstorms thousands of miles away in the Gobi desert scour sand off the desert floor and send it up to the atmosphere. If the prevailing winds are right (which they sometimes are in the spring) this sand gets blown across China and Korea and eventually hits Kyushu, albeit by the time it reaches us it has been dilluted a fair bit.

These are naturally occuring events, but they have become a major environmental problem in recent years for two reasons. One is that the desert is getting a lot bigger in China thanks to poor land use, meaning these events occur a lot more often than they used to. The second is that Chinese industry spews vast amounts of poison into the air (you may remember this being a big point of concern when Beijing hosted the Olympics), which tends to stick to the sand. So when the sand settles back to earth it is carrying all sorts of toxic stuff with it. Fortunately it is mostly dilluted by the time it hits us, so the health effects aren't too bad (though we do get occasional yellow sand warnings on the TV news when people are recommended to stay indoors). Korea gets it a lot worse and is a major bone of contention between them and China (which refuses to acknowledge that its industrial emissions have effects beyond its borders). This is what the storms look like from space:
Anyway, the reason I'm talking about this is because we were getting hit by one of these things as we departed, and we pretty much remained under the haze for the whole trip. This is the view of Hakata Bay as our ferry left the port:
The two islands visible on the left and right are actually extremely close to the ship but can barely be seen due to the yellow sand.

Fortunately however the air remained breathable and this turned out to be the only "bad" thing to happen on our trip.

The ferry ride took just under two and a half hours and despite the haze we had some really nice views:
The haze sort of made the trip more interesting as islands would slowly emerge from it in the middle of the calm sea as we passed them by:
Eventually in the far distance the outline of a large island came into view and we knew we were almost at our destination:
The ship sailed around the southern part of the island and then made the turn around the southwestern point and came into port at Gonoura, the town we would be staying at:
We rode our bikes off the ferry and went straight to the hotel (a big, ugly "resort" hotel that I couldn't bear to take a picture of) where we dropped off our stuff. We then stopped at a supermarket, bought some stuff to eat for lunch and began to explore the island.

We had a map we got on the ferry and decided to head towards Saruiwa, a big rock shaped like a monkey that was about halfway up the island, 13km from town. As soon as we left the town we were surrounded by beautiful countryside. Within about 15 minutes we came across a really pretty inlet and decided to stop and have a snack:
After that the quiet little road that we were riding along (Iki shima only has a population of 30,000 or so spread across 138 square kilometres, so pretty much all the roads are quiet with very little traffic) turned into the mountains.

At this early stage in the trip I realized that the Lonely Planet Guidebook, which had described Iki Island as "flat and ideal for cycling" is nothing but a pack of lies. Our entire two day trip was mostly spent going up and down some extremely hilly and often times quite steep country roads, with virtually no flat stretches. Fortunately though the scenery was fantastic and we enjoyed the extra exercise this provided us with.

The first major hill we went up had a little roadside viewpoint at the top, from which we could look down on the inlet where we had earlier stopped for snacks:
Ena felt an extreme sense of accomplishment at having made it up there on her little old bike:
The road took us through an un-ending stretch of pretty countryside with so many pretty vistas of mountain scenery with farmers fields overlooking the island-dotted sea below that I eventually stopped bothering to take pictures of them. To be surrounded 360 degrees by attractive scenery for such a long time is a rarity in Japan, where there is almost always at least one massive eyesore in site at any given time. It was a really nice change:
After a lot of hard biking through the pretty countryside we finally arrived at the Monkey rock, which lived up to its name:
Ena thought there might be some resemblence and took this photo for later examination:

We went over for a closer look. It is pretty much a straight drop down to the sea below but we braved it for as long as it took to take this photo:
Of course it only looks like a monkey if you view it from the correct angle, otherwise its just a pretty rock:
The whole coastline around there was really spectacular, with little islands and rocky cliffs:

Another interesting site, which was only a couple minutes walk from the monkey rock, was the remains of the Kurozaki gun battery. This was a small underground fort with a huge naval gun that had been in operation until the end of the war:
You could go inside as part of the tunnel was lit up, but it was kind of spooky and Ena didn't want to do too much exploring (ie she ran out in sheer terror about 20 metres in) so we didn't spend much time inside. If you walked on top of the little hill though you could see the massive hole that used to house the main battery:
The gun is long gone though, and it was never used in combat. Iki island is not far from where the decisive naval battle in the Russo-Japanese war was fought, resulting in the destruction of the Russian fleet, so I guess they were concerned about the American Navy attacking Japan from that side too.

Anyway, after that we went back to town the same way we had come, pausing here and there to enjoy the scenery:
When we got back to town it was getting late and we decided to watch the sunset over the harbor from a nearby park:
Then we went for dinner in town. I made the (perhaps unwise) decision that we should eat something local, so we stopped at a restaurant that specialized in sea urchin, where I had a refreshing beer:
We had the sea urchin mixed with rice, which wasn't bad. Our dinner course also included these rather large shellfish though:
This is what they look like close up. I ate not one, but two of these:
After that we walked our bikes back to the hotel and got a good night's rest to prepare for the second day of our trip!