Tuesday, 6 November 2012
The sixth of November 2012 will go down in history as the day Green Moon won the Melbourne Cup and Barack Obama was re-elected President of the United States. In Hughesy's personal iconography, on the other hand, I mightn't remember the actual date but I doubt I'll forget the experience of visiting Miyajima.
We were downstairs at seven looking for breakfast, only to be directed to the third floor, where we found a table with our room number laid out with a variety of Japanese breakfast comestibles, most of which I would have avoided under other circumstances, such as a Viking breakfast layout. Here, on the other hand, with a variety of platters things that I wouldn't have gone for under other circumstances worked off each other rather well, in much the same way as the previous evening's banquet had done.
With breakfast out of the way we were back upstairs packing and contacting the front desk to arrange a shuttle bus to Onoura station at 8:37 that would deliver us to the ferry terminal at Miyajima Port just after nine.
What we found after we'd safely deposited the Little Red Travelling Bag and Madam's backpack in a convenient coin locker was an example of the sheer weight of numbers involved with Japanese cultural heritage tourism.
The JR ferry we boarded wasn't quite packed to the gunwhales but wasn't far off it, and the ferries we saw headed across in the late afternoon were almost as packed. With three ferries operating a service across and back throughout the day that's an awful lot of folks headed to a significant site on a week day when there was nothing obvious (apart from autumn leaves) to draw them there.
Admittedly, a significant portion of the crowd were high school students in excursion mode, and many of the remainder were elderly Japanese formed into largish tour groups, but it was still a fairly significant number of travellers visiting the sacred island.
As the ferry neared the shore there was a predictable movement of seated passengers towards the port side railings for a first glimpse of the famous torii. from what I could gather the ferry's course would deliver a better and closer view on the starboard side, so that was whee I was headed, determined to find the optimum viewing spot for the closest approach.
Needless to say I was subsequently joined by most of those who had previously migrated to the port side railings, but at least this time I had the premium viewing spot.
Once we'd docked there was the inevitable exodus as a steady flow of people headed towards Itsukushima Shrine, which lies right behind the torii. It had been low tide about half an hour before, and most of the stretch between temple and gate was not quite dry land, so there was plenty of camera action from the headland and the exposed beach.