It’s a stunning day. I get up and visit the park across the highway again. It’s Saturday morning and many are jogging around the lake. And in typical Japanese style, they are all going in the same direction. It makes you feel like running in the opposite direction, against the flow, against the order. I wonder what they would do. Anyway…I feel a bit guilty sitting here enjoying my large coffee and scone.
I aim for Kyoto today. Again I board the magnificent bullet trains (or Shinkansens). Many business men still prefer to use these trains for travel rather than planes. The cost is about the same but there is plenty of legroom, there are smoking spaces and you arrive in the middle of your destination with easy access to subways, trams and buses. And they are very comfortable. Much of western Kyushu has a rugged terrain so a lot of the trip is through tunnels, which is a frustrating for me. The hills are heavily forested with bamboos and trees I’m not familiar with. I always get a window seat to study the fleeting landscape as it passes by at great speed. Rice fields, market gardens and greenhouses patchwork the scenery between houses. The trains seem completely detached from the landscape. The tracks are high off the ground so you are looking down on everything except when going through tunnels. They must be a sight for the communities they slice through, though it’s not obvious. They don’t acknowledge them in any way as if we are invisible. The Shinansens are an amazing engineering infrastructure that would have been built from scratch because it’s such a specialised system, and truly one of the world’s great engineering successes I would think.
My hotel is very Japanese style with fibre mats, simple mattress on the floor, sliding wooden doors and public baths. Very nice. Hotel Honnoji is usefully located in the city centre.
angusmccoll 