Don’t Swallow a Bee

So I must start off today’s blog with a bit of disappointment- we had planned to go to Okunoshima or Rabbit Island as it’s known, because well there are thousands of rabbits living on it today. When looking at it at home on the map it seemed like a simple enough thing to do – but in reality we were going to have to back track some serious distance, up many inclines and do about a 30km round trip. We sadly came to the decision that it probably wasn’t worth it. Then we had a thought – there’s a ferry terminal literally outside the door of our ryokan – maybe the ferries go from there to rabbit island??? We went over to the ferry terminal last night to check it out but we could see no evidence of ferries travelling to rabbit island. And so with heavy hearts we gave up on the dream of seeing thousands of bunnies frolicking in nature. We went ahead and planned our day sans bunnies…only to discover when we got back to our ryokan in the evening, by looking at a Shimanami Kaido tourist brochure I picked up somewhere – THAT THE FERRIES DO GO FROM RIGHT OUTSIDE OUR DOOR STEP TO RABBIT ISLAND!!! Nooooooooo!!! 😭😭😭 It was such a warm and sunny day today too – perfect for a ferry ride and bunny viewing. Very disappointing indeed. It’s meant to be raining tomorrow, plus we don’t really have time plus I think the ferries only run on the weekends- so the rabbit island dream is over.

Anyway….we had breakfast at our ryokan this morning and it was very delicious and lots of food as always.

And in case Steve forgets who he is or where the breakfast room is, we luckily have this handy reminder-

After breakfast we went for a wander along the nearby shopping street but nothing much was open. We made it to a cool looking temple (Kousanji Temple) and had a quick look inside the gates but decided not to go in properly.

Instead we went and had a coffee at Soil cafe which is right next door to our ryokan. It is very nicely designed and the coffee was A+.

Our plan for the day, was to buy a bento for lunch from the pace around the corner that didn’t open until 10am and then ride slowly around the island. The map said it was a flat easy ride which is about all we were up to today.

Bento’s bought and lunch packed we headed off on our merry way. First stop was Sunset Beach, which we saw yesterday, it was a little busier there today, beach was still basically empty though.

We stopped at some point near a campsite where you camp in Geodesic dome. Kind of cool. We had our Mikan juices. I don’t know why auto correct always capitalises Mikan but it does.See? It did it again.

We kept riding around and saw lots of citrus groves and ship building yards. Not the most picturesque really but kind of cool.

We stopped by a small temple and parked our bikes to have a look. A small girl was riding her scooter out front and when we arrived she ran in to the house on the temple grounds. We had a Quick Look around and then started to head off when the girl came out and came over to us and handed us some Goshuin – “Goshuin are large stamps, handwritten by monks, that work as a kind of proof that you have visited a specific temple or shrine” (thanks good for the explanation) we said thank you many times over before heading off. It was very sweet.

Ok, now where was I? Sorry just took a break from blog writing to have a bath…ok so after the temple we kept riding – we were looking for somewhere to stop for our lunch but it had all got a bit industrial around there so we kept riding and riding. We eventually found a little rest stop, which wasn’t the most picturesque, but it was fine and we were starving by this stage.

Also we needed to have lunch before our next stop – Dolce Gelato which was only a few kilometres ahead. When we got there it was really quiet, but just after we went in, it suddenly got really busy – queues out the door even!

I got Hakata sea salt, Mikan and strawberry and Steve got lemon and Hakata sea salt. Nice icecream. Nice-cream in fact.

We rode on after our ice creams and we were soon back in town. We successfully completed a trip around the whole island. To be fair, it’s a pretty small island.

We dropped our bikes off at the ryokan and went to explore the shopping street – except because it was Sunday almost everything was closed. Except the lady who had been making croquettes since 9am this morning. I just had to buy one. It was so crispy and tasty!

We walked back up to Kousanji temple – and decided to go in because it actually looked quite fabulous. It was 1400 yen to get in, which in the grand scheme of things isn’t actually that expensive but it’s more than most temples are.

We walked in to the grounds and there was full blooming Sakura everywhere! It looked so magical!

The temple itself was really interesting and then there was the cave of 1000 Buddha. Reminded us a bit of Haw Par Villa with ghastly scenes of death and dismemberment. Remember to behave and be a good person folks – you do NOT want to end up here one day. The cave was cool though and went down quite deep with concrete statues of Buddha everywhere you looked.

Outside of the cave there was a huuuuge statue and more Sakura and interesting parts of the temple to see.

Then at the top of the hill and up a lift (we were too tired to use the stairs) was the “Hill of Hope” marble sculptures and monuments carved by an artist that took 16 years to design and create. The day had suddenly got quite warm and sunny and let me tell you – marble reflects the sunlight a lot. We didn’t bring our sunglasses and were regretting it a lot by this stage. Once we overcame the marble blindness – it was actually really cool. Very other worldly.

We stayed there until closing time at 5pm and were glad that we visited this temple in the end.

Headed back to our ryokan and had a bit of one chill by the waters edge. It turned out to be quite a nice day today – we enjoyed as much as we could as it is meant to rain tomorrow for our ride back to the mainland.