Road trip with Darren Day 3

Day 3
From Kofu we headed over some amazing bridges and the island of Awajishima to reach Shikoku. As we were crossing the final bridge at Naruto we managed to cross at the same time as the Naruto Whirlpools were whirling. Darren held the steering wheel for a while so I could look too.

We spent the next several hours driving over mountain passes & heading south to reach the coast road of the Pacific Ocean. We stopped at a viewing point of a cape in Tokushima prefecture, I was taking a self-poprtrait of us & along
came a car. A man jumped out of the passenger seat & offered to take this photo then jumped back in the car & it took off. You can't actually see the cape in this photo but it was beautiful!

Along the long & hairy drive we found a shrine perched on the cliff top overlooking the spectacular ocean. On the way down we discovered this huge hole. Can you see Daz down there on the bottom right!

This evening we camped in the cute seaside town of Shirahama in Kochi Prefecture. The camp site was right at the beach complete with entertainment from the local youths playing on their bikes. We grabbed some ready to eat fare from a local shop & some beer & watched the sunset & moon rise by the beach. It was by far the best value camp site we stayed at...

Road trip with Darren Day 2

Day 2
After a scrumptious Japanese style breaky complete with fish, pickled veges, miso soup, rice as well as chicken, bacon & some various other things I don't know the name of we set about on our day of sightseeing in Inuyama.

First stop was the beautiful castle still in orignal condition. It was built to defend the enemy but fortunately war never came to this port.




The view from the top on this sunny day over the Kiso river with the mountains in the background was spectacular. Spring came a few weeks earlier in this part so the cherry blossoms had already fallen but the new fresh landscape & lovely warm weather was refreshing to my sun starved skin.

Our ryokan is down there on the right about two thirds of the way to the bridge.




We visited the main Shinto shrine in Inuyama which is dedicated to dogs, fitting considering the name of the city... We followed the instructions to pray correctly: bowing, paying, praying, clapping & more bowing...









No visit to Inuyama is complete without a trip to the Monkey Park which also has an amusement park. We saw many varieties of our not so distant cousins & rode the very slow giant ferris wheel as well as two very cool & very fast rollercoasters.

However, nothing could beat these giant stuffed animals available to ride by simply putting a coin in the slot. Sure beats the boring cars we used to ride outside of K-Mart.

We left Inuyama in the arvo & headed for Kobe!

No visit to Kobe would be complete without tasting the world famous Kobe beef. After much walking around trying to find a place to eat it that wouldn't cost us our life savings (not that I have any), we finally found somewhere & OMG I have never tasted such delicious beef oishii yo!

Road trip with Darren Day 1

Day 1
It started with hangovers all round after a fun night of yakitori, karaoke & warm sake. As a result we headed off 4 hours behind schedule driving through the Kiso Valley, where the temperature hit a low of 5 degrees around 1:30pm. We were on our way to 犬山, pronounced Inuyama with the kanji meaning Dog Mountain.

We stayed in a Ryokan complete with yukata, the most unbelievably delicious & huge evening & morning meals as well as a rotenburo, I was the only one in the girls public bath but you can ask Darren about his experience....

Our evening meal was served in our room, I thought there may have been a restaurant for all to eat in so I asked (in my broken Japanese) if everyone eats in the room, which was interpretered as "does everyone eat in our room" needless to say she kindly replied that only WE eat in OUR room, after which she realised what I had meant & we had a good laugh.

We were unable to finish all the delicious food & as you can Darren needed a digestive rest at the end!