Adventures in Japan

Five Gold Rings?

Tyler's sleeping, so I guess it falls to me to do the blogging tonight.

Today's flavour of fun: riding trains.

First we rode the "One Man Densha", which apparently means "one car train". Because that's all it was. One car. With a toilet in the back. Kinda like a cross between a long-haul bus and a streetcar. The One Man Densha went as far as Tokushima, where we got off and had some lunch. So far so good. The train was comfortable and the view was scenic. Did we take any pictures? No.

Next we caught a regular three-car train to Awa-Ikeda, smack in the middle of Shikoku. The seats on this train weren't as comfortable, and for the first 90 minutes, the view wasn't as interesting. But as we got closer to Awa-Ikeda, the scenery became more dramatic. Still no pictures, but we're getting there.

Our final train was another One Man Densha, but this one didn't have a toilet. Or forward-facing seats. And it was definitely more crowded. But the scenery out the windows was stellar. Steep valley walls and misty mountains gave way to a full-on gorge. The rocks were craggy and the water was amazingly blue, spanned by an nigh-infinite variety of bridges. It was tough to take pictures in low light, through the trees, from a moving train, but we did our best, which amounts to this:


All told, the trip took 8 hours, and now we're in Kochi, in our new hotel, which is far superior to our last hotel, and we're tired, and it's time for bed.