Adventures in Japan

Day Eight: Izumo and Iwami (Ninja Edit Edition!)

We went to a couple different towns today...

(Ninja Edit: I left this stuff in so that future generations may bask in my incompetence)
Man! I can't remember the names of anything!

Carla did all the planning, my job is the blogging. But I can't blog if I don't recall the names of the places. And Carla is asleep so I can't ask her for her notes. And there is no way I am digging through her stuff to find it. That never ends well. I'll just post some pretty pictures and then insert some text later.

(Ninja Edit: New content starts now!)

Mornings suck. I am amazed that we have not left anything behind yet. I probably just jinxed us. I only mention this because I don't actually remember leaving our hotel. The first thing I remember is waking up on the train. We were traveling past a large body of water. So large that the other side could not be seen. I'm thinking it was either the inland sea or some kind of ocean. Not only could you not see the other side, it was not all that easy to see the horizon line.

It all just blurred together in a light blue haze. Maybe the Langoliers don't leave behind a black void, but a more calming (and, somehow, spookier) baby blue one.


Izumo Has a very famous shrine. One of the oldest in all of Japan, maybe even the oldest. It was also the largest shrine in Japan way back in the day. Then it burned down and was rebuilt on a slightly less grand scale. But still quite grand. A shrine dedicated to Okuninushi-no-okami should be nothing less. Yes, that's right, the shrine is dedicated to the same deity as Okami, the video game. The game was good, but I liked the shrine more. It was in the middle of a nice, quiet wooded area. There were a lot of interesting buildings and vegetation.


And random statues of guys praying to Dragon Balls on top of tidal waves.


And trees covered in paper. The papers are bad fortunes. You tie the bad fortunes to the tree to rid yourself of them. There was also a really big rope.


No. That wasn't the really big rope. I admit that the above is a really big rope, but it was merely the second biggest rope we saw that day.


Now that is more like it! Look at that thing!


You could kill a man with that thing. You could kill man and all of his ancestors with that thing.
We saw people throwing coins into the bottoms of the rope, trying to get the coins to stick in. I guess because that would be good luck? We really don't know much about giant ropes and what they mean.

So the shrine was really nice. Green and beautiful and full of really nice woodwork and such. And tourists. The buses just kept coming. And they kept spewing out more and more people. Like I said, this temple is believed to be the oldest in Japan. It is a point of pilgrimage.

Carla and I pilgrimated over to Iwami. Iwami has a silver mine. To be more exact, it had a silver mine. It now has a tour of a former silver mine. It also has a bunch of little Buddha statues. 500 of 'em. All placed in little stone caves. Nice, cool stone caves. It was hot today. We're going to be peeling until around Christmas I reckon. We weren't allowed to take pictures of the little Buddhas, but we were allowed to take pictures of the mine. Here is just such a picture:

Most of our pictures are a lot like that one. The mine tour is basically just a slow walk through a small, dark, sometimes wet tunnel. Most of the time is spent bent over to avoid hitting your head on the low (even by Japanese standards) ceiling.


And, like the shrine in the morning, there were scads of tourist clomping through. I don't know why most of these people go on these tours. They just walk straight through, barely looking around at anything. Not that there was much to look at. We were expecting a bit more. Some informative signs., some dioramas, some... anything. Nope, all we got was a dark walk down a cramped tunnel and a well lit walk up a wide one.


And we got dripped on.


But the walk to and from the mines was scenic. There was a babbling brook and some flowers and a place that made tasty curry. One of which was a fruit curry.


Although we didn't get any pictures, one of the most interesting parts of the walk was seeing all the different tunnels along the way. The tour is only through one tunnel, the biggest one. But there are many, many more. All over the place. Most of them looked quite uncomfortable, dangerous and scary.

I really do need to take notes.