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Post 11: The wheels on the bus are round of course

Written on Thursday 4th Feb, 2010 at 10:36 pm

Yesterday the tour bus left the hotel at around 8 am. We drove for 2 hours up a mountain until we reached Nachi Falls. It was quite a sight, a beautiful scene created by nature. It was only marred by the fact that I was feeling carsick and a lady in our tour group gave me some herbal stuff that made it worse.

After that we drove back down the mountain to an aquarium. There were all kinds of weird sea creatures like giant eels, giant lobsters and flatfish. Flatfish are freaky asymmetrical fish that lie on their sides, and as a result have both eyes on one side. It must of lost a bet when they were handing out evolution chains. There were many other types of fish, crustaceans, corals and anemones, but the most interesting were the turtles. They had over a dozen of them and some were over 200 years old.

Our next stop was Kumano Suigun Basyogoya or The Pirates Lair. This was where Japanese pirates from ancient times hid from the navy. It was a cave with an entrance at the side of a cliff connected to the sea. When we were leaving the cave a man who owned a deli kept insisting we try his free mushroom tea. I was thankful he didn’t charge us for it.

Then we went to some rocks by the sea where I caught crabs of a hermit kind and that was our second day in Japan.

Today, we visited a Binchotan charcoal museum. Here they showed how Ubame oak was burnt into charcoal and then made into various objects like; figurines, statues, spoons, bowls, chopsticks, windchimes, xylophones and lightning rods. They even had an old charcoal-powered car. Binchotan charcoal was pretty impressive but the whole tour group ended up spending more time playing with a puppy at the front of the museum.

At lunchtime we went to Kuroshio Ichiba fish market where we watched a chef cut up a fresh 19 kg tuna fish. After the show some lady kept trying to pawn off her seaweed to my brother by making him eat all the samples.

It obviously wasn’t selling.

After driving a couple more hours we arrived at Arima. Here we checked out the Toy and Automata Museum which featured 3 floors of toys from the post-war era. The most interesting were the automata, or mechanical toys. They were wooden contraptions that operated via a crank which made dolls play out animations. There was one of a skeleton man flogging a dead horse.

For dinner we went into Kobe City and were left to wander around a mall area for 3 hours. I got separated from the family for 2 hours, so I just walked around until I randomly bumped into them at a restaurant. While I was lost I visited a Pachinko arcade. I watched an old man play for 10 minutes and I still have no clue how to play that crazy ball-ping game. It looked like a really boring way to spend a night out anyway.

We transferred to a new hotel in Kobe to end our third day in Japan. The family has been enjoying the trip so far. All of us except for my dad.




This post first appeared on T-Bone Does Far East, please read the originial post: here

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Post 11: The wheels on the bus are round of course

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