Hiroshima/Kure!

Wednesday morning we woke up at 5:30am and dragged ourselves out of bed to get to the train station. We made a little breakfast the night before of Inari (like a tofu pocket you stuff with rice, one of my favourites!), cucumber slices and a juice box. Her dad was nice enough to drive us to the station actually, so we didn't have to walk.

Once on the train it was about a 5 hour+ commute to our destination with some train switching in between.

We got really lucky actually. The night before we heard on TV there was supposed to be a Typhoon hitting Hiroshima that morning/day. As you can see from the pictures we already were getting rain out here. However, by some weird luck the typhoon totally passed and ended up hitting in Tokyo. We basically had nice and sunny skies the whole time.

For the first time too on the way we got to take a drive past the ocean.

After a few hours we started to head into Japanese countryside. It was such a nice place to see and I was glued to the window the whole time. Lots of mountains all around you, small villages and towns everywhere. Many of the houses are well over 100 years old and it looks like you looking right into an old samurai film.

Eventually we ended up back into the city to our first big city along the way, Okayama. We had to switch trains here and had some time to grab a quick lunch for the train. We grabbed a pudding from this lovely place..

I got a chicken katsu sandwich (deep fried chicken crispy chicken) and Naomi got a chicken terikyaki sandwich. Then we had our Peach Pudding which was amazing.

On the way out of the city near a construction zone we spotted this odd little fence holder..

Ah the Japanese..

We went through a few more small towns along the way..

We arrived at our next transfer point and then were on the way to the port city of Kure. We were going to Kure to visit the Yamato Museum. The Yamato was the largest battleship ever built and during WW2 was sunk in 1945 on its final journey on a kamikaze mission to help relieve the Japanese forces being overwhelmed in Okinawa. It is a very famous ship in Japan as it was the symbol of Japan at the time and is still considered to be an embodiment of the Japanese spirit.

The museum is located in Kure as that is where the ship was built and it was one of the main shipbuilding ports during the war.

On the way there we went through a bunch more countryside with a bunch of nice views again.

After about another hour we finally made it to Kure. A quick walk and we were over to the museum.

Outside the museum they have some parts of the battleship Mutsu, which sunk in the harbour in 1943. Nobody knows for sure what happened to it, suddenly the main gun exploded and the ship went down with over 1000 people as well. You can see one of its 16in guns, its anchor, a propeller and a rudder all salvaged from the wreck.

Next update I will post the pictures from inside!