13-05-08

I felt much better today, but this time it is Arjan having some problems: crazy to catch such a thing in hygienic Japan! Resulting in too less sleep on top of that as well :-(

No choice, we had to leave Osaka, to pack and get ready for the day. We met our driver, got in the bus (made for Japanese legs, thus much too small, but since there are only 7 of us, we have plenty of free chairs). We passed the Akashi Kaikyo Ohashi, world's longest suspension bridge with its 3.910m span, linking the island of Honshu with Awaji-shima (Western Honshu).
Today we visited the first construction designed by the famous Japanese autodidact architect Tadao Ando. We will see more artefacts of him in 2 days time. If you google on his name you will find some more information about this interesting man.

We started with the Hyakudan-en Garden (or Yume-no-Butai?) in the Higashiura complex, a concrete garden with flowers, not really my piece of cake. Though an opportunity to admire chrysanthemums of the world of all seasons throughout the year.

Then a little further we visited the Mizu-no-Tera (water temple), a - in my eyes - simple water pound made of concrete as well, with some nice lotuses. Inside a simple temple. Nice, but I am wondering why - certainly - spending so much money for something simple, where I did not see any Japanese visitor. Being very close to Kobe, known 1. for the virtual world championship of Belgium according to our Belgian tour leader - by chance, Brazil beat Belgium during the world cup soccer in Japan in 2002 - and 2. for a much more tragic reason: the earthquake of 17-01-1995, which levelled neighbourhoods and killed more than 6000 people. Fortunately, the city has risen, Phoenix-like, from the ashes and is now more vibrant ever. We did not make a stop in the city itself, but we visited the Hokudan-cho Earthquake Memorial Park, again not really my piece of cake.

We made another stop at the Naruto Whirlpools: at the change of the tide, the seawater whisks through the narrow Naruto Channel with such velocity that ferocious whirlpools are created. We arrived about 20 min. too late to witness it ourselves, but we still could see some remainings of it. The nearby museum gave us a good impression of it.

We were supposed to visit one of the 88 Shikoku temples, but it didn’t stop raining anymore since this afternoon, so we skipped that one. We headed straight away for our hotel for the coming 3 nights at Takamatsu, near to the railway station. Very convenient to buy some neutral food for Arjan, who went to bed straight away at arrival. I backed up the delay in our webblog at the PC in the hotel lobby and had dinner at one of the numberless restaurants in this area with some noisy Japanese salary men. I will sign off right now, see how Arjan is doing, feed him if possible and get some sleep as well. Tomorrow nice weather is forecasted and no, no need to let us know that summer arrived in The Netherlands/France, we know: enjoy it!