Domestic flights can be pretty cheap so we flew 1 hour to Kobe which is a huge city that in 1995 was struck with a huge earthquake followed by fire. At the great hanshin-awaji earthquake memorial we learned all about the devastation and how it rebuilt itself. This included negotiating 5% of everyone’s land to be able to build roads wide enough for emergency vehicle access in the future.
Next we took our trusty bicycles to the base station of the Nunobiki gondola and herb garden. Pete did briefly suggest cycling to the top!
Retrieving our bicycles we did a city explore ride to find the Isuzu bakery, famous for it’s curry bread. Cycling is great in Kobe with shared walkways and pedestrians who happily move out of your way. It still didn’t stop Pete cycling through red lights and down one way streets the wrong way – eek!
Next we took a train an hour back towards Tokyo to Osaka – another huge city where we arranged to meet my neice from Australia and see Osaka Castle together.
Using Osaka as our base for a few days, we took a train about an hour to Nara.
This is Todai-ji temple which houses one of the largest bronze statues in the world using 437 tonnes of bronze and 130kg of gold.
Next we went to Kasuga Taisha, a lovely shinto shrine with many, many lanterns.
There are temples and shrines everywhere in Japan making it tricky to decide where to visit and also retain enthusiasm for another and another. So next we are of to Koyasan to see more temples and shrines – ha ha.
