Travel from Kyoto to Hiroshima was another opportunity to use the amazing Shinkansen – covering the 220 mile journey in 1 hour 40 minutes and cruising at 300 KM/hour. But first we decided to try the luggage forwarding service that seemed to be commonly used throughout Japan. The day before travel, we packed what we needed to keep with us overnight into our daypacks and took our main luggage to our hotel reception, where it was measured with a specially designed tape (Japanese efficiency again), the dimensions looked up vs our destination, and the price calculated – just £25 for both large bags. Our receptionist completed a form in triplicate, with our next hotel address written in Japanese, while we added our booking reference number. The form was placed into a plastic wallet attached to the bag, we got the top copy as a receipt, and then off our bags went on their journey. Oh god, were we mad to let most of our stuff out of our sight? We have Apple AirTags in our bags, so could keep an eye on them and track their whereabouts – staying in Kyoto for the rest of the day the bags made their journey down to Hiroshima overnight, and by the time we set off in the morning we could already see that they were in the vicinity of our hotel. And when we arrived, there they were – standing proudly to the side of the reception desk. Amazing and well worth the money to avoid the faff of travelling on public transport with cumbersome bags, and the accompanying stroppiness and knackeredness. Oh how we wish we’d done it earlier in our trip!

Arriving in Hiroshima we took a tram to our hotel Mystays Hiroshima Peace Park, chosen because it was in a great location, we had liked the Mystays hotel in Kawaguchiko (Mount Fuji), and it was quite cheap (less than £60/night). We should’ve taken notice of the Tripadvisor reviews rather than the Agoda ones though – sadly this place, while undeniably brilliantly located, was a bit of a dump. We think it’d only recently been taken over by Mystays and is in desperate need of a refurb – small & dark rooms, old furniture and the most uncomfortable pillows ever. Oh well, it was just somewhere to sleep and it was clean.

For obvious reasons, Hiroshima is a new & modern city but we were surprised by how nice it was. Most of the ‘sights’ of Hiroshima are focussed on the Peace Memorial Park & Museum (covered in a separate post) but we also had a nice wander around the city, taking in the reconstructed Hiroshima Castle, the new Edion Peace Wing football stadium, surprisingly passing all the usual luxury shops (even Vivienne Westwood!) before having an amazing lunch experience.

Debbie had found a place that supposedly had 25 outlets serving the local Hiroshima food speciality, Okonomiyaki. We were scratching our heads when Google Maps took us to a random shopping street, but it turned out that the restaurants were spread over 3 floors of an inconspicuous building, accessed by a lift. We had some Tripadvisor recommendations but was tricky to tell which was which in Japanese so we just plumped for a place that was popular. Okonomiyaki is layers of pancake, cabbage, noodles, meat/fish and an omelette cooked on a griddle in front of you – amazing to watch and delicious to eat. We both opted for the seafood version, with prawns and squid, which bumped the price up to about £10 each (including beer!)….

Miyajima island is a must-do excursion from Hiroshima, and on a beautiful sunny Sunday we headed for the fast boat from Peace Memorial Park, 5 minutes from our hotel. In the queue ahead of us were 4 English blokes chatting away and Debbie heard one of them say something about “Higher Contour Road”. Are there several roads with this name in the UK as surely they couldn’t be talking about OUR road could they? We sat next to them on the boat so Steve asked – and indeed 2 of them (Tony & Gordon) lived in the same road as us and the other 2 used to live in our village but had defected 1/4 mile across the river to Dartmouth. What are the chances?? We are still amazed by the co-incidence!

There are a few things that Miyajima is famous for – the floating shrine, the cable car up the mountain, more deer, special cookies and oysters – and we experienced them all (well only Steve for the oysters, yuk!).

The floating torri gate was huge and very impressive….

Debbie wasn’t sure about the cable car as she’d read that it was terrifying – bizarre as this is the girl who did a bungee jump in NZ a few years ago – but we went for it anyway. We aren’t sure what planet the author who deemed it ‘terrifying’ was on as it was actually 2 separate but perfectly lovely cable cars to somewhere near the summit of Mount Mizen. We made it to the observatory and marvelled at the view across the islands and back towards Hiroshima, but there was no chance that we could be bothered walking another 500 feet or so upwards to reach the peak.

So down we went in search of lunch, which we found at the brilliant Cafe Lente – just 2 dishes to choose from and both were bloody lovely – a chicken curry with rice and beef satay noodles.

The deer roaming around were pretty oblivious to the tourists, and unlike Nara were not prepared to pose for tourists’ photos!

Oysters – yuk in Debbie’s opinion but another speciality of the area so Steve had to try them. A couple of very plump specimens, in a spicy red sauce and less than £3, were declared delicious. A delicacy local to Miyajima is Momiji Manju, a baked confection in the shape of a maple leaf and traditionally filled with red bean paste. We found a place making them and ate them straight off the production line, still warm – although Debbie went for custard filling, far nicer. The shopkeeper was somewhat bemused that we only wanted one of each flavour as folk normally buy boxes of 12 – it’s not worth trying to explain ‘no room in bags and we aren’t going home for another 18 months anyway’ but we’ve come to the conclusion that we could do some serious shopping in Japan if we had a practical means of getting things back to the UK.

Next up is to hire a car and get off the tourist trail…