Saturday 13th August
With grand intentions of getting up early to suss the train
system and head up to Nikaho town for the day – I slept in and decided I
couldn’t be bothered leaving the house in this heat.Ventured outside around 4 to go for a stroll for an hour so that I didn’t feel like a complete waste of space. Managed to walk far enough out of town to see some of the rice paddies and for a rare occasion Mt Chokai wasn’t completely covered by haze or cloud. Spent the most part of the day wondering how grown-ups manage to deal with using leave responsibly.
Ventured out after tea in hunt of Ice cream – have decided I
quite like going for strolls at dusk as its not stupidly hot ( a nice cool 26 degrees…)
and there were little bats flitting around. Though did start questioning my
choice of footwear when a great big black bug scuttled quite close to my jandal….
Sunday 14th August
With renewed vigour I was up at a reasonable hour. And on my
way to the train station to spend the day exploring Nikaho town.
It wasn’t until the girl that had been walking infront of me
started running that I glanced
at the time on my phone and realised
that I had about 30 seconds to sprint up the road, figure out how to get a
ticket and get on the train that was already at the station.
True to Japanese form the horribly punctual train was leaving the station bang on time. The next train to Nikaho wasn’t for another 2 hours so I figured I may as well check what time the next train headed in the opposite direction was going- 1 hour 50 minutes…..right.
Plan B.
Make the most of the sunshine and head down to the
beach to get sunburnt.
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| Purely here to make the wall of text less daunting- nb the ants |
Fortunately it clouded over after an hour or so (blasphemy I
know – but my god the heat over here….) so it wasn’t quite so roasting – even
the water was lukewarm. Quite a few families were down at the beach swimming
in the nets that they set up, I waited until I saw a couple of guys venture out
for a snorkel outside of the netted area before I was content that I was going
to get yelled at for being a rebellious risk taker or something daft. My GOD
that water was heaven. Seems to be common for families to take
tents/sun-shelters/gazebos down to the beach and really make a day of it. It was
quite a colourful ensemble between the shelters, umbrellas and inflatable
donuts that the kids were running around with.
After a couple of hours I decided it was probably about time
to trudge my pasty white self back home to seek refuge in some shade.
I had heard whispers of a fireworks festival in Nikaho tonight,
a quick bit of research vaguely confirmed this information – though failed to
provide what time and where… Optimistic I headed over to the train station –
and bugger me actually managed to catch it this time. Though not without
worries. The ticket office was unmanned and I wasn’t entirely convinced that I
would be able to buy a ticket on board, I went to ask a lady standing on the
platform what the story was and quickly realised that she was actually Chinese
and spoke neither Japanese nor English…
Last resort: play the gaijin card. Fortunately there was no
angry ticket conductor yelling at me for trying to scrounge a free ride. You do
actually buy your tickets on the trains in the smaller cities as it turns out…
Alyssa met me at the station and we wandered down to the
water front. When the tourist sites tell you about the spectacular sunsets that
Nikaho gets – they’re not lying –hot pink flares across the horizon – it was
absolutely spectacular.
We began to doubt ourselves when there didn’t seem to be too
many people lingering around. Querying a couple of girls walking by confirmed
that the festival was actually tomorrow night. SO we went for a wander along
the beach instead – with bats swooping disconcertingly low over our heads.
Take 2 tomorrow….
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