13 November 2018
The over sharing of the view
Hiking up Inasayama to enjoy the insane view of Nagasaki
Today I saw probably the best view of the trip so far, then the atomic bomb museum. Thats the tl;dr version.
The full version is, I awoke early and ran down to the port. The sun was about to appear and appear it did, in all its grandiose majesty. The water was azure and tranquil, welcoming of this pig nosed stranger and his unusual knack for photographing the obvious and mundane. Ships were bobbing up and down ever so gently as if to wave hello to those that would be... enough of that.
The view from the port was great. Then I ran over a bridge. The journey to the top of the hill, Inasayama had a great view most of the way, so I took a long time to get to the top.
The last bit promised to have paths through the forest. No, all destroyed. There were plenty of annoying signs telling me I must follow only the temporary path along the road into the traffic. This was particularly frustrating at the last bit which easily added a kilometre onto the journey when I could see a grand staircase to the top that looked fine to me apart from one piece of railing crushed by a rock.
Once at the top, the view was great. There were other westerners up there, with their taxi drivers, talking about baseball, sumo, cruise ships, basically talking to them about anything except how the entire place was wiped out in a flash.
After taking too many pictures, I descended an alternate way, along the road again, and through the awesome streets built on ridiculous slopes and I wound up at the bomb museum.
There are 3 areas to see, the peace park (full of kids being silly and far too happy), the museum (full of tourists) and the memorial hall (strangely completely empty apart from me and security).
I think its actually a nicer museum than Hiroshima, but the day I visited the Hiroshima museum it was pouring with rain, so my comparison may be unfair.
I then still had many km to walk back to my hotel, at the double, eating a cream filled sandwich and drinking a delicious CALPIS sour yoghurt soda.
Obviously there will be a lot of pics today, so lets get started. Here is a boat, and todays hill behind it. The clouds were just parting as I got here.
Heavy shipping and huge bridge in the distance, taken from sea level.
Inasayama and its many antennas at the top.
A giant cruise ship in the almost smoke free distance. The rain from yesterday mostly put out all the farmers rubbish fires... for now.
I had to cross a bridge over the harbour, this ship timed it well for me. Thank you mr ship.
From my bridge view point I could plan tomorrows hill.
This however is todays hill. It is not very far and there is a cable car. It turned out to be quite far due to having to follow the road.
Obviously there was going to be a shrine at some point.
On the side of the hill they close this street off for a market. I am not sure it needs to be closed, there is no one around.
The view from the graveyard is pretty good.
Light was tricky at this point.
Thats probably enough photos from this low down vantage point.
I thought I found a detour, it was destroyed in sections by landslide and boulders, but eventually joined back up with the main road.
After longer than I thought it would take, I rounded a bend and spotted the summit lookout. Even from this point it was still quite far on foot.
Now we start the series of views from the top. I was never quite sure if my photos were straight or not. Hills everywhere.
Where I am staying is near the right edge of this photo.
The bomb epicenter is near the centre of this photo.
Ahhh, beautiful towers on the top of every mountain.
Looking out over the East China Sea. Nice islands.
I thought I tried to open my squinty eyes for this photo. I think I permanently squint, or I just have squinty eyes now.
Time to head inside for a snack. An ice cream, a sandwich, some sushi, a chocolate bar, anything. NOPE! Shops shut, no food vending machines. Fail.
Half way down the other side you can take photos like this and pretend you were off in the wilderness.
The reality was around the next bend I was again looking over the city.
Just begging for a landslide. Very strange choices for construction locations here. Deadly landslides occur in Japan roughly thrice weekly.
I was glad to get back to some stores where I bought a sandwich filled with cream and strawberries (without needles).
Here we have the peace park. It is filled with statues donated by various countries. This is the biggest of the statues.
The bomb epicentre is marked by a rather bland looking black obelisk.
Strangely, much of the exhibits commemorating the bomb focus on this one cathedral that was a few hundred metres from this spot. They relocated a part of it to here when they built a mall on the actual spot.
The top of the museum offers a view of Inasayama, just in case there had not been enough view today.
The grand hall of the museum features a re-creation of the cathedral. Why the focus on a cathedral? 75k people died.
FATBOY. I am presuming this is not the actual bomb.
Its a paper crane made from paper cranes!
Last photo for today is the bottom of the memorial hall. The book shelf at the end contains all the names of everyone killed by the bomb. Nagasaki was only destroyed because of bad weather, the original target was Kokura, where I climbed the city mountain a couple of days ago, but cloud caused the plane to divert to a secondary target, Nagasaki.