Road trip to Beppu

We decided to put Tristy's Will Cypha to the test with an almost 2,000 km island-hopping road trip over Golden Week. We started out from Nagoya, then headed south to Shikoku, stopping to let chibbi-chan run off her car cabin-fever at the Naruto whirlpools. The Onaruto Bridge which spans the whirlpools was celebrating its 25th anniversary and as we walked out to view the eddies through the glass-bottomed floor, the staff pressed a commemorative postcard and balloon flower into our hands. Although we'd come at the wrong time of day to see the eddies at their peak (up to 20 metres across), the white whirls were clearly visible and boats with sightseers were riding precariously along the fringes.
Overnighting at Tokushima, we drove west down the freeway then along the glorious coast to the port of Yawatahama, where we boarded the three-hour early evening ferry to Beppu. Beppu is a holiday destination famed for its profusion of restorative onsen and many jigoku ('hells') - bubbling lakes, some colourful, of mineral water in picturesque settings where you can test your endurance in the steaming public footbaths. We were here to visit family, but we also found plenty to keep our toddler amused for a week. She spent happy hours on the rocky beach at low-tide, checking out what the clam-diggers had turned up - an amazing variety of worms, fish, jellyfish, mini-star fish, whelks and of course, the ubiquitous hermit crab. Another favourite was the Aquarium and, directly opposite, what we dubbed 'Monkey Mountain', home to hundreds of Japanese macaques that come down from the mountains to be fed at intervals on wheat and sweet potato. It was all we could do to stop her prizing a baby macaque off his mother's lap (but that raw-looking, red-faced stare put us on our guard).
At the 'Sea Egg Aquarium', chibbi-chan got to toss beach balls to the resident dolphins, feed the fish and coddle the sea cucumbers to her heart's content (poor things). The building is reasonably new and well-designed, giving visitors the chance to browse the sea creatures from different angles and really feel immersed. The Wonder Zone cleverly illuminates the jellies, sardines and cuttlefish to make the most of their shimmering and transparent bodies. And I think it's the only Aquarium I've ever been to where I've seen a diver, after a demonstration, actually cleaning the window of the tank (a woman, naturally, with a wire pot-scrubber).
We were also treated to a day to ourselves - while oji-chan and obaa-san took granddaughter out, we headed over the mountain to Koishiwara, a famous pottery-making enclave about two hours' drive from Beppu. In a beautiful, lush, winding mountain valley, 62 potters make their hand-crafted wares. Many have been around for a few hundred years and have supplied the Emperor's dining room. Prices range from the sublime (a few dollars), to the ridiculous, but I came back with some pretty coffee cups, rice bowls and serving dishes for the same price I'd pay in IKEA and a lot more interesting.
We'd just made our last stop, admiring yellow and black dinner plates, when we were dragged into a workshop behind the store by a jovial, beret-wearing, bearded man in his fifties who insisted we joined the celebratory party (sake playing a large part, given the drunken state of most of those round the table). That's how we got to try 'devil's fingers' from Kumamoto, a quaint name for a barnacle-type creature which looks like a glossy pink fingernail when pulled from its shell and tastes sweet and salty. Our new acquaintance was not the potter, but the proprietor of an izakaya, who had a fondness for slapping women's behinds (my own included). The potter was already drunk.
It was a memorable end to our Beppu stay, but we had to head back and were already looking forward to our pit-stop - the Peace Park at Hiroshima.
Nothing quite prepares you for something like this, especially if you know next to nothing about the place, like I did. YK knew the lodestar in the Peace Park was the Dome, so we headed there first. It's the hollowed-out shell of a building which survived the bomb by being right underneath the explosion - an eerie, stage-set of bricks and twisted metal, its Dome looking more like a crown of thorns than anything. Nearby are peace-themed sculptures and garlands of paper cranes, fashioned from colourful paper by school children. One monument is inscribed with the names of hundreds of schools who had students present in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb exploded on the 8th of August at 8.15 a.m.
It was only May, but it was already hot and steamy, so we sat down at a riviera-style cafe on the banks of the river which flows through the park and ordered coffee and ice-cream. Locals and foreigners were sipping their lattes with cake. Nearby, YK told me, a plaque mentioned that this very spot had been a post office where over two hundred people had died that day. By now, I was eager for more information, so we headed over to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Musuem, where for 50c, you can learn in detail what happened.
Predictably, perhaps, chibbi-chan was uninterested in the black and white plans and photographs of the city. She was drawn to the charred lunch box, the torn uniform displayed on a skeleton, the diorama of wax figures with dripping skin and the video of the bomb blast. The tone inside the museum was reverently hushed, and I was praying no-one could quite grasp what she was repeating over and over in a loud voice: 'I want to see the burned arms.' When you have a three-year old in a place like that, it's an exercise in judicious encouragement of interest and knowledge, tempered with a wariness towards anything which might provoke fear and nightmares (we have enough trouble with 'monsters' as it is). I grabbed her by the hand and we set off in search of something suitable. We found the Video Corner, and sat down to watch a ten-minute animation which showed what happened. As we watched the faces melt into brown rubber and peel away, I think she grasped that the people had been burned, but she wanted reassurance that the 'little boy' who sends his paper plane out over the street, survived (hope for the future and resurgence was my interpretation of the ending, so I was happy to give it).
We came away feeling that it was a stop we were glad we'd made, as we headed on to Kurashiki for the night and our first family-style o-furo.
The next day we met up with friends for lunch at the Uji Botanical Gardens, near Kyoto and then it was home, sweet home.