Saturday, April 14th .....

My internet search continues for interesting places within an hour or two of Osaka. Today, I looked to the south, around Wakayama. There’s a regular rail service to the area by a train called Kuroshio and the line follows the coast. Tourist information says to ask for a seat on the right-hand side of the carriage but for the best views try to sit behind the driver and enjoy the panoramic vista through his windscreen. Japanese train drivers are very egalitarian and their compartment is surrounded by glass and in full view of the passengers – not like Australian train drivers who hide away in case we see them picking their noses or scratching their bottoms.

One of the cities in that area looked good. The beach at Shirahama is rated the 88th most beautiful beach in Japan, famous for its white sand. (The Japanese love to number and rank things). I discovered that the sand is imported from Australia. What a rip-off!

On one of the tourist sites, I found this photo of visitors to Shirahama, accompanied by a quote:
“Let there be warmth in human society, let there be light in all human beings.("Declaration of the Levelers Association")”
I couldn’t resist: what is the Levelers Association? Apparently it was established in Japan in 1922 as a group to look after the rights of Buraku who are members of a diverse social group, descendants of outcast communities of the Japanese feudal era. So there!

Not much is happening here in Dilston. We have a new inhabitant of our block – a juvenile echidna seems to have taken up residence in one of the piles of dirt we laughingly call ‘rockeries’. We’ve seen him a couple of times in the same area, turning over stones and digging into the ground looking for ants.

We had a quick trip to Deloraine today to deliver some stuff to our storage shed. I took our luggage scale with me to check the weights of our two old suitcases. My Polo case, which I bought in KL in 2007 weighed 5.5Kg but Marilyn’s quite expensive Monsac, which is only about three years old, weighed a massive 5.7Kg. That means we’ve been carrying 11.2Kg of material, hinges and handles. With our new, flash Samsonites, we’ll cut that down to 6.2Kg – that’s 5Kg of extra stuff we can squeeze in. Fantastic!