Tuesday, May 29th .....

We’re on the train at last- the Hikari 495 service to Hiroshima although we’re not going that far. In fact, we’ll get off at Okayama and get another train called the Marine Liner across the Seto-Ohashi Bridge to Takamatsu on the island of Shikoku. The Hikari is one of the Shinkansen or bullet trains, not the fastest but we can’t get on the fastest trains with a Rail Pass. Still, they use the same carriages on the slower trains and stop at a few more stations. We’ve been on this train about 30 minutes and already four bullet trains have passed us going in the other direction. I can’t imagine how many bullet trains are on the network at any one time.

I had planned that we would get a train at 9.40am but we woke early and so we’re an hour ahead of ourselves. We’ve just left Okayama on the Marine Liner – a very romantic name for a train but the reality is a bit of a let down. It’s certainly not classy and might not look out of place on the Sydney network, except it is too clean. We were bemused by this poster and decided that it was a competition and you had to write a caption to go with it: ‘He went that-a-way!’ perhaps, or ‘Stop or I’ll shoot.’

The Seto-Ohashi Bridge is remarkable. It seems to jump from one pretty little island to another until it reaches the larger island of Shikoku. We have been disappointed that the scenery is spoilt by the shocking pollution. We noticed it as we flew in on Sunday morning and it’s even worse from ground-level. Everything is hazy and nothing sparkles like it does in Australia,

Takamatsu is a fairly ordinary town but has fabulous shopping arcades, all covered. I think they stretch over several kilometers. We walked the length of one of them and crossed several others on the way. I had left my hat at home so buying a new one was a goal. We walked and walked. Two out of every three shops was a restaurant and the third sold women’s clothes. I saw lots of men wearing hats but it I’m blowed if we could find anyone who sold them. Just as we were about to give up, Marilyn asked someone in a women’s shop where we could get a hat for a man, and the woman pointed to the shelf behind us. Success at last.

Takamatsu is famous for a kind of udon noodle called sanuki. Of course, we decided we must try them for lunch. Among the thousands of restaurants, we chose one and Marilyn tried out two of her Japanese words: udon and tempura. Hai, said the waitress and produced two large bowls of broth with udon noodles and a large tempura prawn. The cook had also battered two leaves of some plant and that went in as well. It was a great lunch so we made our way back to the station for the train home. The alternative was the Jumbo Ferry to Kobe but that would take four hours and we had other things planned for the evening – particularly finding an internet café to post my backlog of blogs.