A Journey to Japan: Itsukushima Shrine

After spending a few days in Okayama, it was time to move on. Our next destination was Hiroshima, which we reached by taking a ride with the Shinkansen. After a short time, given the high speed, we were whisked away from Okayama to Hiroshima in just a few moments.

Our room was not yet available, so we just dropped off our bags and immediately went out to explore. We decided to go to Itsukushima, this shrine on an island, which features a floating gate. It was easily reachable with a combination of train and ferry. And it was such an efficient thing to have our public transportation card work, regardless of the fact that we actually purchased it elsewhere. The interconnectivity was just very impressive.

There were actually plenty of people visiting the shrine. I would almost say it was rather a touristy affair, with the main road leading from the ferry terminal to the shrine lined up with many establishments that are intended to part you from your money. There were plenty of food items on sale, as well as souvenirs, but we all ignored them as we made our way to the shrine. We even ignored the deer which was so used to humans, they were even daring to snatch food away from the hands of humans who were otherwise leisurely eating their food.

In any case, I managed to explore the shrine in relative peace, and even shoot a few photos as you see above, which only featured very few humans. I would like to imagine how this place would look and feel like without the humans, but then again, this is one of the more known sights in Japan, so that would be a hard exercise to actually implement in real life.

After spending some time within the shrine, we still wandered around, and explored the surrounding areas. There's more to see here, so stay tuned.