Written by Dave

Hiroshima to Matsuyama – Back to Shikoku (16k, 70m)

Our island hopping continues. Today we ferried back to Shikoku Island and to the port city of Matsuyama. Matsuyama has a population of about half a million people and we were thinking that stopping here might be a bit boring – well we should have not worried. Matsuyama is a very interesting city with lots of history and a great street vibe. Nancy scored us a room in the Matsuyama Dormy Inn, which turned out to be fabulous as well. All in all, a worthwhile stop.

After brekkie at the hostel this morning, we retraced our path to the Hiroshima ferry port. Being a Monday morning, there was a lot more traffic and in particular, bicycle traffic. A good amount of people here use their bicycles to get to work/school/the shops. People riding bikes here seem to have some sort of sixth-sense for avoiding collisions. We witnessed many riders zipping in and out of side streets, around corners, through intersections, around pedestrians and often while looking at their smart phones. Yet, there were no collisions. Nancy and I quickly dropped back to “mom with two kids on bike” pace – just to be safe. Though to be fair, many of the moms now have ebikes and zip along pretty good themselves.

At the ferry Nancy called a hotel a few days ahead to check on a room. Several folks have asked about how much Nancy has to take the lead in interactions due to her superior, no make that actual, Japanese skill. Well, the answer is all of them. That’s not to say I don’t try to engage folks but mostly that’s limited to me saying hello (konichiwa), the other person saying something incomprehensible to me and for the next while me asking Nancy, “what did he say?” or “ask him about this or that”. Nancy is taking it all in stride, and improving her Japanese every day. Plus she says next trip, I have to do all the conversations – fair enough. Also, for the record, I was the one who bought our ferry tickets today – from a person, who spoke no English – so communication is possible.

 The ferry ride was 3 hours and mostly smooth. I was dozing off at one point when we hit a slightly bigger wave and it made a noise. I jumped and said something about hitting something. Nancy laughed and went back to her book – yes, she is doing just fine on the ferries. (Senior editor’s note – given the length of the ferry ride, I did put my wrist bands on today…)

We had all of 10k to ride once we got off the ferry in Matsuyama. And we couldn’t check-in to Dormy until 3PM. About 2/3rds the way we spotted a Starbucks and decided to do a little market research on what Starbucks looks like in Japan. I can report, it’s mostly the same as in the USA. They have fancy toilet seats and a “Tokyo” Blend” coffee but mostly, they have the same products as in the USA. They even had a pumpkin scone almost the same as the ones available in Beaverton. One other difference was that they featured the fancy one-cup pour over that we’ve been talking about. For 700Y ($4.70), you get 6 individual little pour over cups.

We reached our hotel at 2pm and Nancy negotiated an early check-in. I use the word negotiate loosely as it seems that Dormy is pretty good at adding extra charges for every little thing. There was a fee for getting into a room that was basically cleaned and ready for us before the official check in time of 3pm. Oh well – it is a nice hotel and they let us (actually recommended to us) that we bring our bikes up into the room.  There does seem to be a bike parking area behind some fencing but the clerk at the front desk said something about robbers outside and that it would be better to bring the bikes inside.  The room is pretty small, but we managed to fit them in.

The goal of the afternoon was to visit Matsuyama Castle. We’d heard it was nice but really didn’t know what expect. The castle is on the one really tall hill in the middle of the city. The hill is covered in trees but completely surrounded by city. The castle sits at the top of the hill. It was a 10 minute walk from the hotel to the cable car that takes you most of the way up to the castle. The cable car only runs on the half hour but right next to it was an old-style one-person-per-chair chairlift. We just missed the cable car so we hopped on the chairlift. It was quite fun – think small, really old-school ski lift.

From the top of the chair it’s still a pretty good hike to the castle but every step, every corner, the views improve. We took a lot of pictures down low that we aren’t posting because up at the castle, views were stunning. The castle was built starting in 1602 and finished (for the first time) in 1627. It’s had fires, lightening strikes, WWII bombing raids and even arson damage over the last 400 years. Every time there is damage, they rebuild.

The foundation construction is massive large stones – stacked Inca style without mortar. The top structure is wood and the roof ornate tile. It was largely built for defensive purposes. Originally they threw rocks out of the defensive windows onto invaders below; they eventually graduated to bows and arrows and finally to guns. The defences against modern weapons – modern meaning WWII bombs or later, were not as successful. Since the enactment of the 1947 constitution, the emperor/feudal system has been discontinued, no one lives in the castle today. Regardless, it is quite beautiful and very much considered one of Japan’s national treasures. We are glad we made the effort to see it and Matsuyama in general.

After a soak in the Dormy onsen and a little route research we headed out to dinner. There are hundreds of restaurants near the hotel. To help narrow the search, I looked at google for “sushi near me” – funny, that only narrow it to 40 restaurants, in Japan no less. Eventually we gave up and just asked the gals at the front desk. They sent us round the corner to nice sushi restaurant – who needs google reviews eh?

Tomorrow we ride from here to the bottom of Shikoku where we will take a ferry the next day for Kyushu. We’ve got about half of Matsuyama to cross in the morning, which could be stressful. We’ll do our best to destroy the hotel brekkie buffet before we leave so that we have the strength and nerve to take on the traffic.