Bridge to Heaven

Last Sunday I took a road trip to Amanohashidate, or the Bridge to Heaven. It's one of the "Three Sites of Japan", but Japan has a lot of "Three somethings of Japan" (three famous castles, three national treasures, three famous mountains, the list goes on), so it should be taken with a grain of salt. There's a spot on a mountain where you're supposed to take a picture, but by the time I got there it was already closed.

One surprising thing about Japan is how difficult it can be to get around. There maps are kind of bad and usually confusing. Most roads don't have names; none of the roads near my house have one. I guess everyone just uses GPS. I looked on Google maps and it said I could take Route 9, a main road in my town, almost all of the way there. Turns out there were two Route 9s, one with a small, round blue triangle and the other with a small, round hexagon. Only after returning home from a 2 hour detour did I realize my mistake. In any case, the weather wasn't very good so I probably wouldn't have gotten a very good picture. Here's a beach:


Apparently people go swimming here during the summer, as there were little fake tree stump showers all over the place. There was also a couple of observation bays. I think I'll come back sometime to go swimming (and it won't be drenched in oil!)


Like most of the historic places I've been to in Japan there was a famous assassination here. I think the assassination site I see most often is now a Starbucks.


A man fishing off the bridge:


A lot of temples and shrines will have trees with white pieces of paper hanging off them that people put up as their wishes. This one had little white fans that were all pre-printed:



PS: I edited how you can make comments, so it should be a lot easier to do now. Any comments are appreciated!

PPS: John, if you decide to write on this with an alias I don't know, please tell me so I don't get freaked out like my last blog.