Golden Week

So I guess there was more to the trip than the food. I just haven't been too motivated to write lately. This first picture is the beach where I met up with the guys after my solo train ride. It was a pretty beach, but there were a lot of people, and there was no swimming. The pine tree/ocean combination was nice, though.

This beach is one we found the next day on our way to another part of the island. It wasn't particularly beautiful, but we spent a lot of time there watching all the surfers.
This lighthouse it at the southernmost point of the island. Kind of a plain lighthouse.


These pics are from one of the 88 temples that people make pilgrimages to on the island. We saw these pilgrims everywhere we went. I think it takes about 3 months for someone to walk to all of them.




I know this is another food picture, but it was one of the best meals we had. We didn't get to this area until pretty late, so we bought groceries and barbequed on the beach. Very pleasant.

And after dinner, we played with sparklers.

And this is the view we would have had if we would have eaten when it was light.


This was the view from a short hike we did.


I unfortunately didn't get pictures of my favorite day. We had a lot of driving to do through a river gorge to get to the next destination. We all kind of decided we were tired of driving, so we decided to f ind a place that rented boats. We found a small shop that rented kayaks, so we spent a few hours in the middle of the day kayaking down a beautiful river. I didn't want to take my camera given the fact that we couldn't really tell how rough it would be (it wasn't at all) so I didn't take any pictures. I am kicking myself now.

This was one of our last stops on the trip. The town was Matsuyama, and it is famous for it's onsen (hot springs for bathing). This building was used by a famous samurai back in the day (I can't remember his name).

We decided to go up to Matsuyama castle, and found that we could take a chairlift!

Needless to say, we didn't enter these gates, so we never found out what it was. We were curious if the Japanese really translated into the same thing.