8/9 Tomonoura Ponyo

One of the places I had always wanted to go was Tomo-no-Ura. It is a little seaside town in rural Hiroshima prefecture that likely served as the inspiration for the movie "Ponyo" from 2008. That is the Studio Ghibli movie I have seen the most, because I pretty much watched it every day while eating baloney with my brother. I had asked Junko if she could take me there, and she was completely on board with it. There was another student who really liked Ponyo, that was Go.

I think Junko came to pick us up at 7 in the morning, so we were off to have a long day. We got breakfast at FamilyMart, somewhere along the way. And for the rest of the trip I was just staring out the window taking in the scenery.

I think by 10:30 we had finally entered the town of Tomo-no-Ura. It's a long drive to get off the island of Shikoku. We went and stopped at some kind of visitor center/gift shop. There were pictures of Ponyo galore! From there Junko took us over to the ferry terminal. We walked over to the harbor, which makes the town so famous. In the center is an old lighthouse, which you can see below. As the town lies within the Seto Inland Sea National Park, everything is protected.

As soon as we got to the water in the harbor, we were lucky enough to see a ray of some kind. We took lots of pictures. Next up was the town museum, which was up on a cliff. It was pretty neat inside, but mainly about festivals with most things written in Japanese (which I could not read). I think there was a koto that we could try and some other things. We weren't allowed to take pictures so there is nothing for me to go off of. When we left and were walking down, there was a kid with his grandpa and he was trying to catch cicadas to put in a little bug "jail." It was funny because he had a bunch in there and so if you tapped the cage they would buzz so loud it sounded as if they were angry.

Next up, the ferry! We were gonna go across the water to Sensui island. The ferry was very interesting because it was in the style of an old Japanese steam-paddleboat that Sakamoto Ryoma had rode on. Unbeknownst to me, the hero of Kochi had a huge connection to this area. Sensui island has a hotel and restaurant on it, but the three of us went past it. We went over to a large open area and walked around on the beach a little bit. Go and I decided to go check out the red cliffs, which was unfortunate because the direct trail was closed. That meant that we would have to hike over a hill to get down to the beach.

It was pretty nice, but we did eventually make it to the beach, and there we noticed how besides some fishermen, there were some rocky tidepools for us to check out. So we went over to see all of the crabs and anemone and so.

Then we had the brilliant idea to hike (without water) all the way to the highest peak on the island. From there you need to go up, for a while. There were a lot of worms hanging down from trees, and supposedly if you touched them they make you itchy. We kept having to dodge them. Eventually we went through this really haunted looking area, and started hearing sounds in the forest. We ran for our lives up to the top. We were super tired when we got to the top, and luckily I had a little bit of water, so I drank what I had. We rested for a while and then had to head back to Junko. 

We needed a cooling break, and were tempted by the ice cream advertisements for the hotel. We walked up to this relatively large hotel and navigated our way inside. It definitely seemed "vintage" with its fancy decorations and in general looked really nice. They had soft-serve salt ice cream, which always piques my attention. We took a breather in there and cooled down. We chatted a little bit, and when the frozen gold was depleted we had to make our escape back to the mainland.

Next up we had a drive to the city of Higashi-Hiroshima (East Hiroshima) to visit one of Junko's friends. I was pretty sleepy so I don't remember what we talked about, but it seemed to mainly be about our status as study-abroad students. The man was a work colleague of Junko and gave us some local monaka treats (which I took back to the US). He also paid for our okonomiyaki dinner and I was so grateful.

Then we had a long drive back (at night) where I accidentally fell asleep for a little while before being dropped off at the dorm. Thank you so much Junko!