The area all around our home is very beautiful and there is lots to see if you can pull yourself away from the couch!
Just South of us is an island just off the mainland that is reachable by a big bridge. this island is called Oshima Island and it is famous in Japan because of its tangerines! So off we went to Oshima Island! It is the fat little island here in this link just East of Yanai - Oshima - Yanai I wakuni is on the delta that looks like a triangle just south of the Boldfaced town named IMAZU.
The drive down there is is on Route 188 which follows th ecoastline. the interesting thing about Japanese Oceanfronts is that it does not have that smelly ocean smell. It is also not salty and misty around it. Kinda weird but it stuck out to Christy as well. you drive down that road and it is very fresh and airy.
Just as you get to Yanai you see that huge bridge to get over to the island. We cross over it and then we took a left to follow the coast road to the North side of the island. As you can tell from the map the road pretty much circles the island and it takes about 2-3 hours to circumnavigate it.
As we drove around the north side we noticed the multitudes of tangerine groves and pretty beaches. Now these beeches dont strike me as Hawaii style beaches, you have to go further south from here to get that, but they are nice get your feet in style beaches.
The roads through this island got progressively tighter and tighter and I caught a glimpse of Christy hiding her eyes! I noticed up out of the corner of my window, way up in the sky was a hangglider! It was in an area near one of the peaks that made up this island. Oh also found out that the earthquakes that we felt here at home originated near or under this island... niiiiice huh?
So I looked at my car GPS and found a road that swirled up and in the direction of what I thought would be the peak. It also had 山 word symbol next to it which is Yama or mountain so that way we went.
The road was INCREDIBLY narrow! I don't even know how teh car made it but it did.. Christy kept saying that we should stop and go back down and only two times did we have to pull off onto the cliff's ledge to let a car pass us going downhill... it was SCARY! I think I had my nutz in my chest the whole time.
With risk there is reward! We were greated with an incredible view as we neared the top of the peak. you could see in every direction and way out on the horizon you could see the runways at Iwakuni. It was a neat sight, but unfortunately we had made it as far up as our car could manage- any further up was way too narrow so we parked and hoofed it on foot. We could hear people up ahead of us around the turn and then we saw them. It was a whole gaggle of people young and very old and hanggliders and para-sails! We had found the launch point!
The people were very nice and I had an older gentleman explain to me in Japanese that they launched into the wind so we had to keep an eye on the windsock. The launchpoint was a ramp that extended off the side of the cliff! Talk about crazy.
