Day 4: part 2 - Arriving in Hiroshima

I decided that I would wake up early, take the train to Hiroshima, and then come back in the late afternoon and sleep in Osaka. This would make the next day's journey to Yokohama much more bearable.

I have already remarked more than once that I love the JR Rail Pass. The main reason I did not visit Hiroshima years ago was because the cost was prohibitively high. With the JR Pass, I feel like I'm travelling for free (although I did pay for it weeks ago).

Arriving in Hiroshima around 8:30, the Enlish speaking attendant at the information booth was not yet in for the day. Just as well. I would be able to take a map from the booth and figure out for myself how to get where I wanted to go.

One thing that made this difficult was that it seems that the main public transportation around Hiroshima is not subway, but by streetcar. I don't now why this should intimidate me, but it does. (Perhaps it's because I would actually have to interact with a driver to make sure I was on the correct streetcar; also, I don't want to find myself on the streetcar, and not paying for my trip, as I have done in other foreign locals.) As simple as it was, I couldn't quite make sense of the map, and after wandering around, looking for a subway (and not finding one), I finally deciphered that I was supposed to get on the green streetcar line. I decided to face my fear of streetcars since I ruled out walking due to the fact that it was raining so much, and seemed to have no inclination to stop any time soon. Fine, easy enough. So where do I buy tickets? Seeing the streetcar load up, I asked the driver, and he said I just pay the fare onboard. Ok, like I said, easy enough.

The problem is that there were two different destinations for the green streetcar. Of course, I got on the wrong one. Oh, who cares? It's not like I had anywhere to be, anyway. So after discovering my error (it was soon enough), I disembarked the streetcar, and looked at my map. Based on how long I got to where I was, I determined that Hiroshima is not such a big city at all, and that it would be quite navigable by foot. I would just walk down the street about a mile or so, and then be at the Peace Memorial Park, the main destination for this trip. In fact, despite that there were other interesting locations in Hiroshima that the guide books might have wanted to direct me towards, I really only wanted to be here for a couple of hours to visit the bomb site and museum, and then leave.