Our gorgeous hotel in Nagasaki was set half way up a mountain with a fabulous view of the harbour and surrounding hills. Black kites swooped past the window at the breakfast bar 🙂
Not so convenient for wandering around the town, but there is very little flat space in Nagasaki.
Our bus took half an hour to drive about a mile up and down and around windy streets to the historic Sakamotoya inn for our dinner. (The inn still preserves the in floor brazier at the entrance for the rickshaw drivers to warm themselves at while they waited for their clients.) There we experience shippoku (‘tablecloth’) cuisine – a fusion of Chinese, Dutch and Japanese food styles. It was bloody amazing, and also a lot of food 🙂 After travelling with them for over a week, I had no sympathy for our two Jewish tour members (who were rude to just about everyone, and whiny pills to boot) and our raw fish hating bogan couple being sequestered at a table and stuck with boring cooked fish, while the rest of us ate gorgeous seafood and pork and sashimi 🙂
After Hiroshima, I didn’t have the heart to see more atomic memorials, so I opted for a quiet day in the hotel. Doug went out though, to the Glover Garden
Nagasaki Museum of Traditional Performing Arts
Oura Catholic Church (Kyoko for some reason, though not Catholic herself, insisted on giving us masses of info about Catholic missionaries everywhere we went. Maybe she thought we would want to know this stuff?)
And Sofuku-ji Temple
We had lunch at the very fancy French restaurant at the hotel, and Doug declined to go out again that afternoon. We were both pretty damn tired, and had room service rather than go out for dinner with the group. Sadly the room service, while perfectly adequate, did not match the extravagant standards set by the Tokyo hotel.
Then onto Kumamoto via Mount Unzen and Shimabari, and the next post!