Small Visitors

In addition to the funamushi William found this weekend, we have come across a few other creatures in the past month. Two of them I never, ever hope to have a run in with again.

In the beginning of May we spent a few days camping on Sensuijima, an island just off the coast of Fukuyama. During the day, we noticed a couple of tanuki hanging around the outdoor eating area begging for food. They looked incredibly diseased, scabby, and were even missing their tails. They were awake during the day, which is strange for tanuki, abnormally comfortable around humans, and seemed to be in pain. I thought it was incredibly cruel that the restaurant owners had not decided to take responsibility for these creatures and put them out of their misery.

As soon as night fell though, a whole army of healthy, bushy tailed tanuki emerged from the forest. Every where you shone your flashlight was a little raccoon dog that would stand stunned for a moment before scampering off into the trees.

About two weeks ago, I was sitting in the dark feeding the baby at about 4am. Suddenly I felt something crawl onto my back from the couch and inside my shirt. I was really groggy and so the first thought through my head was, "yuck! a cockroach just crawled into my shirt". Our house is pretty old, with lots of cracks and holes to the outside, so it wasn't too far fetched to think that a cockroach could find its way inside the house and down my shirt. I proceeded to smack at the "cockroach" as it tried to make its way from my back to my sleeve. At the time, crushing it against my shoulder under my shirt to kill it seemed like a good idea until my skin started burning. I quickly stripped off my shirt and flung it on the floor. The last thing I wanted to do at that moment was go through my shirt and search for whatever bug just bit me, so I went to bed and had a fitful sleep until the sun came up. By that time, my stomach felt kind of queasy and my arm and back felt very sensitive and painful.

Just in case you were wondering, this is what nightmares
are made of.

I searched through my shirt and didn't find the bug (it must have run back and hid in whatever hole it came from) but I found a number of curved orangey red legs that could only have come from a mukade, or giant centipede. These insects are huge, fast, and relatively poisonous. For an adult it is not such a big deal to be bitten, but the toxin can be pretty dangerous for young children. I am so happy that it was me and not Rosie or the boys that came across the centipede!

This is what my arm looked like a few hours later.
The actual bite is on the bottom near my armpit and all
 the little red dots are where its legs scratched me.

The bite itself didn't look too terrible, just red dots and scratches from where its legs scrabbled against my skin. It didn't actually hurt too badly when it bit me; kind of like a cinder landing on your skin for a few seconds. The real pain started about half an hour later radiating out from the bite down my back and arm. I was actually surprised at how little and innocuous the bite looked considering how much my muscles and joints ached. The aching feeling in my back and arm lasted about a day or two and I felt a bit dizzy and queasy for about 10 hours or so. Really, the worst part of it all was how itchy and puffy my skin became. Even the spots where its legs touched me got red and itchy and it took all I had not to touch for about two weeks until the swelling went down.

We also had our first encounter with a suzumebachi, or asian giant hornet. It came buzzing into the yard and died a few minutes later when Dustin smacked it with a broom. Like the giant centipedes, these are far larger than any hornet has a right to be and can be pretty dangerous if you are stung multiple times or if they sting a child. Once again, I counted my blessings that none of the children were around.

This is definitely not the one that flew into our garden. I wouldn't have been crazy enough
to let it walk around on my palm.

Just in case you think our house attracts only the worst sorts, we do have this lovely fellow who pops his head out from time to time. There are actually a lot of skinks that come and go in our garden, but this individual is easier to spot with his slightly shortened tail. He lives a large lavender bush at the front of the house and comes out to drink water droplets from the leaves and keep an eye on me whenever I am watering. Not all of our creature visits are bad!

Miyajima Continued

After a quick exploratory walk around the town, we were able to find a small grocery store where we bought breakfast. We found a small shrine nearby that miraculously didn't have any deer wandering about and we ate our breakfast without being harassed.

Theo, attracting a few weird looks while finishing his breakfast

The tide was low, so after breakfast we headed over to the Itsukushima Shrine to take a closer look at the huge torii gate. There were coins placed as an offering into all of the small tidal pools surrounding the torii and imbedded into the base of the pillars. Theo was very interested in all of the little invertebrates that were in the tidal pools. There were crabs of all sizes, hermit crabs, snails, and I am sure lots of other creatures crawling around.

Dustin, the kids, and I beneath the torii at low tide

Offering money imbedded amongst the barnacles on the torii

Theo exploring the tidal flats

Karlee and William with the torii

Mid afternoon as the tide came in

After we had our fill of gawking at the shrine and torii, we found a much less crowded beach and let Theo swim and play the beach. It was a very sunny day so our skin could only handle a couple of hours on the beach before needing to seek shade.

Theo enjoyed making all sorts of jewelry out of seaweed

He also spent a good hour pretending that he was riding around on a jet ski

Theo made a birthday cake out of bits and pieces he found on the beach. Sand cake with seaweed frosting, snails, shells, glass and pine cone decorations and bamboo candles. Here he is blowing out the candles after singing "Happy Birthday" to himself.

We spent the rest of the day wandering the shopping streets and trying out various regional foods. Some local specialties that we nibbled on were salt water eel (anago) cakes, oysters, and deep fried momiji manju. Momiji manju is a specialty in Hiroshima prefecture and is a maple leaf shaped little cake filled with sweet red bean, custard, cream cheese, sweet green tea paste, chocolate, or a lot of other fillings. There were quite a few shops in Miyajima that made their manju fresh with an awesome machine. Some places even sold them battered and deep fried on a stick. It was heavenly.

The momiji manju machine in  action

Taunting William with the sweet goodness of custard filled, deep fried momiji manju

The torii at sunset

We had really wanted to hike the mountain on the island, which has bands of wild monkeys living on it, but since we decided to not spend one more sleepless night on the island, we didn't have time. We headed back to the mainland on the last ferry and had a long and tiring train ride back to Fukuyama.

Miyajima

Hiroshima Prefecture: Fukuyama City is the small box on
the right and Miyajima is the larger box on the left

In the end of September we all decided to visit Miyajima. This island is on the opposite side of Hiroshima Prefecture and a really popular tourist attraction. All of the of the hotels and ryokan were fairly expensive, but luckily there is a campground on the island that charges 300 yen (about 4$ Canadian) a night. I had shipped all of our camping gear about a week before I left, but by the middle of September when it still hadn't arrived, we started to wonder if we would have to cancel our trip to Miyajima after all. Lucky for us, only a few days before the trip all of our gear arrived.

Karlee and Dustin wait for the train all
loaded up with camping gear

We took the train from Fukuyama to Miyajimaguchi, which took about 2 1/2 hours, and then a quick ferry ride from the mainland to the island. One of the first things we noticed when arriving was that there were deer everywhere. The species on the island is the Sika deer, which is a bit smaller than the deer we are used to and never lose their white fawn spots.  The deer were completely accustomed to humans and were milling about, sleeping, eating people's food and even letting children pet them. They were charming for about the first 30 minutes and then became super annoying, especially after one tried to chomp at William's foot and head butted me when I tried to shoo it away. Luckily, it was one of the deer who had its antlers cut off. By the end of our weekend, even an animal lover like me wanted to kick one. It is very sad actually, since humans are completely to blame for the aggressive, begging, scavenger monsters that these little deer have become.

Theo and a deer inspecting each other

Theo on the ferry

William and I on the ferry

Karlee walking from the ferry to the Campground

A morning clash right next to our tent

The campground was fairly nice during the day, but once it got dark everything changed. Firstly, all the male deer around decided to retest who was in charge of the tents. There was pawing, grunting, and clashing of antlers. At one point during the wee hours of the morning, a deer must have knocked over someone's cooler, since there was a mad herd gallop of at least 10 deer from all points of the campground right past our tent. Once again, all of the males felt the need to fight over who had the rights to the spilled food.

View of the sunset from the campground beach

Laughing at one of Theo's ridiculous jokes

There were a number of people who decided to shoot fire crackers for a few hours. One group of campers only arrived near midnight and sounded like they were building a cabin with all of their tent peg hammering. There was absolutely no wind, so I am not really sure what they were so concerned about. I was almost looking forward to when Theo would wake up at 7:30 a.m. running, shouting, and wreaking vengeance on all of these noisy people. Unfortunately, these same people decided to loudly take down their tents and leave at 4:45 a.m., while Theo somehow slept through it all. To top it all off, a loudspeaker played a long and loud wake up call at 7 a.m. I might have been annoyed if it woke up the kids, but miraculously they both managed to sleep in a little.

Dustin and Theo heading for the toilet

After our crappy night, Karlee, Dustin, and I realized that there was no way we could possibly manage another night at the campground. We decided to explore the town and island until late in the evening, and take the last train back to Fukuyama that night.

To be continued...

Tomonoura

The 19th of September was Respect for the Elderly Day and as this was a national holiday in Japan, Dustin had the day off. We decided to head south to Tomonoura, the port district of Fukuyama. It was about a 15 minute bus ride from downtown, and about as touristy as I have seen Fukuyama get, which is really not that touristy at all. There were no big crowds, only a few little souvenir shops, and only one street food vendor.

The district is pretty small with narrow, winding, stone paved streets and beautiful old Edo period buildings. 

There were old storehouses from the 1800's that you could wander around in, and quite a few little shops selling yomeishu, a sweet herbal liqueur which is supposed to promote a long life. 

Hayao Miyazaki rented a house here in 2005 and based the town in Ponyo off of Tomonoura. Every souvenir shop had a few cute Ponyo themed items for sale which took a lot of self restraint not to buy. 

We went to a quaint udon shop for lunch. The man who owned it told us that Miyazaki had used the goldfish in his courtyard for his original sketches of Ponyo. Theo loved his onigiri. 

William charmed his way into the owner's heart and by the end of our meal he asked us if he could take a picture for his "wall of good customers".  Here was the outcome:

The old stone lighthouse was made to resemble the lanterns used at temples.

Tomonoura is on the Seto Inland Sea with lush little tree covered islands scattered here and there. 

From the harbor you can see tiny Benten Island with its pagoda and torii gate. 

Directly behind Benten Island is Sensuijima, a much larger island, with a little hotel, hot springs, and campground. There is a ferry that takes you from Tomonoura to Sensujima which is made to look like an old sailing ship. Theo was so happy about riding on the "pirate ship".

There was a really nice beach near the campground and Theo was ecstatic to take a dip in the ocean. The water in this area is extremely calm and there were hardly any waves. It was a warmish, over cast day and the water was really pleasant, so Theo spent almost 2 hours enjoying himself in the water. 

Hopefully we can find a free weekend sometime soon to come back and camp. It looked like there were a few trails to wander and beaches to discover on the island and best of all, very few tourists!

Goodbye for Now

The boys and I just returned from a week long trip to the Rockies. This was a multi-purpose trip that included a vacation, a wedding, and dropping Dustin off at the Calgary airport all rolled into one.

In front of Castle Mountain

The boys, Dustin, and I drove to Banff last Tuesday with his parents which was a fun filled 17 hours in extremely close quarters with uncomfortable kids. William cycled between eating, sleeping and crying the whole trip and Theo spent the whole time asking "why?".  I am glad we were spared the "are we there yet?", but answering questions about why everything is the way it is can be more than tiresome. The drive is fairly boring, since you travel through the topographically mind numbing prairies for 16 hours, but you do get to drive through fantastically named Canadian cities like Moose Jaw and Medicine Hat. 

Theo with magnifying glass in hand

We finally arrived in Banff where Dustin's sister and her boyfriend and Dustin's brother and wife joined us. We spent three days there and I wish I could have spent every waking moment hiking, but half of the company we were with was not too pleased at the prospect. The weather was marvellous the whole time. We did spend one full day hiking Marble Canyon and the Paint Pots which are around an area of forest that burned a few years ago from a lightning strike. Theo absolutely adores hiking and was happily darting up and down the trails asking why every living and non-living thing was placed where it was. We also saw a grizzly bear rooting around in the dirt on one of the trails, which I am sure made the whole trip worthwhile to my father in law. 

William drooling his way through the mountains

On the 29th Dustin and I had to drive into Calgary for his JET pre-departure orientation. While Dustin was in his orientation, I was hoping to get William his American citizenship papers since Calgary is the closest U.S. consulate to Winnipeg. Unfortunately, after waiting for 3 hours with two squirmy bored kids and still no service I finally gave up and left. I suppose it is not the first time  have been disappointed with my country. We also celebrated our wedding anniversary in Banff by going out to the Bison which is an insanely good restaurant if anyone is planning a trip there in the future. The next morning we dropped Dustin off at the airport and said our goodbyes until the 24th of August when we will be joining him in Japan. Theo took it really well and seems pretty secure in the fact that we will be seeing Papa again pretty soon.

Parting is such sweet sorrow

After Dustin left we attended his cousin Lorel's wedding. We finally set off back to Manitoba on Sunday evening. The drive back was pretty much the same as the one there, with William slipping into his cycle again and Theo being exhaustingly inquisitive, but we all arrived safe and relatively sane last night. I could have easily spent another two weeks in Banff wandering around the park, but it was nice to have even a few days with the family before we leave.  I am really hoping that the next few weeks are so busy for Dustin and I that we won't even have time to miss each other!