A gorgeous morning dawns as we arrive back in Japan with Sakurajima spewing fumes in the distance. 

We’re back in Japan!   And you know what that means!  Immigration!  Supposedly a long and drawn out process, we are not waiting to get off and hazard long wait times, so we pull the suite card to get off early….or I should say at least try to.  We were told – and have a printed letter to prove it – that we can get off without a numbered card (which everyone else needs) and since we also have a “shore excursion” booked (the shuttle) we can get off for that. Well, that’s all fine and dandy until we hit the gangway stairway and Emily or Brooke or whatever the hell the activities director’s name is!  She gives us the hardest time, asking us for our number, we show her our cards and our letter, nah, doesn’t cut it. She gets all haughty with us. Tells us we have to wait in the theater for our tour. We show her in the app where it says we meet outside. She just says, well, you can try, but they’ll just send you back. Ok sweetie, we will just try then. You know what we are thinking!!!

As it turns out, NO ONE questions us at all.  We sail right through immigration and are outside with an hour to kill before the shuttle even leaves!  Take that baby!

So, what do we do? We walk around the walking track in the park adjacent to the port, enjoying the lovely cool, crisp weather.  Great way to waste time and get some exercise.  And while we could keep on doing laps, even though we are still way early for the shuttle, with maybe 45 minutes until it leaves, we notice other people lining up there, so we cut our walking short and head over to hang out until they are ready to board.  Then, finally at 8:30 on the dot, we are ready to go.  Off we go into the city with one of the tour people onboard who gives us a sort of overview on Kagoshima and the area.  It takes about 30 minutes to get into town and to the drop off point – which is fine. We’re going to catch the City View HoHo bus – and after listening to our pseudo-guide, we figure it is probably better to jump on the bus in the middle of the city (a 10 minute walk from the shuttle drop off) rather than try to get it here on the waterfront.  It all has to do with schedules and timing. So off we go.

It’s an easy walk to Chou park where stop #4 on the bus is located.  And we have 14 minutes to do it.  Unfortunately the damn traffic lights are our undoing!  They take forever to change – and nobody jay-walks, even if there isn’t a car in sight.  Geez. And we thought Asheville traffic lights were bad!  Holy crap.  These are so bad – we literally miss the bus by 1 minute! Because we can see it at the stop, but we can’t cross the freaking road to get there because we have a red walk light.  Argh!!!  This means an entire half an hour is wasted waiting for the next stupid bus.  Sigh. Into every travelers life a little rain must fall….but still!

So, wait we do.  We wander around Chou park, which isn’t all that interesting.  Go across the street for the “photo point” for the Saigo Takamori statue (the last samurai) and take pictures – well – as soon as the Japanese girl who is posing for a bazillion pictures moves.  We get some great shots of the statue – along with this cute little dog statue that is sitting on the photo platform area. 

Crossing back over to the park and bus stop side of the street, we find a toilet, buy a coffee from the vending machine, which is cold this time – who the heck knows which is which?  We sure don’t!  Then hop on the bus, buying our tickets from the driver and starting our adventure. 

First stop is the Shiroyama Observatory park where there are incredible views over the city proper and of Sakurajima. It is such a pretty day, we decide to walk down to the next bus stop, through the park, instead of waiting for the bus up here.  A great decision, as the walk is wonderful, with a nice paved path winding though the lovely park. 

We make it down to the street, past the Chisui Shrine dedicated to the 84 people who died from disease or accident while building a levee to protect the town from the overflowing river, to the bus stop with not much time to kill. (OK, we even jay-walked because we weren’t going to miss that damn bus again!) And wouldn’t you know it? The bus is late.  Oh well, what can you do?

It finally arrives and we grab a seat for the ride up the hill to the Sengan-en gardens.  Getting our combo ticket for the gardens and the Shimadzu family house (a very important royal family here in Kagoshima) we enter and begin our wanderings.  The gardens are not that large, only 12 acres totally, but are nonetheless impressive with ruins of the old Reverberatory furnace built as part of a project to counteract the challenges at the end of the Shogunate period, Shrines to the Mountain and Water deity, lovely old gates and beautiful garden rock sculptures.

Inside the house, we can walk through the many rooms (it is really large and it is only 1/3 the size of the original house – they reduced the size when the last prince moved to Tokyo!) and get a feel for the international nature of the Shimadzu family.  Gorgeous lacquered furniture and furnishings, beautiful inner garden and long hallways of strategically tatami mats give you a feel for how the family has lived through the years.  There are displays of the old style clothing they wore, an old telegraph machine and a model steam engine, built by one of the Shimadzu from information gleaned from textbooks in the 1800s. And a really cool painted oyster shell display – which turns out to be a matching game with 160 shells divided into 2 boxes – one face up, the other face down for matching.

And the interior garden is spectacular! You can see it from virtually every room.

Moving through the different rooms we reach the reception room where important guests were entertained, Tadayoshi’s (the prince who took over in 1858) private rooms including his changing room with gorgeous screens, his bedroom, even his private toilet.  There is also a room where the family inspected gifts given to them from dignitaries. It’s a fabulous view into a completely different lifestyle.

Moving on to the rest of the garden area, we wander around the gorgeously manicured lawns, the stunning views of Sakurajima and the gorgeous house sitting majestically between 2 lush green mountain peaks.

And it just keeps getting prettier and prettier as we pass lakes and waterfalls, paths through the trees. Cherry blossoms, on their last legs, but still beautiful dot the landscape.  Too many gorgeous views and too many photos! A lovely way to spend an hour or two on this beautiful day.

But, we are on a schedule and need to get back out to the bus stop for the next bus to take us back into town.  It is about lunch time, so we hop off the bus at the waterfront parking lot where we will catch the shuttle later, asking the tourist folks there where to go to eat.  They direct us into town to a mall area with a food stall hall upstairs. Finding the mall is easy, the 2^nd floor food? Not so much, but we manage to find it finally and settle on a great little ramen shop where we order from the automated machine in the front. We’re getting used to this!  The pork ramen is excellent as well as the big beer (this is the land of big beers!) and we thoroughly enjoy our meal sitting at the little counter in our 2 person plexiglass section.

We work off our ramen meal by walking through the city, along the river, to the Meiji Restoration museum. Here we get a history lesson on how the Shogunate period ended and the modernization of Meiji began.  Of course there is little English and we do most of our translating on the phone, but really just end up looking at all the displays without bothering.  It is here that we find out how much Saigo loved his dogs, he kept 10 or 20 of them at any given time, which is obviously why the little satsuma dog is on the photograph platform near his statue.

Watching the time, we take our leave, walking back to the shuttle, stopping at the Lawson’s on the corner for our snack supplies, then arriving back at the port to watch the show Kagoshima port puts on for our farewell. 

We decided on the buffet tonight, planning on just having salad, but there were so many good Asian things up there we couldn’t resist – we stuffed ourselves, unfortunately!  But it was oh so good.  Then went to the magician show, who was just excellent! And then to bed – tomorrow Aburatsu.