Touring the south

After spending Monday nursing a nasty sunburn--I'm still new to this snorkeling thing, and failed to realize just how much of your back and shoulders stick out when you float along looking at the pretty fishies--we four southerners all piled back in the car on Tuesday for a whirlwind tour of Tsushima south of my town.

Mike had left the morning after our Kinkai night to go to America for two weeks, Joey was leaving that weekend to go to Thailand for two weeks, and I was leaving that Friday to go back home for two weeks. That meant I wouldn't have a chance to show them around until September, but with school starting back up, there would be all kinds of welcome parties for them, so finding time to do stuff would be kind of hard. That's what made me want to show them as much as possible before I went home.

We stopped first at a mountain about ten minutes south of town. It's the easiest mountain to hike on Tsushima: you drive up a big hill, park at a staircase, and voila--summit and amazing view! Gavin noticed you can see vague outlines of mountains off in the distance. It's either Iki or Fukuoka, as that's the southeast coast of Tsushima.

The next stop was Oura, the beach with the diving platform, and where we had a barbecue last month. Gavin ran out and jumped off the platform some, while Joe, Rose, and I walked along the shore.

After that, we went to Ayumodoshi, a huge park situated along a river. The river flows over smooth, flat rock, which provides a lot of space for sitting. There are a couple of big pools that are great for swimming, and lots of families visit the park in the summer. There's a big wooden suspension bridge spanning the river at the entrance to the park, which reminds me of Indiana Jones every time I go. We took a walk along the river, and on the way back we noticed it was clouding up.

As we headed to Tsutsuzaki, the last stop I'd planned, it came a cloud. Just like the summer storms in Georgia, Florida, and Alabama, it went from beautiful and sunny, to cloudy, to torrential downpour, and back to sunny, in the course of half an hour. Luckily for us, that's exactly how long it took us to get to where we were going.

Tsutsuzaki is the southernmost point of Tsushima, with a lighthouse off the shore, amid some rocks jutting out of the ocean. There's a weather station at the top of a hill which affords a spectacular view of the bottom of the island, and there's a very old munitions shed dating back to the time of the Battle of Tsushima in the Russo-Japanese War.

Our crazy trip finished, we headed for home. My little bitty Suzuki Kei, all 660cc of it, performs admirably when it's just me in the car. With four full-sized Americans, though, the hills on this island--which are difficult enough as it is--are just brutal. We'd be coasting along at about 40mph with the air conditioning on, then come to a hill, and all of a sudden we'd be going about 10mph with the engine at 2500rpm. Shutting off the AC provided a noticeable boost, but we'd still have to make do with 20-25mph up hills.