Miuda Hike

Today I drove up to Hitakatsu. I stopped at the Mine Family Park for a quick picnic, luxuriating in the sunny, almost-not-cold weather. I met Kim and Joe at Joey's, and the four of us set out for Miuda. On our way out of Joey's, we noticed that somebody was drying their laundry on a fence in the middle of the parking lot. Weird.

The plan was to hike along the coast, on a path Joey had scouted out recently. We set out along familiar Miuda beach, exploring among the piles of washed-up garbage. The tide pools were crystal clear, and the views were amazing. Kim and I lagged behind because we kept stopping to stare at fauna we couldn't identify. We took the long way around one pool, going so far as to climb up a pretty big rock formation, and saw a lady harvesting seaweed. She happily started talking to us, though our inability to understand much of the local dialect combined with the roar of crashing waves limited our responses mostly to noncommital "uh-huh"s and "oh, really?"s.

After hiking up a hill, we came to a large stone memorial. Dedicated to those who died in the Battle of Tsushima, the memorial lists the names of the 4,380 Russian and 117 Japanese sailors lost. It was pretty impressive to see the Japanese losses stacked up against the Russian ones. Japan really beat the snot out of Russia.

From there we headed along Joey's path, strolling right into a dense bamboo forest. Our approach scared off a deer, which made me wonder how easily deer can plow through the bamboo. The bamboo gave way to more common deciduous forest, with lots and lots of camellias in full bloom.

We made our descent back to the rocky coast. After some scaling, we reached one of our destinations: a cormorant cliffside nesting area. (It's visible from the Miuda parking lot, recognizable by the huge white swath of years of accumulated poop.) The view was majestic: we slid along the cliff such that it was probably a sheer hundred-foot drop to the sea. The deep water, interrupted by occasional crags jutting out, created excellent waves. We sat and basked in the scene for a while, admiring the view of tiny Miuda and the roar of the surf.

After climbing back down from our spot, we trekked onward. The tide pools were increasingly home to interesting creatures. First were sea anemones. Some of them looked inverted, their tentacles covered by what looked like a sheath of skin. Joey, who does this kind of exploring all the time, would unhesitatingly poke the anemones. He did it to show us the water that would squirt out, as well as to feel the suction created by it.

All along our hike, we saw lots of barnacles growing on the rocks. I was feeling particularly geeky, so the kind we saw reminded me of Enemy Mine, an old 80s sci-fi film. Dennis Quaid is stranded on a planet with a Louis Gossett, Jr.-sounding alien, and they learn to use what look like giant barnacles to shield their shelter from meteorites. That reminded me of the part of the movie where a giant antlion tries to eat Dennis Quaid.

Anyway. We also saw a ton of nudibranchs. Having eaten them at one point or another during our stay in Japan, we were all fascinated by the "before" look. While we saw several in tide pools, slowly but surely ambling along the bottom, most of the ones we saw were sitting motionless on dry rock. We guessed they'd slept through the tide change. Kim and I moved a couple back into the water, but soon gave up, figuring they were either going to be fine or had demonstrated a combination of genes decidedly unfit for reproduction.

After taking some pictures at what seemed to be the tip of the coast, we headed back to Miuda. We made it back right at sunset. Joey, Joe, and I went to a sushi restaurant at the port for supper. After a dinner of sushi, anago tempura, yakisoba, and yakimeshi, I headed back down south. Joe was staying the night, but I had a feeling I needed to be in town Sunday to help the teachers move.