A little boy urinates

It all came about with Dad having a large envelope that needed delivering and Hitomi and I wanting to just get out of Tokyo for a while. Dad could so easily have used the postal service or a courier and we could have gone anywhere just for a moment to breathe and to move away from the almost surreal feelings back at home. We could once more fool ourselves into thinking that it's just another day. It is of course just another day and for most people all over the world, normalcy continues but here the news is constant and so close to us that we can almost reach through the screen and touch the devastated ruins and we can stand beside those grieving people and cry with them.
It needs no stretch of logic, just an understanding of dad's persuasive manner that had the two things combine together. We would deliver his envelope to Tokushima and then spent time in such a beautiful region as our little break away from home.
We took the 9:30pm bus from Shinjuku bus station and headed out into the night. Hitomi settled back into her seat and she casually watched the dark city disappear behind us, her head slightly nodding either from a lack of sleep, the motion of the bus or the sweet sounds of the 'funky monkey babys' or a combination of one or more or all of them, I didn't know. I fell asleep quite quickly really as the soft vibrations almost rocked me to sleep and when I opened my eyes again we were passing Osaka and heading towards Kobe. I connected to the net with my laptop for a while but settled down to sleep again before we crossed the bridge into Ayajin, the island that we visited last March. Hitomi was still in dreamland. The Kobe-Awaji-Naruto Expressway that takes us from Kobe into Shikkoku carries a large volume of traffic and so traveling there over night when the traffic is much less dense makes perfect sense and the seats in the bus are very comfortable and easy to relax in. it is also much cheaper than the train or the airline.

Shikoku is the smallest of our four main islands and its name 'Skikoku' means four regions. There are four prefectures on this beautiful island, three of them in the north and easily accessible from the rest of Japan. There is a line of high mountains that almost cut the island in half and the prefecture on the far side, the south side is Kochi, which is sparsely populated and still very wild. We tend to say that people from Kochi are of the rugged kind. We mean rugged in the way that they are considered strong hardy people with endurance and stamina but sadly the other side of the term is also associated as in a lacking of culture and polish! I personally do not know anyone from the region and I refuse to generalize.
We arrived a little after six twenty in the morning and took a taxi up to the hotel. We booked in, showered and changed and had a wonderful breakfast before telephoning dad to say that we'd arrived safely.
We had a look around the city from lunch time until the early evening when someone came to the hotel to collect the envelope. Oh I know it all sounds like it's full of secret documents from a spy movie but it was just some business papers and a couple of non-electronic transferable items to one of dad's colleagues.
On Sunday we took a tour up to the Iya valley where the scenery is really breath-taking. Everywhere seems to have a legend or a story from ancient times.
As a photo opportunity, we stopped by a statue of the little boy standing on the edge of a high point to pee into the river far below as a feat to prove his bravery before continuing past such steep roads and steeper inclines falling away from the roads and go look the ancient vine bridges that cross the hundreds of tributary's that feed the Yoshino river.

Life is very relaxing here but then getting away from cities and usual routines always is, isn't it?
It is now Sunday night and after just two days of this land of legend I feel rejuvenated enough to close my internet and go have a couple of beers and then later we can enjoy the quiet, darker and silent night together.
In fact, that's what I will do!