Nagasaki 22nd April

Being low down at the back of the boat is generally good – it’s quite stable. The downside is that when we’re going to dock, there is lots of vibration, presumably because they turn the azimuth pods sideways to push us in, but it’s always at about 5am so I’m not sure what they’re doing.

So we woke in Nagasaki, which is not particularly big and sits in a valley where the river empties into the long narrow bay. After breakfast we went off on our tour, which was slow to start because when we change countries there’s a lot of rigmarole with passports (which has generally not happened on European cruises).

I’m not sure how to describe today’s tour, which was not exactly boring but was slow and not particularly enjoyable. First we went to the Peace Park and adjacent Ground Zero park. Neither of these were particularly well maintained, they seemed weedy and muddy, though I appreciate the weather didn’t help. The Peace Park had a Peace Statue which was stunningly ugly, a dumpy, thick, ill-proportioned man that I couldn’t bring myself to take a picture of. Then there was a Peace Bell with statues of children above it which was ugly and then other statues donated by other countries than were almost as bad. The fountain was the only thing that was kind of okay.

After this the bus took us to the atomic bomb museum. This was a modern, concrete-style edifice. It was okay, lots of salvaged relics and then some things about the war and post-war bomb development. Lots of tourists and lots of Japanese school children.

Our final stop was for the cable car ride to the top of Mount Inasa. This involved lots of queuing to get up and again to get down. The view from the top varied as clouds blew in to obscure the viw and then cleared again. 

By the time we got back it was mid-afternoon and we had to hunt around for a late lunch. At the cable car station we’d continued our experiments in Japanese snacks and icecreams, with something that turned out to be two slices of frozen cake with a dollop of icecream in the middle (available in a range of flavours). I don’t know what it was called.

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