千八百五十一： 鹿児島

sunrise this morning

Woke up at 5am to fly to Kagoshima (鹿児島）this morning for Tomoko's wedding this weekend. SJ also went for the wedding so he rented a car and we had decided to go Kagoshima, Sakurajima to see the volcano then drive up to Miyazaki, where Tomoko lives. However, after we went to the aquarium at Kagoshima, we realised that the volcano was obscured by i think volcanic ash clouds/smoke, so couldn't see the volcano clearly at all.

when the sky finally cleared to see Sakurajima a little -桜島

However, there was this weird fish at the aquarium which ate sand and spat it out. It also filtered the sand out from its gills. (notice the sand piling up below it's gill area in the video) very weird.

　

since we scrapped the Sakurajima plan, had to find places to see this afternoon. so went to a famous temple 霧島神宮 (Kirijima Jingu) which was tooo spacious and had too many steps then headed to a 吊橋 at the town of Aya - 綾の照葉大吊橋. Pretty cool, but it was really tedious to get there, drove for nearly 3 hours on a very narrow and winded mountain road and I never ever get car sick but this route almost pushed me there. I was starting to feel pukish when there was about 10km left, and my head was starting to hurt so forced myself to close my eyes and doze off instead. When we finally reached there, there was only 30 min left to closing time :( but. best thing was I saw a rainbow even though there was no rain.

a tiny bit of rainbow in the middle of the sky above the clouds

it was another hour drive to Miyazaki City, finally reached the hotel. Super tired!! Tomoko is going to take us to 日南海岸 area tomorrow finally no more mountains, can see the sea!!