Hitchhiking in Japan: Hiroshima
4th of May, 2025.
I ask to a couple if I can put my metal cup in their small fire place, just so I can get some hot water for coffee. They have an adorable little dog with them. This trip of ours would be a lot about me seen dogs and going all crazy about them all the time, and Miles always saying: “All of them? Really?”. Laugh. I’m actually surprised about how many people have dogs here in Japan. But most of them are small dogs.
It’s a beautiful and sunny day, so after breakfast, with our tents already dry, we pack and start going down the hill towards Hiroshima. We are hitchhiking at the same time because it’s about 20 minutes driving from here.
On the way, we pass through some lovely houses in this lovely Japanese village.
After walking just for a few minutes, a lovely lady offer to take us to Hiroshima. Yay!
She’s very cute and after some consideration about where we are going and where she’s heading, she put the address of the main historical attraction in Hiroshima in her map, and drives us there.
She seems very happy to help too, just like everybody else who has helped us until now. And she tell us about this Japanese saying, which sounds more or less like this: “Itchi go Itchi eh” – and it talks about the importance of once-in-a-life time encounters. How adorable!
She drops us off right in front of the Atomic Bomb Dome, and from here we walk to what it should be a tourist information centre (it’s not), with the hope they can keep our backpacks there for a few hours, while we explore the area (they don’t).
No panic! Only after a few hundred metres, we ask in another place, more like a shop with a coffee shop, and they let us drop off our backpacks there for a few hours without further questions apart from what time will we be back. Yay!
This historical part of Hiroshima makes you forget that it’s a city with more than 2 million people. It’s crowded and full of people / tourists, yes, but it’s also nice and inviting in a nice way. Today there’s an important baseball match (apparently, they are crazy about baseball in Japan, go figure), and the stadium is right here, so we see loads of people dressed in a purple uniform and cheering for their team.
We walk only around this area, but it’s huge, with parks and the river, which makes it everything very beautiful. It’s a sunny and warm day. Today is also part of the so called Golden Week, a week break for Japanese people, and that’s why there’s so many people around, even more than usual. There’s some local markets here and there.
After walking around, we stop to rest and have some snacks. Here we make a plan for our exit of Hiroshima. We find a hitchhiking spot, and decide which town’s name we will write down in our sign, as we are going to Mount Aso, which it might be way to far South for people to understand they can take us only half way or so.
We then walk around Hiroshima Castle, which is very beautiful from outside, and in contrast with the green of the trees and the blue sky looks even better; plus the river.
I’m sure there’s plenty more to visit in Hiroshima, but that’s why we came here for. For me, it was more like being here, in this huge and important symbol for the WWII, more than anything else. As we were at the Atomic Bomb Dome, the only building remaining from those times, and I was reading the info board, looking at the photographs, I just can’t stop thinking of how could humans be so low to do such a thing, bombarding a whole city, reducing it to ashes, with its whole population, for what? Power? Money? Truce? What justify killing almost 150.000 people just like that?
We don’t have to walk a lot to find a suitable hitchhiking spot, surprisingly, for a city the size of Hiroshima. And the spot is quite good! Here in Japan, doing our hitchhiking sign in the gas stations works really well! They always have cardboard boxes and markers (which they call it “magic”), plus they are always so happy to help!
After some time waiting (which I understand due to the fact that it’s late afternoon), a car stops. Our sign only shows a town about one hour from here, and that’s because we simply want to camp in a service area on the way there, and tomorrow we will carry on to our next destination: Mount Aso.
A very nice and friendly man, called Onichi, drives us all the way to the service area. At some point, I kind of figure out that he is not going anywhere, as he tell us he’s going to have some drinks with friends later night in Kaila, the small town where Miles and I camped last night. What means that he gave us a lift to the service area simply because he was free and wanted to help, and not because it was on his way or something. How sweet!
The service area is massive and there’s a perfect spot behind it where we put up our tents while there’s still daylight. All the SA in Japan are equipped with great bathroom facilities, free hot and cold water (plus green tea, and sometimes even a second tea option!), and a bunch of other stuff. The only dark side of it is the food. Not that it’s bad, I couldn’t know as I haven’t eaten any, and the reason is simply because they only accept cash and not cards. I understand that happening in countries like Thailand, where the food court of PTT stations also only accept cards, but here in Japan? These are all inside and nice restaurants, how come? The other problem is that, if there’s not a 7-Eleven, or any other small market like that, what unfortunately happens more often than not, then you have to buy food in this kind of “souvenir” shop which belongs to the SA, and they suck! There’s almost no variety at all and the things are way overpriced, so Miles and I just have some instant noodles.
10 Years Around the World 