Naoshima - Art Island

There are many small islands off the coast of Takamatsu, which you can travel to by ferry quite easily. Alternatively you can take a ferry from Uno on the main island of Honshuu. I had spent some time researching islands on Japan-Guide; did I want to visit the Mediterranean Shodoshima, famous for its olives? The small, mostly mountainous island of Megijima, famous for its Ogre Cave (from the story of Momotaro)? Or perhaps Ogijima, with its one village, reportedly a collection of wooden houses connected by a confusing system of lanes? In the end, I decided on Naoshima -

Shikoku: Naruto's Whirpools and Takamatsu's Old Village

Last Friday was my favourite kind of national holiday - the kind that latches on to a weekend, giving me freedom to travel a little further out of Hamamatsu than I normally could. Japan is made up of four main islands, and so far - other than my soujourn to Hachijo-jima - I had not been off Honshu, the main island. For a long time, Jeff had wanted to visit another of the islands, in particular Shikoku. I didn't know much about Shikoku, other than that Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shorewas set in the very city that we would later stay in...
 
Armed with the internet and zero knowledge, I set about planning a 3-day trip. Unfortunately, time and money wouldn't allow us to travel too far into the depths of Shikoku, but we did manage to skim the surface while visiting two other cities on Honshuu on the journey. The plan - travel to Kobe on the Thursday night after work and stay at a hotel. The next day, we would take a bus from Kobe to Naruto, at the closest point of Shikoku. Here, we would marvel at Naruto's "famous" whirpools for a while before heading to Takamatsu (where Kafka is mainly set!). We would stay there for one night, and spend a part of the next day on Naoshima, a small island famous for art. From there we would travel up to Okayama and stay there for a night (I liked the look of the castle) before heading back our separate ways on Sunday.
 
So, Thursday came and off we went. Meeting in Maibara, we were in Kyoto by around 9pm. Using the JR trains all the way from Hamamatsu would normally take about 5 hours, but I was lazy and decided to splash out on the shinkansen to Maibara, before continuing on the JR trains. We walked around Sannomiya for a while, but to be honest there doesn't seem to be that much to do there. We spent some money in an izakaya, and Jeff showed me their "famous" flower clock... which, to be honest, was nowhere near as awesome as the totem pole lurking behind it! It was raining so we didn't stay out for long.