October 25 - October 26, 2000

After Okayama, we left the island of Honshu in favor of Shikoku.  Shikoku is the least traveled by tourists, and it shows.  There is practically no English on the island, and very little effort has been made to make it tourist-friendly.  Still, it was a fun experience.  The island is more agricultural than Honshu, and it's quite lovely.

Our first stop was Takamatsu ("tahk-ah-mahts").  The chief reason for staying in Takamatsu was the easy access to Kotohira, which was the main attraction we were going for on Shikoku.  But, in looking through our book, we found Ritsuren Park, a beautiful landscape garden.

The Southern Garden was all we had time to see, since we were pressing on to Kotohira.  Work on the park began in the 1600s and took about 100 years to complete.  With that much time into it, it's gotta be spectacular, which it is.

Mt. Shuin forms a perfect backdrop for the garden, giving it a very large apparent size.  It strikes a nice contrast to those gardens we saw which were surrounded by city.  This one just seems to be surrounded by nature...it's deceptive.

Finding the park was an interesting experience.  Here's Elaine's recollection:

---

"Attempting to follow Frommer's directions to Ritsurin Park and the gardens there, we wandered for a bit.  Then we spotted a map at the station that showed how to get there.  There was no English, but thinking we had figured it out, we tried to follow its directions.  We ended up walking for an hour getting very frustrated.  Looking at the map at the station again, we saw that we had gone in the exact opposite direction we should have.  We debated about taking a taxi, but decided to continue walking.  This time we found it."

---

So, the key learning here...don't go the wrong direction.  You'll get there faster going the right direction.  It took us 15 minutes on the return trip, walking the right way.  Very helpful.

After all that exercise, we figured to have a nice, relaxing stop at Kotohira.  Yeah, right.

Dragging our tired bodies...to Kotohira...

• Takamatsu City Homepage

[ Main Page ]

The Southern Garden of Ritsurin Park, filled with 1,500 pine trees and 500 cherry trees.  Each bend of the path showed a new, beautiful view..

The backdrop of the mountains really gave this park a neat contrast to all the other gardens in the middle of cities.  This one just looked very natural.

How come we don't have landscape gardens like this in the States?