13 September, 2013

The morning was rather non-existant, I think we slept in after my pump kept us awake all night beeping about lows (which I guess was good that it alerted me).

At about lunchtime we made up our mind to go to Ushiku Daibutsu, currently the 3rd largest statue in the world, and the largest statue of buddha. To get there was actually a bit difficult. We took a once every half hour JR Line (very unusual in Tokyo, most come every 5 or so minutes) out to Ushiku. No-one in Ushiku spoke any English and it took us a long time to figure out where to catch the bus from to get to the Daibutsu  (Stop 1, in case anyone reads this and needs to know). The bus itself only came once every hour and a half or so, so we had a 50 minute wait until it arrived. Our train of course was covered by our JR Rail Passes, but the bus to the Daibutsu was 660Y each way per person. An interesting thing that I noted on the bus was that the driver had barely anything to do with the fare. You take note when you get on the bus of the stop you get on at, and at the end you pay what price corresponds with the bus stop number. You feed it into a conveyor belt, which I don't think gives change, so we were glad we had the correct fare for both ways.

The bus journey took a good half an hour. You could see the Daibutsu from several kilometers away, it was the tallest thing around as Ushiku was a rather small town with no high rises.

The Daibutsu cost only 800Y for the full tour, which included going inside the statue and admittance to the gardens and mini zoo.

Hugh & I being Buddha's.

Inside the Daibutsu you take off your shoes and are ushered into a small room. All the lights are blacked out and a man speaks in Japanese. They do not have English translation at all for the tour but that didn't bother me, we just followed what everyone else did.

Inside the Daibutsu you see a room filled with little gold statues of Buddha's, about 3000 of them. I think you could pay money (probably a lot) to get your name inscirbed beneath one.

We caught the elevator up the 5th floor inside the statue, which I think was about 100m up (The whole thing stands at about 120m from ground to top, and about 100m from feet to head), and slowly worked our way down.

Thankfully this all took some time as the bus back, after dropping us off, didn't make another run for over 2 hours. We caught the last one of the day, which leaves the Daibutsu at 4.10pm, and you arrive at Ushiku station at just before 5pm.