Hey Hive!
If you missed the last few posts, we're recounting our trip to Hiroshima back in April 2019! Sean had won some free air tickets to Hiroshima from a lucky draw sponsored by one of the local banks in Singapore, DBS! Since we've never been, we decided that was a good chance to explore the Chūgoku region!
Last week, we started our day-long journey of visiting Rabbit Island, aka Ōkunoshima which is home to over a thousand wild rabbits!
So we took a train and then it was a short ferry ride to arrive at Ōkunoshima! The whole island is pretty much inhabited other than these little guys, and you even get to feed them with rabbit food that you can buy!
They were actually surprisingly tame but we still made sure to be cautious in case one of them went rabid and bit us.
Anyway let's continue!
13 April 2019. Saturday.
This is whole map of the island, but unfortunately it's in Japanese so we couldn't really understand it.
But it's alright we were mainly here to see all the rabbits anyway. And we found some cherry blossoms here too, like this huge beautiful tree!
And these cherry blossoms overhanging some very important looking stones with words carved into them. I'm not sure what it says but maybe it's about the history of the island?
This whole little area of the island actually had a lot of sakura trees around, and the ground was littered with pretty pink petals!
It looked so picturesque it felt like we could film a drama here or something.
And there was even a little shrine here too! It looked so rustic like it had been here for a long time.
The rabbits were pretty scattered here but there was this little guy just chilling.
I know we were here for the rabbits but the trees here looked so pretty I couldn't help but just stand and admire them.
But we did see a lot of adorable rabbits around so not to worry! Some of them were even huddling together like this; it looked so cute!
We weren't sure if they'd eaten their fill so we tried feeding them and one of them seemed interested at least!
After that they all seemed pretty eager for our treats!
Here's a video of me feeding them! Their snoots were so soft and it was kinda tickling my hand a little bit when they were eating the treats from my hand. xD But it was so cute feeding all 3 of them at once!
I was kinda scared that we wouldn't have enough treats for them since we were going to finish our bag of treats.
After that we took a walk further down the island and arrived at this empty plain.
And we saw this little guy chilling outside his burrows!
Here's a better map of the island in English! This was definitely more useful showing the different sites and the history of the Setonaikai National Park which this island is a part of; and its also one of Japan's very first national parks in 1934!
There were definitely more rabbits out here in this empty plain. Look at all those burrows!
Turns out this empty plain is actually the National Park Resort, called Yukamura Okunoshima! I guess the rabbits were here to relax at the resort >.<
Sean tried feeding this one that was hopping around and he accepted some treats!
There was also this rabbit just relaxing under the huge palm trees here.
And another dude just feeding lettuce to this whole group of rabbits!
And not too far from the resort was actually the site where they used to manufacture poison gas back in 1930s?! I'm not sure what the poison was for but I guess it was for war time..
There were a bunch of rabbits just behind this signboard chilling in the bushes.
And more behind the fence! It was kinda hard to feed them but we tried our best! And it was so cute to see their little heads squeezing through the fence.
The empty area had an amazing view of the sea and neighbouring islands too! Maybe the rabbits gathered here to enjoy the sea breeze since I'm guessing it does get quite warm out here when the sun is out.
We just walked around looking at the rabbits and trying our best to avoid the poop on the floor. And we came across this adorable couple of rabbits!
I was scared of getting too close lest they get scared and run off, but I did manage to get a close up!
There was also this tiny bunbun under the bushes! It looked so cute!
This guy looked pretty well-fed with a whole salad in front of him!
We still had a couple of handfuls of treats left and we wanted to use them all up before leaving so we went looking for rabbits who wanted food and tried to feed as many of them as we could.
Which also gave me plenty of opportunities to take cute pics!
I like how each rabbit had a different coat too; they must've been cross breeding for who knows how many generations!
I think Sean had a lot of fun feeding and petting the rabbits too.
We started to slowly make our way back to the port and we came across the small cute bunny again! But I think it wasn't hungry because we tried to feed it and it wasn't too interested.
We didn't really explore the whole island, but we weren't too interested in the messy war-torn history of this place where soldiers died and poison gas was being made. Not to be insensitive, but neither of us are history buffs and we just wanted to see some cute rabbits.
And after emptying our treat bag it was getting a little late so we headed back to the port to catch the ferry back.
It was early evening by the time we left the island and we got to enjoy the nice sea breeze on the ferry back to the mainland.
It was less crowded now so we got to take some pictures at the ticket station which had this huge banner!
And a unique manhole cover too!
We had some time to kill so we went exploring this town and saw they had a couple of street stalls set up.
And this karaage stall caught my eye so we bought a cup to share for a snack!
It looked and smelled pretty good; but didn't seem like it had much spice.
It wasn't as good as our favourite karaage stall but it was still pretty tasty.
It was like a local street market or carnival here with so many snack stalls and even some games!
Like this stall where you could get pet fish? It seems like there are always these kinds of stalls in carnivals for some reason.
We saw this really cheap "pancake" stall that piqued our interest. I'm not too sure what it was but it seemed like a savoury pancake of some kind.
It was a pretty small serving of course but it was pretty tasty nonetheless. It tasted like a fish paste pancake with egg and vegetables on top? It wasn't super fishy or anything though which was good.
After that we headed back to the train station and were greeted by this amazing sunset!
There was a grass patch on one side of the train station that had a whole group of cats! Sorry for the poor quality:
This was one of the few stations that we've been to that was outdoors, and it was cool to see so many cats gathering close by! We were joking that they were plotting to invade Rabbit Island xD
Here's a map of the surroundings! Turns out there's actually quite a lot to see in this region other than Rabbit Island.
We had so much fun exploring the island though! And what a unique experience it was! If you ever get the chance definitely go and see it for yourself, especially if you like rabbits!
We were so beat after returning back to Hiroshima we bought Lotteria back for dinner and just enjoyed our night relaxing our feet in the apartment.
We've read about another island in Japan that is inhabited by cats, called Aoshima, that we'd love to visit one day as well! Maybe sometime in the future we'll find our way there!
Thanks so much for reading!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
Check out my previous post in this series!
TacoCat’s Travels #158 (Hiroshima): Visiting Rabbit Island! 🐰