Sunday, September 04, 2011

Three day trip away - Part 3

As I have mentioned before I am not really much of a "tourist attraction" lover and find a lot of the Japanese attractions even less attractive. But, when it is 35 degrees outside and very humid and only 14 degrees inside I am more likely to be tempted to at least go and see what the attraction is all about. We had a few hours to spare before we checked into our accommodation for the night so we went in search of somewhere cool with a little bit of gold thrown in! In Hita City there is a gold mine that was actively worked for 80 years from around 1894 and which has a total of 110km worth of tunnels leading to depths of 500m. They have opened up about 800m of the tunnels and put up really good displays and information about how the mining was done which gives you a really good idea of how it would have been in the mines. They had enough English to make it worth taking Mum there too. After so many mining disasters lately I found it really interesting to get a feel for what they would have gone through. I can't imagine having to work in that kind of environment every day. The display I found the most interesting was one which showed how the very first gold mining was done. Incredibly hard work in incredibly rough conditions.
After our wander the kids did a bit of gold panning and came away with a few little flakes of gold... all found by the demonstrator - it is definitely harder than it looks!

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