The side of Miyajima the ferries don't go to

Everyone who comes to Hiroshima goes to Miyajima. Almost all of them see the same kilometre of it: the ferry terminal, the floating gate, the shopping street, the ferry back. The island is far bigger than that, and parts of the western shore have no road to them.

You get there by boat, and once you are on the water the scale of the place changes. Forested slopes come straight down to the sea. The paddling is flat and easy, so this is not a sport — it is a way of being somewhere that is hard to reach.

The contrast is the whole point. Two hours earlier you were in a queue for a photograph of the torii. Now you are on a beach on the same island with nobody in sight.

If you are already planning a Miyajima day, this is the version of it worth extending a night for.

The other half of that contrast runs on a timetable. Whether the torii is standing in water or standing on dry seabed when you queue for the photograph is settled by the tide hours before you get there, and it shifts by roughly fifty minutes a day. Our sister site works out which days do which — worth two minutes before you fix the date.