Japanese highways.
Expensive.Magnificent engineering feats.
I can still remember my bus ride out of Tokyo (much cheaper to get home to Hiroshima on the highway bus, 11 hours, than the bullet train, 4.5 hours) which left the very central Tokyo station and, after only a few city blocks, rose up onto a highway/expressway (I never know which is the correct term to use) and proceeded to glide out of Tokyo without having to stop at a single set of lights. Pretty incredible, although understandable considering it is one of the most densely populated cities in the world and there was no shortage of government money when they were trying to pull their economy out of recession.
For those readers of mine who have played any of the Need for Speed games of late (which I suspect is a worryingly high percentage) you can picture the highways of Japan as being very much like in that game. Huge concrete rivers that allow cars to whip around the city uninterrupted. The only downside is the insanely high tolls. Driving between Hiroshima and Kobe (about 450km I think) would cost you over $100 in highway tolls, or so I have been told by friends here.
The thing that really blows me away every time I travel across Japan is the enormous numbers of bridges and tunnels. The country, or at least Hiroshima prefecture, is so mountainous that the highways look like the engineers just said "fuck the mountains, we're going in the most direct route and that's that." They just draw an imaginary line between one city and the next and just dig tunnels or construct bridges to fill that line with highway. On a recent trip to Sandankyo (a small town in the NW of Hiroshima prefecture) we went through so many tunnels I lost count. One of them was at least 3km long according to my rough calculations. It all adds up for a pretty spectacular driving experience although it can feel strangely claustrophobic, especially in areas where the highway is bounded by enormous soundproof walls.
You would think that with all these amazing highways that you could get some nice high speed driving done. Well scratch that thought, the limit on all the highways seems to be 80km/h! It just doesn't make sense, the roads are in such amazingly good condition they could be 200km/h autobahns. Maybe its a conspiracy between the government and the Japan Rail companies that operate the shikansen (bullet train). Faced with the choice of a 11 hour drive to Tokyo that would cost me at least 200AUD in fuel and another 200AUD in tolls or a 4.5 hour train ride in big comfy seats with refreshments that costs about 200AUD I know which I'd choose.
Oh here's some highway vocab for those of you who care. "Intersection" in Japanese is インター which is "intaa" in katakana (the alphabet reserved for foreign words and names). It really is amazing how many English words the Japanese have adopted.
That's about enough for a random musing. Let me know if you liked it and I will keep it up.
