Just Over A Mile To An Owl On An Isle...

Dad’s away on business, so how do we entertain ourselves, other than going to MacDonald’s for breakfast, lunch and dinner as Jessica was insisting? Well, just a short trip on the Portliner (the driver-less train from Sannomiya station) is the delightful Kobe Flower and Bird Garden on Port Island - the perfect place if you don’t want to travel too far to entertain a fast-food-obsessed 6-year-old.

Relatively new (it opened in March 2006, more or less the same time as Kobe’s airport, which is close by) the garden is spread across several enormous greenhouses and gives you a chance to get up close and personal with our feathered friends. I was told that Port Island was constructed to provide additional living space for residential overspill from Kobe, but it didn’t quite work out – nobody wanted to live on a small, man-made island apparently - and the place does seem a little deserted, despite having a hotel, a university and several large companies.

First off we took in the owl show - all in Japanese of course, but we got the general idea…they’re huge. You can touch the rather impressive Snowy Owl if you’re feeling brave, or for 500 yen you can have your picture taken with one of the many other species.

The gardens have several large ponds with wild fowl, penguins (more photo calls) and koi . We were told that the 1500 square-metre tropical pond boasts around 100 species of water lily, but we didn’t take time to count them. The children were much more interested in other things (Jessica, the parakeets; Jack, an angel trumpet).

After a coffee under a roof of fantastic hanging fuchsia baskets, we found the petting area. Although Jessica did not fancy feeding the toucans (which will actually very gently lift morsels of grape from your hands) she was much more confident with the smaller birds and parakeets.

Japan is a fantastically clean place, but even so, what did strike us as being bit strange was the complete absence of bird poo. Perhaps the residents were wearing the ‘bird diapers’ we found in the shop on leaving - Avian Attire: Flightsuits with Flair. Combines Fashion with Diaper & Leash Function. Even our Japanese friends found these hilarious.

Editor's note: Steve supplied the title for this blog entry, which is a dig at my Northern Ireland accent apparently...