Shimoda Trip Part One - Kawazu Loop Bridge

At the end of December, we took a short trip to Shimoda at the end of the Izu Peninsula. We had originally planned to take the train, but realized that it would actually be cheaper to drive and pay the highway tolls. The drive through Tokyo wasn't much fun, but the area south of Mount Fuji was very beautiful (Nozomi had to tell me to watch the road, not the view, a couple of times).

We followed the highway down the peninsula as it wound through the mountains and I wished that we had started earlier in the day so we could have enjoyed the scenery more before it got dark. I was using Google maps on my phone for navigation, and as we started to head down out of the mountains, I saw a very strange thing on the map display: it showed the road making a complete circle. Because it was dark, I couldn't see far ahead; I thought that maybe Google maps had some kind of error. We approached the big circle on the map, and then I saw the big circle in the road.

What do you do when the road needs to descend from a mountain very quickly, but there isn't enough space? You build a circular bridge. It was rather eerie in the darkness, but very interesting to experience. We didn't have time to stop and take pictures, so I'm including some photos I found on the Internet.