RtG Japan Daily Dispatch - day00 - Flipbook - Page 49
18 September to
16 October 2025
Day 25 Hiroshima Rest Day
13 October 2025
Photos: gerardbrown.co.uk
We’re well onto the home straight now. Today’s
a rest day in Hiroshima, an iconic city, famous
for the wrong reason. It was here in 1945 that the
20th-century world reached a turning point and
entered the atomic age.
The city has been rebuilt of course, and lives have moved
on, but the impressive museum serves as a stark reminder
of the past and hopefully a lesson for the future. Only
one building survived the blast; the Hiroshima Prefectural
Industrial Promotion Hall, designed by Czech architect Jan
Letzel. It stands a few hundred metres from the museum, a
skeletal monument to that awful day.
Away from the history lesson, the rally was diligently
dealing with its homework. In the car park, Oli and Sabine
Stastny’s Ford, which had been trucked to the hotel last
night after losing its clutch shortly after the submersible
bridge, was being worked on. Andy Inskip had diagnosed
the problem - a broken bolt - and opened the gearbox
casing just enough to remove it, clean out the debris and
fit another. It was a long and difficult job but, by day’s end,
it looked like the 1936 Model 48 would roll again.
The ‘gonking’ 1974 Austin Mini
Richard and Catherine Phillipson’s Mini was also being
dealt with. The gonking sound turned out to be a worn CV
joint, so Charlie Neale and Russ Smith were helping the
crew to fit a new one.
Sightseeing and relaxing were then the order of the day,
ahead of the difficult decision of choosing where to eat
dinner. Wherever was settled on, cake with candles would
have been on the dessert trolley for two of our crews. David
Roberts and Irene Dubs were celebrating birthdays today.
A very happy birthday, we wish them many happy returns.
www.rallytheglobe.com
