26-Dec-2022
It was only last week that Nigel found out there was a monorail in our vicinity. And monorails need to be visited, of course.
So we armed ourselves with another rail pass (a two-day, Fukuoka-wide one this time), and set off for Kitakyushu.
To get there you travel on the very beautiful Sonic, which gives you a very smooth, fast ride:
Our trip basically consisted of lunch and monorail.
Lunch first, at another of these sit-round-the-bar places (sometimes, as here, the spaces are partitioned off, presumably for hygiene reasons):
Varieties of beef sukiyaki: very simple, very tasty
Nicely nourished, we tackled the monorail. There's 8.8 kms of it, and it opened in 1985 (for more detail of the history, see here).
It offers a pleasant, comfortable, scenic ride (I was quite surprised at how much it climbed):
Nigel has a video of the monorail experience here.
And to get home, we rode a different sort of Sonic: