We had three more nights in Tokyo before it was time to leave Japan. Having previously stayed in Shinjuku, this time we stayed in Ginza in the East of the city. Ginza is one of Tokyo’s shopping districts so there was lots in the area which was handy.
We found it difficult to book hotels for the weekend at short notice in any of the towns we fancied visiting so our last three nights before heading back to Tokyo were spent in three different hotels, with lots of train journeys in between.
Having heard that just North of Nagasaki there is a whole theme park based on Holland, we couldn’t resist a peak – it sounded too bizarre to be true. Bizarre it definitely is. Apparently they even imported the bricks for the buildings from the Netherlands.
Next on our Japan itinerary was a few days in Nagasaki on the island of Kyushu (so far we’d been on Honshu island). Like Hiroshima, Nagasaki is pretty famous for being bombed, but we found there was a lot more to the city. We didn’t actually visit any of the A-bomb memorial sites here.
Okunoshima is a small island in the Japanese inland sea which we visited for a day from Hiroshima. During WW2, it was chosen as the site for the Japanese army to develop chemical weapons and huge amounts of mustard gas and tear gas were produced here. That’s not why we went though. We went because […]
Unfortunately everyone has heard of Hiroshima due to the atomic bomb ‘Little Boy’ that was dropped here on 6th August 1945. There is of course more to the city, an art museum, castle and a great network of riverside parks and paths. It’s also a great city to base yourself in for various daytrips, but […]
We visited Nara, another former capital, as a day trip from Osaka. It’s a bit closer to Kyoto but as Nara is all about temples, we decided we needed a break between temple visiting in Kyoto and Nara.
It was a fairly short train ride to our next stop of Osaka. Osaka is Japan’s second city, and hence is very built up, merging with the neighbouring city of Kobe. Hotels seem to get booked up pretty quickly in Japan so we ended up staying a little bit away from the centre but our […]
Kyoto was the capital of Japan for over 1000 years and is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Japan due to the high density of temples and other sights.
From Tokyo, we made the short journey South to the Hakone region. Hakone is part of the Fuj-Hakone-Izu national park, and is famous for its hot springs and beautiful scenery. The area is very well set up for tourists and we bought a pass which enabled us to travel on all types of transport in […]
