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 […]
Our four weeks on Japan started with our first ever aborted landing coming into Narita airport. It looked like we were nearly down and then we were taking off again! The cabin crew made the very helpful announcement of ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, we were landing, but now we are going up again. We will let […]
We arrived in Shanghai absolutely shattered from lots of travel and sightseeing. It was a Friday evening and the main task for the weekend was to rest and restore our energies for the remainder of our travels.
Our next stop in China was Xi’an to see the terracotta warriors. We flew from Beijing and then caught the airport bus into the centre. This was not a short journey, about 1 hour, and road is the only link to the airport. As we drove towards the centre, we saw many new developments of […]
Having visited two of China’s SARs (Special Administrative Region) along with Taiwan, it was time for us to visit the mainland. We arrived in Beijing to heavy smog (extremely hazardous according to US measure, only hazardous by Beijing scale), the visibility was terrible and we later found out it had been the Beijing marathon that […]
After Macau, we returned to Hong Kong, this time staying on Hong Kong island. We stayed in the Ovolo hotel, a chain which could almost have been designed for us, free minibar (again), free drinks and snacks for two hours in the evening, a gym and a laundry! It was one of the cheapest hotels […]
