Since we’ve been back, a few people have asked about our favourite place on the trip so I thought I would sit down and reflect on our favourite places and experiences over the 24 weeks that we were away.
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.
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.
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 […]
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 […]
