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September 25th 2010
Mt Fuji The season was drawing in on us for our opportunity to climb Mt Fuji, by the time we heading back this way. Only the stupid would climb it, but we wanted to at least see it. So we booked ourselves on the train from Kyoto to Mt Fuji, for one night only, as we were struggling for time to do everything we wanted and we had not even been to Tokyo yet, we had less than a week to go before our flight to Sydney. We constantly checked the weather praying for a good day for our only day at the mountain. We stayed in a lovely hostel that was empty. We headed to the supermarket to get our lunch, the town was small and very tiny. Nobody was about and only a handful ... read more
September 22nd 2010
Kyoto After rushing around for a couple of days in each place we decided to stay somewhere for a week. I also wanted to have my birthday in a main city. So Kyoto was our next destination. We stayed in a hotel near the station. The station was amazing. SO HUGE, very modern and grand, this is where I and James spent nearly every morning watching the world go buy with a coffee and a dunkin doughnut. HMMM….not a particularly a healthy breakfast but as it didn’t contain rice and fish we were happy. The station had everything in it…a garden on the top roof…100s of good restaurants, shops for everything it felt like a modern bull ring instead of a train station. This hostel was in a high rise building, we had another dorm and ... read more
September 20th 2010
The train journey was relatively short in comparison to our previous ones which was a pleasant change …but in true travelling style, well, I should say mine and James travelling style, we still did not get to the Kanazawa till late afternoon. We had heard of a good hotel that was recommended on the typical backpackers grape vine called Pongi’s. We turned up during Pongi’s siesta time (but we did however persuade another backpacker to let us in to drop our stuff off so that we could explore and check in later on. So off to explore, the best thing about travelling is the exploring, being put in a new town walking down a new street, with wide eyes and taking it all in with the desire not to take out the lonely planet book to ... read more
September 19th 2010
Takayama After Fukuoka, we didn’t really have much choice in where we wanted to go, as it was a national holiday and the Korean teachers were off for a month, the only accommodation we could find was in Central Honshu so we had a mammoth of a train journey to get from the south to the centre, it’s very lucky that the Japanese have a brilliant train system…so getting to Takayama was easy but long. We got into another hopper hostel and exchanged a free night for a day hire of a bike. On the evening we went out for dinner in a small lonely planet famous eatery, which sold hide beef which is the local speciality. The food came out on a clay pot with a mini grill, your meat was placed on top of ... read more
September 18th 2010
Fukuoka With nowhere booked on the evening, we decided that a big town would be best to find a room for the evening. Everywhere was booked in Kyushu. The only placed we could book was about 16 hours away by train, which we managed to book for the next night. So Fukuoka was out place of choice to break the 16hr journey up. On the journey up I had visions of us sleeping on a bench or spending the night with the trendy youngsters in McDonalds, in Osaka that would be the norm and perfectly acceptable for the young, however a faux pas amongst the older generation. So much that we could not even get anyone over the age of 40 to even talk about it. After getting into town, we went straight to the tourist ... read more
September 17th 2010
After slumming it for a couple of months, we were definitely due a treat and we decided to stay in a traditional Ryokan for an evening. We went to Kurokawa, which is a small town full of Ryokans and onsens, half an hour bus journey from Mt Aso. The town was surrounded by trees and a river bisected the town with onsens on either side. We went exploring as soon as we got there, after our guide took our luggage and told us what to do in the town. It took us 30 mins to explore the town and then we ended up going to another Ryokan to experience the onsens there. By now you'd think we were pros, at the beginning it was just me and James in the mixed onsen with a lovely view ... read more
September 13th 2010
Mt Aso Getting to Mt Aso, was a nightmare. It took about 6 hours, we arrived in the dark and we had about four change overs. Everything was fine until we took the regional train that runs from Kumamoto to Oita, at Kumamoto station we tried to analyze the timetable with a look of tourist confusion on our faces. Typically it took about 5mins before a friendly English speaking Japanese guy came over and helped us out, gotta love the Japanese. He did keep saying “change” and we kept saying yes we have already changed trains to get here. A bit further on we realized that we had to change at another station to get to Mt Aso (or we could have got a straight train to Mt Aso, but we didn’t know that ). So ... read more
September 10th 2010
Hiroshima We stayed two nights at J hoppers in Hiroshima. As soon as we got there we dropped our bags off and then we headed to the peace memorial museum. We did not have time to go through the entire museum but it was interesting, very disturbing and harrowing. I mentioned before that Japan and travelling has put my faith back in human nature and it displays how well we can all get along, but this places counteracts all these things. It showed pictures of the bomb, memos from the Hiroshima mayor to the world leaders to stop using nuclear power as a weapon…a few we noticed was addressed to the UK and France, harrowing pictures and stories of children being effected by the blast, letters to and from the us president and Winston Churchill agreeing ... read more
September 8th 2010
Osaka Finally we had reached land.... trains in Japan are very efficient and easy to use and with a rail pass a hell of lot cheaper, so getting to the hostel was extremely easy as we have made one rule for booking accommodation which is that it should be no more that 10min walk from a station. We had planned to stay 5nights in Osaka as we planned to stay longer in Japan than what was booked, which we thought would be a easy thing to do, we found out that later that it was that easy and we had to keep with the original plan which messed up our timing for our rail pass, so we missed out on other places in Japan by staying in Osaka for too long, but looking back now, I ... read more
September 5th 2010
Beijing to Kobe - boat journey The STA travel guy advised us" travel by boat to Japan it a cheap, an experience and you'll met loads of people" Wow what a great way to travel. How wrong were we and the tour guide! We got a train to the main train station and from there getting a taxi was easy just queue up. We even thought ahead and asked the hostel to write down the directions in Chinese. Got in the taxi showed the taxi driver the paper and that where everything started to go wrong. We have not really had any problems with language really only on the food front, but this taxi driver did not have a clue, we made boat noises and hand gestures, used an iPod app, showed him a picture of ... read more
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