Category: Overseas Travel

Our gorgeous hotel in Nagasaki was set half way up a mountain with a fabulous view of the harbour and surrounding hills. Black kites swooped past the window at the breakfast bar 🙂 Continue reading “Nagasaki”

We went by bullet train from Hiroshima to Hakata, our first entry into Kyushu. Kyushu is also very proud of its own type of fatty, tender beef, so we had another yakiniku meal with it for lunch. After lunch, we were taken to the village of Okawachiyama near Arita, a region synonymous with Imari porcelain. Continue reading “Hakata”

What can you say about Hiroshima that doesn’t seem trite in light of what happened there during WWII? It’s a surprisingly lovely city – calling it ‘bland’ as one of our group did was a particularly shitty and tone-deaf thing to say, and not even true. The peace memorial park is of course mandatory,  beautiful while incredibly moving. The peace memorial museum…let’s just say we all left it feeling bludgeoned.  Continue reading “Hiroshima”

We only spent a night in Kyoto before racing off for a day trip to Nara (next post) and the one day we were allowed for Kyoto, we actually spent outside the city proper. So I can’t say we really saw Kyoto at all, but as it was raining, the Philosopher’s Walk would have been a bust anyway. Another city for a return visit. Continue reading “Kyoto”

We only had a day in Kanazawa, but it was one of the more interesting ones. First stop was Nagamachi, to visit a former samurai’s house, with a small but perfectly formed garden, and a museum of samurai armour and accoutrements Continue reading “Kanazawa”

Nara is the former capital of Japan – its first permanent one. En route we visited the Gekkeikan Okura Sake Brewery museum. The water source in Nara prefecture is particularly pure (we were invited to try it for ourselves), perfect for sake, and the region is famous for it. We were already fans though 🙂 Continue reading “Nara”

After a three and a half hour train ride from Tokyo, Continue reading “Matsumoto and Takayama”

Thanks to Qantas, we arrived a day late to start our tour in Tokyo. Continue reading “Tokyo”

At Fukui Station

from

https://twitter.com/snj_/status/574181829156077568/photo/1

Background story is here.

Mad food*, lovely people (one of whom was wild to take our photo), and buggered if I could work out what was going on in 90% of the signage over there 🙂 It was so great!

[*It’s sweet potato icecream that was as purple as my shirt, even though the photo doesn’t show that. Delicious!]