My second stop in Hokkaido was the town of Noboribetsu, known for its many hot springs. I was staying at the Dai-ichi Takimotokan, which claims to be one of the biggest hot spring baths in all of Japan! They have 5 different springs coming into more than 30 different baths, both indoors and outdoors. The time I didn't spend relaxing in the hot water was spent walking around in the "Hell Valley" (Jigokudani), a network of hiking trails around the crater of a now inactive volcano. Read more

I'm doing 3 stops in Hokkaido: Sapporo, the prefecture capital. Noboribetsu, a famous hot spring town. Hakodate, a harbor town south of the island. I arrived in Sapporo late and tired after a long day of travel, so I didn't do anything until the next morning. My first stop in Sapporo was, surprisingly, a cemetery. Makomanai Takino Reien Until a few years ago, there wasn't much interesting there. The main attraction was a giant buddha statue, but there are a lot of these in Japan. Read more

After Fukuoka was time to go to Yakushima, a forest/mountain island to the south of Japan attracting many tourists for its great hiking trails. It took about 90min on a boat from the port of Kagoshima to get there -- that was a pretty fast jet boat, most of the time we were moving at around 80km/h. While leaving Kagoshima I was lucky enough to witness an eruption of the Sakurajima volcano. Read more

On my way to the southern islands of Japan I've been doing a 1 day stopover in two major cities along the Shinkansen train line: Hiroshima and Fukuoka. Hiroshima My original plan was to spend my day in Hiroshima on the nearby island of Miyajima. Unfortunately, this got cancelled due to bad weather: it was basically raining until 5:30pm. Too bad. Instead I spent most of the day in the Hondori shopping arcade, got food at the Okonomimura (aka. Read more

On Tuesday I took the train from Osaka to go visit Naoshima, a small island in the Seto Inland Sea of Japan. Since 2004 the small island (only 14km²) has become focused on art and museums to drive tourism to the area. A lot of temporary and permanent outdoors installations are also present throughout the island. After arriving by boat in the morning, I rented an e-bike to ride around Naoshima and try to hit most of the museums. Read more

Yesterday was the day I'm leaving Tokyo this trip! My final destination for the day was Osaka, but instead of going straight by train (~3h) I decided to instead make a stop halfway through in Nagoya. From there, I took a highway bus north to the small town of Gujo Hachiman. The town is at the intersection of two beautiful small rivers, with many shrines, temples, bridges, and waterways. Read more

Thanks to sdier for the really nice DSLR pictures in this post! Yesterday I left early from Tokyo and took the Shinkansen north to the Miyagi prefecture, and more precisely to the area surrounding Mount Zao. Mount Zao is a volcano about 2h north of Tokyo. In winter, it's a big ski resort, but the rest of the year it is full of nice natural spots and hot springs. Read more

This morning I rode an Odakyu train from Shinjuku station in Tokyo to the touristic natural area of Hakone, about 80km south-west of central Tokyo. This wasn't originally part of my trip planning, but seeing as the weather was going to look beautiful this Saturday it would have been a waste to stay in the city. Given that I went totally unprepared and only for a day (which, given the time taken in transportation, ends up being more like a half day), I mostly stuck to the standard route. Read more

I didn't end up doing much on Wednesday and Thursday — met with a friend for dinner + random hacking discussions after arriving on Wednesday, then pretty much worked the full day on Thursday since it was rainy most of the day. But yesterday I finally had the opportunity to do more interesting things in the city. I worked in the morning and in the evening to give me some time to walk around in the afternoon in the now beautiful and sunny 24°C weather. Read more

One of my goals for this long trip in Japan was to get a very broad view of many places in the country. This is something that I haven't been doing during my previous shorter trips — partly because I wanted to spend more time in the big cities (Tokyo, Osaka), and partly because I was traveling with first time visitors the last 2 years. So I went all out when scheduling this year's trip: going through 10 different cities and crossing through the whole country. Read more