In June we took a day trip to Oita to enjoy cooking over natural steam and bathing in the infamous Oita hot springs. This was a trip organised by the lovely Noriko and taken with her daughter, Hinako, her brother, and Joe and Kate. The day started out with a visit to a shrine in…
Category: Travel around Japan
Walking on Air
During our Golden Week holiday 2018, we visited a famous walking bridge in Miyazaki Prefecture. The bridge, Aya Suspension Bridge, sits at 150 metres above the valley and river below. The bridge is 250 metres across and you walk from one side, swaying side to side, to the other. Such fun! The view, I am…
Lush Miyazaki
After a few days of natural beauty in Aso during Golden Week 2018, we decided to hit the road and head to Miyazaki. We had an airbnb booked in the city, and were excited for real walls and city sights for a few days. The drive down showed Miyazaki prefecture to be beautiful, with lush…
Life on Mars
Mount Aso would make the perfect location for filming of a space adventure. It was as close as I could imagine walking on Mars would be, with nothing green, but a sea of reds, whites, blacks, golds, and browns. In our quest to get as up close and personal with the volcano as safely possible,…
Aso
Our Golden Week adventures in 2018 took us to the Aso area of Kyushu. To save some pennies and enjoy this beautiful part of natural Japan we decided to camp, just like Golden Week 2017. The differences was this year we had hired a car from Shimonoseki, and so we packed our futons and camped…
Golden Week 2018 Photo Gallery
The Golden Week of 2018, so called because of several well-placed bank holidays in Japan, we chose to complete a mini tour of Kyushu island. The journey took us to one of the most active volcanoes in Japan, Mount Aso, and then down to the so-called sunniest city in Japan, Miyazaki. Here are a few…
Coffee Tour Kokura
As we have already established, Dan loves coffee. So, one sunny weekend at the start of the glorious spring season in Japan, we took to Kokura to have a little coffee tour. We started out taking a 1 hour trek through suburbs, past factories, down back allies, to find coffee shop number one. It sat…
Our First Snowboard
On the first weekend of March, we took off on Friday after work in pursuit of snowy pastures. We had a weekend booked at Geihoku Kokusai in Hiroshima prefecture, and a weekend rental of a cottage and snowboarding equipment…the cottage was an excellent pine cottage in the woods style. But without any Gothic horror vibes….
Kagoshima and Coffee
Our long weekend trip to Kagoshima was full of relaxation and coffee shop discovery, as usual! We enjoyed the charismatic streets of Kagoshima. Little alleyways you could meander down and find a nice restaurant or cool bar. We visited several places with no information on the outside, but inside we found colourful spaces and eclectic…
Kagoshima = Active Volcano
My favourite moment of our long weekend away to Kagoshima was sitting in a Lawson’s cafe (convenience store) overlooking Mount Sakurajima, which is a large active volcano. Talk turned to volcanoes and fiery deaths. Dan picked up his phone and typed ‘most active volcano in Japan’. The answer: Sakurajima. He looks at me, slightly pale,…