Japan

I just arrived home from a two week trip to Japan for the purposes of site seeing and snow sports. Over the next few months there will be photos appearing on Flickr of my travels. However in the mean time I thought I'd make a little post about my thoughts of Japan and recommendations about where to go and what to see when you are there.

Firstly it would seem that all those website who say its a good idea to book ahead when you visit Japan are in fact correct. We didn't. Well we already had our first week of accommodation booked in Niseko where we went skiing however we didn't book much else and we kind of had to take what we could find, which wasn't always easy. That being said, if you are going to wing it as we did, there are a lot of things that will help you, like some great websites such as Booking.com, WiFi everywhere you can imagine and a very awesome Japanese Rail network that will get you everywhere, quickly.

One word about booking.com. While its true they won't charge you to use their website they will charge the hotel you are booking with and in the case of the smaller ones, they'll probably jack the price up to match. So if you can speak Japanese or get lucky enough to phone a place that speaks English, simply get the number of booking.com and phone then for you reservation instead of using the website, you might save a few hundred Yen.

Japan rail is an amazing organisation and moves a truly impressive amount of people around every day with out incident. They are also the most punctual institution I've ever dealt with. So if you are traveling to Japan and are going to be using them, and I'd recommend it, then you should probably get your self a JR Rail Pass.

Of the many reasons to use JR, one of my favorites is the opportunity to ride on the mighty Shinkansen or bullet trains. It is truly incredible how fast, smooth and reliable these trains are. If you do want to go on the fastest one of all, you'll need to travel express from Utsunomiya to Morioka (or the other way) on the Hyabusa Shinkansen which will get up to 320 km/h.

Japan is a beautiful and diverse place. In our travels, my friends and I went from Niseko to Sapporo to Hakodate up in Hokkiado (north island) and on down though Honshu (middle island) stopping at Nikko, Nagoya, Kyoto, Mishima and Tokyo. My picks of the places we went would have to be Kyoto for its shrines and temples, Nagoya for its winter lights festival and Niseko for its beautiful scenery and amazing food.