Category: Japan

Another must do, we thought. And so did many other tourists during the two days we visited the most traditional city of Japan, the ancient capital with its 1600 temples and shrines which of quite a few belong the the Unesco World Heritage. We decided to discover Kyoto by bicycle and managed to see quite a lot within our short time. That said after the Kiyomizu-dera Temple and the Fushimi Inari Shrine, crowded with Japanese tourists, foreign tourists and many, many school…

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Visiting Hiroshima is a must, Dorit said. And I had to agree. Too significant history-wise, too important as a memorial for our vulnerable future. Yet from the very moment I stepped off the train it felt weird being there. Was I an intruder? Was I practising disaster tourism? I know it wasn’t me that dropped the bomb and it wasn’t my country either, but being a western tourist in this city, that had dealt with so much pain,…

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After all the multi-day treks I had done in New Zealand and Australia, I was keen to share the same experience with Dorit. This is the one we picked, known for being away from civilization, with peaks of up to 1756m. A three day hike over Sobo-san, Furosobo-san, Hontami-yama, Kasamatsu-yama and Katamuki-yama. We only met a few Japanese hikers and had the small camp-sites mostly for ourself. Yet the few people we met were keen on using…

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Aso San is probably Japan’s most famous active volcano. It sits inside a huge ancient caldera, that has been inhabited and cultivated for thousands of years, due to its highly fertile soils. At the footsteps of this mountain lies the village Aso with several pretty temples, but the main attraction here is the volcano itself, smoking and steaming non-stop with poisonous gases. A road leads all the way up to the crater, though part of…

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In Japanese terms Beppu is a rather small town, but it’s known nation-wide for the thermal water that powers the uncountable spas spread out all across the town. Beside the spas, there are 8 hot water ponds that most tourists go to see. The colour of the water varies a lot and some look pretty nasty, thus they are called hells in Japanese. We went to see two of them. First a geyser that shoots…

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