Another early start, another train, this time heading for Japan's third largest city, Osaka. We broke the journey for a couple of hours at Himeji, to visit the castle (claimed to be the best in Japan) and gardens. Also known as the White Heron Castle due to its white appearance and is very imposing. Having completed our touristic duty and being duly impressed we moved onto Osaka and lodged ourselves in a hostel in the Namba district (once again aided by "the bl...

One Shinkansen train and two local trains later we were in Onomichi, we (Heather) had found a cycling route called Setouchi Shimanami Kaido which spanned 6 islands in the Seto inland sea and covered 77 Kilometres and we scheduled two days to complete it …… Easy Peasy An evening of beer and pizza to prepare our bodies, then up at 6:00am, stored our big rucksacks at the railway station, picked up our rental bikes and away we go. We started off by boarding a sh...

Our last day in Hiroshima was devoted to the Peace Park and the museum. At 08:15am on 6th August 1945, the first Atomic Bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, it destroyed virtually the entire city and instantly killed thousands of people, in a totally horrific way and thousands more died in the following weeks - 140,000 people are estimated to have died in total. There is a visual presentation showing the city just before the explosion, then a countdown, followed by the...

Another long bus journey (4 1/2 hours) and we went straight to our hostel (K's House) in Hiroshima. This time it was different, we had our first experience of a Japanese room ….. No bed, the floor was "tatami" matting (no shoes allowed) and a set of very precise instructions on how to roll the Futon out and how to properly dress it with the bed coverings. Dinner was again traditional, a local Hiroshima speciality called Okonomiyaki (easy for you to say). B...

Left Busan by Hydrofoil, nice change from a plane but as we cleared the harbour the sea became quite rough and Heather started wondering if the airplane was that bad after all. We stayed in another hostel called &And which was strangely located in the middle of a busy shopping arcade, we found it with the help of google maps and the little blue "walking man", which was quickly becoming our favourite gadget (after working out the local bus and which stop to...