roganjosh

I’ve spent the last week or so exploring northern Honshū and I think I can safely report that there aren’t many other tourists here! The few that I have run into are either heading out skiing, or are on their way to Sapporo for the snow festival - but by a far more direct route than I’ve taken! Anyway, take a look at the places I’ve been to in the last seven days and witness the awesome power of the Japanese Rail network:

Matsumoto - laid back city with a pretty impressive castle and at least one great onsen! Stayed in a very friendly guesthouse where I was the only guest, but the owner shared plenty of local sake and kelp with me. Kelp is surprisingly tasty, once you get past its snot like appearance.

Yudanaka - SNOW MONKEYS! Actually, not as exciting as I’d hoped. I was expecting a huge lagoon full of monkeys diving around, but in reality it was just a monkey hot tub, built by the hotel down the road I suspect. Certainly not worth flying David Attenborough all the way to Japan to look at them (as the BBC did a few years back)

Nagano - The rather faded olympic podium in the middle of the city is a bit comic, but the Zenkuji temple to the north of the city centre is stunning, especially with all the surrounding buldings and trees draped in snow. I stayed in the youth hostel that’s in one of the temple buldings, which is great till you get up in the morning and discover there’s no hot water and the only person around is a monk who won’t stop chanting.

Matsushima - Reckoned to be one of the 3 most beautiful places in Japan by one of the thousand lists of these type of things that the Japanese produce, and the little bay with hundreds of islands in it is very pretty. It’s a hell of a walk up into the hills to get a view of the whole thing though, particularly when you keep getting lost on the way. Just about worth it though. So long as the cafe at the top is open.

Sendai - I didn’t make it out of the train station in Sendai city, though I did head out to the suburbs to stay in a hostel in an old farmhouse. Lovely building, shame about the highway and the McDonalds moving in next door.

Kakunodate - Old Samurai village in which you can look into old samurai houses. The ones that are open anyway. One of the nicest ones had had a concrete floor put into parts of it though, and you could walk around without taking your shoes off - It felt VERY wrong.

Morioka - Quite a nice little city. If I’d stuck around another day I could have seen a snow candle festival taking place around the old castle, but I figured I’ll have no shortage of snow and ice related festivals over the next couple of days.

Aomori - The city in the bay at the top of Honshū that is the last major stop before you go through the senkai tunnel to Hokkaido. I stopped off for lunch and got back on the train.

Hakodate - Here I am! Going to have a chance for a quick explore of the city tomorrow, but for now it’s very cold outside and I’m going to see if there are any amusing Japanese game shows on the hotel TV. Ta ra!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 6th, 2008 at 5:03 am and is filed under travelling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.