Mizushima Kokusai Hotel Kurashiki

On the New Year's Day of 2010, I left Nagoya at 23:30 with a long distance bus to Kurashiki. In the original plan, I didn't mean to visit Kurashiki and Okayama, because the main destination of this time was Tottori on the Sanin Coast and Kurashiki is located on the Sanyo Coast. Honestly, Kurashiki was not so fascinating at first and Okayama look...

For a change in scenery, we head to Shikoku island, where no one seems to speak English and the tourists are all Japanese.
Our first destination is Naruto (yes, Bevan does watch too much anime) too see the whirlpools that form in the channel on every tide change.

We also visit the secluded Iya valley where we take a tourist boat tr...

JOINED THE CLUB

Well, I've taken the plunge and joined the Toyoko Inn Club. Toyoko Inns are already a great deal--cheap room with free breakfast and often a free gift when you check in. On a past trip, that's how I got that bright green and yellow washcloth and those monogrammed TYK socks. This time, it was a plastic foam slab in a wrap...

Slept well until I realized that without the heat, the temperature drops to zero. My back was frozen stiff this morning. But got to Zentsuji early nonetheless. Navigating local trains here has been really challenging--the times are correct but you never know if your small stop is on the way or a passed station. Zentsuji is famous for 2 things: b...

Got a good night's sleep at the hostel but I awoke to Jordan's alarm at 7AM. So I decided to get out to Matsuyama castle, which I originally was going to skip. The castle is on a hill that I feared if I climbed, I'd have no engery for Kompira-san. So I took the cablecar. The castle, though renovated, has been redone with original materials and i...

Started today early with a really filling and hearty minshuku breakfast. Totally new experience, but very nice. The owners had a log outside with Shitake mushrooms so I got to pick a few and then grill them up myself at the table. I'm sure minshukus exaggerate what's normal fare, but I'm fairly certain most of what I ate could be eaten in the Ja...

Kotohira-gu Shrine In Kagawa is one of the largest shrines in Japan, also known as Konpira-san. My Japanese friends told me Japanese should visit it at least one in their life time. My husband and me went there on the New Year day and drove from Okayama-Ken.We also pass the world's longest two-tiered bridge system -Seto-Ohashi Bridge. It was nic...

Not too long ago I realized that my time in Japan is already nearing its end! (well at least I am over 50% of my time here :P) Inspired by this realization I transformed into a mad-insanely-ambitious traveler, set on experiencing as much of Japan as can possibly be squeezed into various weekend trips. By cutting back on sleep and spending more t...

What you've done becomes the judge of what you're going to do - especially in other people's minds. When you're travelling, you are what you are right there and then. People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road - William Least Heat Moon, Blue Highways Himeji-jo On to Himeji, 55km west of Kobe and conveniently loca...

As I said last week, Hanami is the Japanese tradition of getting extremely drunk in the park while sitting under cherry blossom trees and stuffing your face with food. With that in mind, Bill and Satsuki and I headed out for Himeji, which has the beautiful castle as well as a park filled with cherry blossom trees. We took the train from Osaka fo...