So it was back to Tokyo via a little mountain town called Nikko. Nikko is a World Heritage site just to the north that is renowned as a historically important. It is an amazing little place, with temples, shrines and statues around every corner on a huge mountain base. We hiked up the trail, which was covered in snow to see the far reaches of the archaeological site. It's really beautiful. We also found a stone park with over 70 statues of Buddha all with red h...

At last the day had come - we were heading to the mountains to ski/board. We were told that if you want to ski Japan, its either Niseko (in the far north) or Hakuba (home of the 1998 Winter Olympics). We had heard that the powder in these resorts is uncomparable to anywhere in the world. We opted for Hakuba due to its proximity to Tokyo and the fact we only have a week or so left on our train passes and Niseko was more of a complicated long journey. As we left...

We had a lazy day yesterday, while we were suppose to get up at 7am to head to a Volcano park in the southern island. It just didn't happen - we didn't realise how tired we actually were, so the alarm went on snooze and we didn't get up for another 2 hours. So it was back on the Shinkansen, passed Hiroshima, Osaka and Kyoto and onto another city called Nagoya. Here we changed to the local line which headed to Nagano. Our next stop however was a little town cal...

From Fukuoka we took the local train (no more Shinkansen's down here :-() to Nagasaki - which took 2 hours. Even this train was pretty nice - like a Virgin train at home. We arrived in Nagasaki and our intial thoughts were that the city looked a lot prettier than the majority of big cities in Japan have. First stop was obviously the epicentre of where the 2nd atomic bomb was dropped, this actually wasn't in the centre of Nagasaki at all. The bomb nicknamed &qu...

From Hiroshima we took the Shinkansen to the end of the line - a station called Hakata, but the city is actually known as Fukuoka. This was where we were basing ourselves for the next 3 nights. We also found a bargain of a hotel which was out of town, a 4 star resort, that came up cheaper than the hostels in town - called the Luigans. Since we have the Japanese rail pass it didnt matter to us that it was out of town so we took advantage saving about a tenner a ...