Our flight from Okinawa landed late so it was about 11pm by the time we got to our hotel. We went straight to bed to get a good nights sleep as the next day was Sumo day! We decided to stay in Nagoya an extra day so we weren't clock watching during the day, but supposedly our hotel was fully booked (again doubtful but no reservation, no room!) so were up early to move to a hotel down the road, which actually turned out to be much nicer anyway. Once checked in w...

Grant was really keen to go to Okinawa, it was one of his top things to do while we were away, so we planned to go for a week over his birthday. We got to Fukuoka airport and after an hour delay was on the flight, very excited! Okinawa is a small island south of Japan and apart from the capital city doesn't have any public transport, so we booked a car for a few days to drive around the north of the island, before doing some island hopping on the even remoter ...

Our next stop after Hiroshima was Beppu. We caught an early train to make the most out of the day and arrived at the Ryokan we'd booked (a traditional Japanese guest house) to find the guest house owners looking all freaked out that we were early frantically trying to explain in Japanese (they couldn't speak English, obviously it being a Japanese guest house in a not particularly tourist town) that we couldn't check in yet. After a lot of hand gestures we manag...

From Kyoto we took a short train to Osaka and checked into a small (and not that special) hostel, it looked more like someone's flat than a hostel so we didn't hang around and went for a walk in town. Osaka had a bit of a weirdo vibe going on with lots of strange gothic shops and people walking about in the weirdest clothes they could find, it was pretty different to the other places in Japan we'd been to. I wanted to do a bit of shopping for Grants b'day so left...

We arrived at Tokyo airport pretty much on time, got the train to our hostel, which we managed to find without getting lost, and checked into our first dorm room. We knew that Japan was going to be more expensive than the other Asian countries we'd been to so wouldn't be able to afford private rooms, but we'd also decided that it was too easy just to talk to each other when you're in private rooms and we wanted to be more sociable with other travellers. The room...