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...

While we were in China we met an American women called Kim, who is currently living in South Korea, and she kindly offered to put us up for a couple of days. After we had dropped the car back to the airport (this time with no arguing!) we got a couple of trains and headed to Kim's town, Pyonteok. Kim picked us up from the station and drove us back to her place to get settled in. We were blown away with how gorgeous her flat was. It was massive, with an authentic...

I was really looking forward to South Korea, it was near the top of my list of places I wanted to go. We ummed and ahhed about going when we first left for travelling because of all the media reports on the problems with North Korea, but decided to book the flights anyway and assess what was going on nearer the time. While we were on our tour in China we met an American lady there who worked for the US army in South Korea and she told us there was no problem with...