Japan is well-known for its Sakura blossom viewing, but before that season starts off you can see another type of tree in bloom: plum trees. Every year you can see them at many locations, but today we went to an area near Ome called Hinatawada. They have not a few but an enormous amount of plum trees in that area; in total nearing 25.000. A perfect place to watch some flowers! As we had just received the 'dog-carry-backpack' that we had in Holland, we decided ...

The Tomari port was just 300 meters away from our hotel, so we could take our time to get there for the first ferry of the day to Zamami. The high-speed Queen Zamami III takes about 50 minutes to get to this island, so we arrived around 10 in the morning there. Strangely enough we had 3G reception during the entire route. We never knew it could reach that far. It was quiet at Zamami. On the ferry there were only about 30 people and most of those were picked up...

The day before, we went to the Naha Tourist Center to find out how we could do a whale watching tour. There are many companies offering them, but there was one in particular that they recommended: Cerulean Blue. We made a reservation with the English speaking staff and we were offered a free pick-up service from the hotel. The time of the pick-up was decided later that day so we received a fax (yes, you are reading that right. Faxing is still done everyday in J...

On our first full day in Okinawa we decided to go cultural. We walked through some shopping streets that weren't open yet due to the early hour, to get to our first destination: Yachimun Street. This paved street is famous for its pottery since you can find 35 pottery shops and craftsman workshops within a few hundred meters. It's not just a regular shopping street as the side streets look like the days of old with withered walls crawled over by vines and bushes....

Last year we visited Shibuya and Harajuku on New Year's Day and got a glimpse of what usually happens then. We expected that a lot of stores would be closed but that's not exactly the case. New Year's Day is the traditional start of the Japanese Fukubukuro season and the start of many New Year's sales all over Japan. For the people wondering what Fukubukuro means: it stands for "lucky bag" or "mystery bag". So what is so special about these bags? Well, I think ...