We boarded the less sleek and less speedy but no less comfortable train from Nagoya to Hida Takayama and were soon on our way north. We passed through urban areas before suddenly finding ourselves surrounded by steep hillsides, densely covered in forests of trees and bamboo.

The train ride, which took us a couple of hours from Nagoya, was fantastic, with great scenery the whole way. As we climbed into the mountains we followed a river, at times wide and languid and at others, churning in the bottom of jagged rocky gorges. The steep forested hills were a constant, and we passed small traditional looking villages as well as stopping in some larger towns. Hydroelectric dams and modern advertising sat beside the traditional houses in the towns we passed, a microcosm of Japan as a whole with the marriage of modern and traditional.

We soon arrived in Hida Takayama and left the train to find the temperature a pleasant few degrees cooler than the sauna-like onslaught we'd become used to, though it was still warm and a bit muggy. We found our way to our hostel through the small town centre which also provided a nice contrast to the urban areas we'd been in lately. With quieter, less busy streets and smaller buildings, the town had a much more laid back feel than the frenetic streets of Tokyo, Kyoto and Hiroshima.

We dumped our bags in our hostel, planning to return to check in later, then explored some of the town. As soon as we left the hostel it started raining, so we took refuge in a café which was a bit of a mistake, as we paid way over the odds for some bits of semi-defrosted cake, though the coffee was alright.

With the rain easing off, we left the café and walked across one of the many low bridges crossing the river which ran down the centre of town. On the far side of the river, we spent quite some time wandering up and down the streets which were entirely filled with traditional houses, shops and sake breweries, with deep ditches running along the sides of the street. Although we had visited one or two isolated streets with traditional wooden Japanese houses, it was nice to immerse ourself in a village full of these beautiful buildings with their elegant latticed windows, paper-panelled doors and simple colour schemes.

We wandered in and out of some of the souvenir shops, admiring the buildings and puzzled by tall narrow garage doors that we passed, until we remembered that the town is host to a festival every year where ornately decorated floats, some hundreds of years old, are paraded through the streets. These garages were the places where the floats were kept until the festival.

One of the things we were keen to try whilst in town was the famous Hida beef, similar in fame to Japan's popular Kobe beef. Most of the restaurants we passed sold steaks and so forth, but they were all really expensive. As we were walking around the streets though, we found a little stall selling various treats made with the Hida beef. We bought two croquettes of minced beef, and ate them at a little table by the side of the street. For basic fast food the croquettes were absolutely amazing, and the little stall was obviously worthy of the awards it had claimed to win in its window.

Our next stop as we walked through the historic streets of this pretty mountain town was at the Yoshijima Heritage House, a merchant's house built in 1908 and preserved as a cultural attraction. The design of the house was fantastic, with the entrance opening into a huge hall with a vaulted ceiling, criss-crossed with wooden beams and with a stone floor. This would have been the main commercial space of the building when it was a sake brewery. We took off our shoes and stepped up onto floors of tatami mats to explore the rest of the building. The ground floor was split into rooms which would have been used for business purposes, and upstairs there were rooms for living in. The elegant simplicity of the building was great, with no ornamentation in the rooms, allowing them to be used for any purpose depending what was placed in them. The dim light filtering through the paper panel of the walls gave the whole building a serene, comforting feel though it was rather warm inside.

After looking around the house and its small garden, nestled between the surrounding buildings, we walked round a few more corners until we found ourselves at the karakuri or puppet museum. Having heard the shows here featuring old puppets were worth seeing, we paid our entrance fee and got into the little theatre area just in time for the show to start. We were treated to a show featuring 4 or 5 different types of puppets, with a woman introducing and explaining each puppet beforehand. The shows were impressive considering the age of the puppets, some hundreds of years old, but this age did show as the rickety wooden puppets jarred around. Nevertheless, the complexity of the puppets movements and the skill required to operate them was impressive. One of the puppets climbed steps, hung on a rail and zipped across the stage with no real sign of it being operated from below, whereas another flipped and swung across monkey bars to land in a big jar. The one I liked most was the little wheeled robot which, when a cup of tea was placed on the tray it was holding, would roll across the floor to serve the tea.

After the puppet show we looked around the rest of the small museum which housed a collection of hundreds of traditional wooden lion masks in all shapes, sizes and colours.

We then left and, rounding another corner, found ourselves in the grounds of a beautiful temple nestled in the leafy hillside. We climbed the steps to look at the small temple, then walked back down and through the town, crossing another bridge where we watched some local kids jump into the rather shallow river below.

Taking a route back through the busier, newer side of town, we looked into more shops and stopped at a stall serving little balls of chewy rice on sticks, coated in soy sauce. We bought a stick to share and found it pretty tasty, chomping on it as we wandered back through town. Our next stop was back at the train station where we booked our tickets back to Tokyo the following day, something we'd forgotten to do when we arrived. After that we went and checked in at the hostel and carried our bags up to the 4th floor, where we found our room with its rickety old air conditioner wheezing out lukewarm air. We decided to relax in the room for a bit, but had to sit right in front of the air conditioner which was too old to cool the room properly, especially on the warm 4th floor of the building. After eventually cooling down, we lay down for a short nap.

After our nap, we went out for another walk around town, finding it just as pleasant in the evening. We looked at some of the restaurants serving Hida beef but deciding they were a bit pricey, we made our way to a burger place we had seen earlier in the day. We found the little restaurant by walking through a closed antique shop and out the back, into a little space filled with kitsch Americana and with some country music playing. We were pleasantly surprised to find a Hida beef burger on the menu and ordered that as well as a bacon cheese burger and a Caesar salad to share, with a beer to wash it down.

Our burgers turned up and we tucked in, finding them delicious. The Hida beef one was just chunks of the tender, marbled steak on a bun with the usual burger trimmings, and it went down a treat. Lucy, who isn't normally the biggest fan of a burger, said hers was the best burger she had ever had. After dinner, we walked back through the quaint old streets to the hostel, enjoying the cosy feel of the town in the soft light cast by the lampposts.

Back at the hostel we climbed up to the too-toasty 4th floor and went online for a bit, sitting in front of the air con unit again to keep cool. After that we had a shower, then Lucy went off to sleep while I sat in front of the air conditioner reading for a bit before calling it a night.

We got a good sleep and didn't race to get up too early the next morning. After packing our bags, checking out and leaving our stuff in the hostel, we walked the short distance across the bridge to the historic part of town again, to check out the morning markets which are another famous attraction in the town.

The heat was quite intense for the morning, but we still enjoyed walking through the market, set on the street overlooking the river with weeping willows and little shrines lining it on one side and traditional shops on the other. We tried a few little bites from the various stalls, including a little donut ball filled with the red azuki bean paste found in pretty much every Japanese sweet, some peanut brittle, and a weird little cube of egginess dipped in honey and grilled on a BBQ, which was delicious.

We continued looking through the market, with the usual soundtrack of cicadas whirring at about a million decibels, then walked back across through town where we stopped in at a weird little café called Bagpipe. We had to check it out based on its name and found it to be a tiny place like a cross between an old pub and a country tearoom. One again we were fleeced by the Takyama café Mafia, this time for some tiny coffees and some toast.

After our breakfast, we walked to the bus station, arriving in perfect time to catch the bus to Hida no Sato folk village, about 10 minutes from the town centre. The bus journey took us up the hill, giving us a great view over the town in the valley below, and of the massive golden-roofed temple near the town, apparently the headquarters of some new religion.

We arrived at Hida no Sato and spent a good few hours wandering around. The folk village was one of my highlights in Japan. Numerous traditional mountain houses had been relocated to this site, often from sites which were to be flooded following the construction of hydroelectric dams, and arranged like an old village with various other buildings dotted around like storehouses and water mills. The whole thing was set on a hillside around a pretty pond filled with, you guessed it, carp.

The setting was idyllic and we loved waking through the dimly lit old wooden houses which had fires smouldering in their fire-pits to give them an authentic ambience and to help preserve the thatched or shingled roofs. There were various styles of houses but our favourites were the gassho-zukuri houses which had tall, steeply-pitched roofs of thick thatch designed to bear the weight of heavy snows common in the mountain areas where these houses were built. The buildings were beautiful in the summer sunlight, with grasses growing out of the thatch, and quiet and calm inside, with light filtering dimly through the paper panelling of the walls and onto the soft tatami mat flooring. Where the mats weren't laid down, the floors were smoothly polished dark wood. It was fun climbing up into the attics of the houses to see the big wooden beams holding up the thatched roofs.

In one of the houses, there was an exhibit on sericulture or silk worm farming which was one of the industries common in the mountain villages. There were live silkworms which we held in our hands, and lots of information about silk, which we didn't really know much about beforehand. As well as sericulture, there were buildings showing some other traditional crafts such as woodwork and pottery enamelling, though the craftsmen weren't around in these areas.

After our time in the folk village we went across the road to a place which was offering the chance to try out some various crafts. We opted to make our own chopsticks and decorate a pouch for them, which was good fun. Although the chopsticks were already pretty much cut into shape, we had to sand them down and oil them to finish them off, then got to paint the colourful pouches to hold them. It was a lot like being back in primary school art class and a lot of fun, giving us a souvenir we hadn't just picked up in a shop.

After our craft session, we got the bus back to town, picked our bags up from the hostel and walked back to the station, where most of the population of the town seemed to be waiting for the same train as us. We were glad we'd booked our seats earlier. We bought some bento boxes from the kiosk in the station and hopped on the train. We were excited to find that rather than the usual cold bento boxes, we'd bought self-heating ones which, when you pulled a string on the side, puffed with steam and started heating the food thanks to some chemical reaction in a pouch inside.

We cruised down the mountains on our train enjoying our delicious hot food, then I fell asleep for most of the rest of the journey. In Nagoya we had to change train again, catching our last shinkansen to Tokyo station. Once there, we managed to suss out which train we needed to get out to Narita, the town where the airport was. We'd booked a hotel there for convenience getting to our flight the next morning. We found the train and about an hour and a half later were at our hotel, just a short distance from the station.

The room in the hotel was classically Japanese, with a tiny double bed with built in 1970s control console for the lights and heating in the room, kimono style dressing gowns, and a tiny moulded plastic bathroom with Toshiba fittings. However, it was comfy and we had a good sleep before catching the free shuttle bus to the airport in the morning and going through the usual rigmarole before boarding our flight to Bangkok.

Japan had been amazing, and we resolved to come back with more time and to see some more of this fantastic country.