Having reached our "tipping point" for cities, we decided to spend a few days in the mountains. Packing short stay essentials into a small "daysack", we deposited our big rucksacks into lockers at Osaka Namba station and headed for the hills. Our destination was Koyasan, a mountain sanctuary for Buddhist monks and the headquarters of the "Shingan sect of Esoteric Buddhism" which was founded by a monk named Kabo Dashu in 816 - His followers do not believe he is ...

Another early start, another train, this time heading for Japan's third largest city, Osaka. We broke the journey for a couple of hours at Himeji, to visit the castle (claimed to be the best in Japan) and gardens. Also known as the White Heron Castle due to its white appearance and is very imposing. Having completed our touristic duty and being duly impressed we moved onto Osaka and lodged ourselves in a hostel in the Namba district (once again aided by "the bl...

One Shinkansen train and two local trains later we were in Onomichi, we (Heather) had found a cycling route called Setouchi Shimanami Kaido which spanned 6 islands in the Seto inland sea and covered 77 Kilometres and we scheduled two days to complete it …… Easy Peasy An evening of beer and pizza to prepare our bodies, then up at 6:00am, stored our big rucksacks at the railway station, picked up our rental bikes and away we go. We started off by boarding a sh...

Our last day in Hiroshima was devoted to the Peace Park and the museum. At 08:15am on 6th August 1945, the first Atomic Bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, it destroyed virtually the entire city and instantly killed thousands of people, in a totally horrific way and thousands more died in the following weeks - 140,000 people are estimated to have died in total. There is a visual presentation showing the city just before the explosion, then a countdown, followed by the...

Another long bus journey (4 1/2 hours) and we went straight to our hostel (K's House) in Hiroshima. This time it was different, we had our first experience of a Japanese room ….. No bed, the floor was "tatami" matting (no shoes allowed) and a set of very precise instructions on how to roll the Futon out and how to properly dress it with the bed coverings. Dinner was again traditional, a local Hiroshima speciality called Okonomiyaki (easy for you to say). B...