I made the most of our meagre one week holiday from school by travelling pretty much as far west as I could, using only very very slow trains, thanks to a strange rail pass. As I live here I can't get the fantastic pass that allows everyone on a tourist visa to swan around on the bullet trains (on condition that they leave the country after a maximum of 90 days...) This meant that my travelling may have cost less than £40 in total, but everything took about three times as long as it would have done by bullet train. Oh, and just because it runs during the night, you can't claim it's a 'sleeping' train if you NEVER TURN THE LIGHTS OFF AND MAKE LOUD ANNOUNCEMENTS EVERY 20 MINUTES. Still, plenty of time for kanji learning... I'll fill in some more details in a couple of days, but here are the photos from my various adventures:
Some sightseeing in Tokyo before I left. Can shiny (but nonetheless fundamentally restricted) redevelopment for the super-rich ever truly benefit a city? Discuss... Oh, and I got Ando to sign a book (or two in fact). Excitement!
Sandankyou gorge, near Hiroshima. I was worried that it might rain. It didn't, choosing instead to snow, heavily, for hours. Concerned that I might miss the bus, I chose to run most of the downhill sections of the way back. Mmmm, slippery! Also, the waterfall that I had been assured was the most beautiful had been turned off by the dam at the head of the valley. JAPAN!
Miyajima and Itsukushima Shrine. One of the 'three great views' of Japan, enhanced I'm sure by getting up at 6.45 and sharing it for the first few hours with only the deer and the monkeys. Lesson of the day: if Japanese people say a climb is hard, they're not joking.
Asosan. Like a mountain, but with a hole in it and loads of poisonous smoke coming out. Ash-ridges that look like they might a) provide a good viewpoint for a photo and/or b) be fun to slide down may in fact be perched on top of a sheer drop to the crater floor.
Oh, and of course no April in Japan would be complete without cherry blossom. It was actually really nice to be reminded that nature still exists in Tokyo, even if this reminder mainly consisted of sitting on blue vinyl sheets drinking a lot (along with hundreds of thousands of other people), and taking a ridiculous number of photos of what is, when all's said and done, a tree.
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