Our first day was a long one but we managed a bit of sleep and relaxed in Gyoen National Garden in Tokyo which is very pretty and there was a bit of cherry blossom already popping out. There are luggage lockers at the station so at least we could spend the day just lugging a pram and rucksack around rather than all of our heavy holiday bags.
It's a very pretty park and we had our first taste of the national enthusiasm for cherry blossom (Sakura) which is a big deal out there and they were gearing up for it in Tokyo. We missed the main festivities in Tokyo but as we moved around we saw the celebrations going on elsewhere. The 'blossom season' moves up Japan with the warm weather and is, it has to be said, very pretty.
Tokyo was a great place to visit, REALLY busy at rush hour but so big and full of areas to visit and experience that we barely scratched the surface. Around every corner there seemed to be something new happening and each area had it's own personality.
Our first trip was on the Shinkansen (bullet train) to Sendai and Matsushima Bay which is very lovely. Sendai was a much bigger city than I expected and there's little to no sign of any damage from the earthquake last year. We didn't go close enough to the coast to see where the Tsunami had hit although there was some evidence of damage in Matsushima Bay.
We stayed at a traditional Japanese Ryokan hotel before reaching Sendai which was brilliant, the food was served in the room after which we sat in a natural hot spring and returned to sleeping mats laid out on the Tatami. It's very hard not to sleep well after great food and a hot bath (although the little one did his best). The picture above is Shiroshi castle.
The Sushi was brilliant!
http://www.city.sendai.jp/kyouiku/iseki/index-e.html
The website doesn't really do it justice, it's worth a visit.
Our trip around Matsushima Bay was plagued by seagulls which have strangely turned into a tourist attraction, people bought crisps just to feed the gulls so attempting to take a picture without a gull blocking the view was tricky. I stuck at it though!
The blossom was everywhere and very photogenic, the parks and riverbanks looked incredible as it was gradually coming out.
Our second stop was Kyoto, this was an exciting and ever so slightly nerve-wracking section of the trip. So far we had been helped along by Japanese speaking relatives and this was the first section of our trip that we managed on our own. It turns out that very few people speak very much English in Japan and our Japanese was flaky at best so there was some resorting to the ancient art of mime and we did our best to avoid talking LOUDLY AND SLOWLY IN A FRENCH ACCENT which is the traditional resort of any good Englishman on holiday.
We coped well enough and despite a scary bus journey managed to find Kinkaku-ji (Golden Pavillion) which is really amazing, although like a lot of temples and historical structures it was re-built in the last century after burning down.
Kyoto is definitely worth a visit, once we had visited Kinkaku-ji we found a complex of temples and amongst them the Daitokusi temple which contains Japan's smallest Zen Garden. It's lovely and we could have spent a long time there.
This was taken during our day out to the Shisen-Do temple, it rained but that just meant that less people were there at the same time and we almost had the temple to ourselves.
We visited Hiroshima whilst moving around and spent a few days there. I really enjoyed the city, there was a relaxed atmosphere there with a few art galleries, decent museums and a brilliant old-world tram. We also sampled Okonomiyaki (above) which is a savoury pancake fried on a hot plate in front of you.
They preserved the Hiroshima Prefectural Promotion Hall after the atomic bomb detonated almost directly above it and it's been called the Genbaku (a-bomb) Dome or the Hiroshima Peace Memorial ever since. The Peace museum is nearby and an essential part of a trip to Hiroshima, although fairly harrowing in places it paints a reasonably balanced picture of incidents leading up to the bomb.
http://www.pcf.city.hiroshima.jp/top_e.html
Miyajima is a short train ride away from Hiroshima and easily formed a highlight of the whole trip. The weather helped, but it was a beautiful island in a very pretty bay with one of the most amazing shrines we saw on the trip. Itsukushima shrine stretches onto the water at high tide and the gate is enormous and a fair way out to sea.
The photo further up was taken from Mt.Misen which is the highest point on Miyajima and we nearly didn't bother heading up the Miyajima ropeway. Needless to say it comes extremely highly reccomended.
http://miyajima-ropeway.info/en/
After Osaka we ended up back in Tokyo and realised that we weren't far from the end of our holiday, we hadn't seen the Imperial Palace on our last visit to Tokyo so had a walk around it. It's in one of the nicer parts of Tokyo and surrounded by a really nice park. We couldn't go in (although you can make an appointment to have a tour) but the general area is definitely worth a visit.
The new camera obviously made the trip with me and did a sterling job, I would have bought it out there but the exchange rate is terrible so it's no cheaper. Teamed up with the Sigma 10-20 I can nearly take a full 360 on the sweep panorama setting and there are a lot more functions still to be played with on the Alpha 77.
Our trip finished up with a visit to Yokohama Bay and a look a the famous ferris wheel there, as well as a little shopping trip around the Red Brick Warehouse. It's a pretty funky area of Tokyo and I could have spent a lot longer there!
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