Welcome to our Japanese travels
This page links the information on the places that we visited on our trip to Japan in October 2019.
The first part of our trip was staying with friends Marta and Tim in Nagoya. The information in this blog is about the time we were touring by ourselves. The blog is organised with a page for each place we visited.
General Information on travel in Japan
We used trains to move around. For most travel between cities the train is the most efficient and flexible way to plan your travel. The trains are frequent and on time. The stations are normally in the city centers and easily accessible by public transit.
We chose not to visit Tokyo as we preferred to visit the smaller cities and towns. The route that we took could easily include a stop in Tokyo as we passed through it when we traveled from Nikko and Hakone.
If you are planning to travel by train get a Japan Rail Pass. It definitely pays for itself if you do a few long journeys. We took the 21 day pass and even travelling for 15 days it paid for itself.
The pass allows you free reservations. To get the reservations you have to go to the booking office at the station. The lines can be quite long so if you know the time you want to leave it is a good idea to book the seats when you arrive or the day before you leave. Even if you do not have a reservation you can still get on the train as there are normally 2 wagons for unreserved passengers and in the worst case you can stand there.
If you do not want to transport all your bags with you there is an option to send bags between hotels or even to a 7/11 store. You have to do this one day in advance so you will still need some luggage with you. If you want to stop off for a few hours of visiting on your way somewhere there are left luggage lockers in all the stations. There are a limited number for large bags, so on those days it makes sense to use the bag forwarding option.
A useful app to have on your phone is Navitime. This allows you to plan your travel to optimize your use of the rail pass. In the app settings you can select that you have the pass so it will try to setup the route to use the pass. This also avoids the limited number of ultra express trains that you are not allowed to use. Every once in a while it has a problem when there is no train service to your destination with Japan Rail. It will send you off on buses that are covered by the pass, but, are not the best route. On those occasions check the route it is giving you with google maps.
We did have some problems with google maps sending us to non existent bus stops in Kyoto.
We chose not to visit Tokyo as we preferred to visit the smaller cities and towns. The route that we took could easily include a stop in Tokyo as we passed through it when we traveled from Nikko and Hakone.
If you are planning to travel by train get a Japan Rail Pass. It definitely pays for itself if you do a few long journeys. We took the 21 day pass and even travelling for 15 days it paid for itself.
The pass allows you free reservations. To get the reservations you have to go to the booking office at the station. The lines can be quite long so if you know the time you want to leave it is a good idea to book the seats when you arrive or the day before you leave. Even if you do not have a reservation you can still get on the train as there are normally 2 wagons for unreserved passengers and in the worst case you can stand there.
If you do not want to transport all your bags with you there is an option to send bags between hotels or even to a 7/11 store. You have to do this one day in advance so you will still need some luggage with you. If you want to stop off for a few hours of visiting on your way somewhere there are left luggage lockers in all the stations. There are a limited number for large bags, so on those days it makes sense to use the bag forwarding option.
A useful app to have on your phone is Navitime. This allows you to plan your travel to optimize your use of the rail pass. In the app settings you can select that you have the pass so it will try to setup the route to use the pass. This also avoids the limited number of ultra express trains that you are not allowed to use. Every once in a while it has a problem when there is no train service to your destination with Japan Rail. It will send you off on buses that are covered by the pass, but, are not the best route. On those occasions check the route it is giving you with google maps.
We did have some problems with google maps sending us to non existent bus stops in Kyoto.
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