Had a surprisingly great trip to Japan for two weeks in April. Japan ranks very low on most people's travel wish lists. I had been going to Tokyo for business for years, and found it a thoroughly enjoyable city, but definitely not loveable on the surface. I hadn't wandered about the country, and very few foreigners do, partly due to the crazy prices in Japan (which is actually more myth than reality), partly the enormous language barrier, and partly because people don't really have a good idea of what Japan has to offer. We stayed on the island of Honshu, the main island and home to the vast majority of the Japanese. And the corridor connecting Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka is incredibly densely populated, with all Japan's population, government, business and industrial activities crammed into this pretty small strip of land. Traveling through this area can be boring, but at least you're on the bullet train, in my opinion the best train system in the world. And despite the urban sprawl, it's still an immensely interesting place, full of beauty spots, history and lots of "only in Japan" quirks. We spent one week based in Kyoto, the undisputed must see destination in Japan, made some side trips from there, then a week in Tokyo with some excursions further north. This appears to be the trip where we started going crazy with photos too, as we have hundreds of them. So this section might evolve slowly, since the process of moving all these from the photo album to the blog is pretty tedious. And I've got to decide how much to show. I think our preference is to show a lot, because it's interesting to us, but I recognize it's probably only interesting to us. So we may scale back to make it less boring to the Chinese girl and anyone else who happens to still be visiting us here.
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