Last week, I covered the itinerary for our trip to Japan in 2015, the language, and the train system. This week, I’ll go over some of the highlights – I’ll try to restrain myself!

The Highlights

Overall, I think my favorite city that we visited would have to be Kyoto. That isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy Tokyo, Nagano, or Hiroshima, but from a sheer number of great memories, Kyoto tops the list.

The sights we saw in Kyoto were all VERY touristy, which isn’t usually my thing – but there’s a reason they’re popular. From Kinkaku-ji and Fushimi-Inari Taisha to Kiyomizu-dera, the cultural sights in and around Kyoto are worth the people. My favorite was Fushimi-Inari Taisha, a maze of trails up a hillside, covered in red torii – exploring the trails was like being in a Miyazaki movie.

Fushimi-Inari Taisha

Although we had this in more than Kyoto, another fond memory is of the numerous cones of “soft cream” (soft-serve ice cream) we had while exploring the sites in Kyoto. I’m pretty sure we had a cone every hour or so – and to be fair, it was really warm and humid out, so we were only being responsible and keeping cool!

This deer was pretty sure it wanted some soft cream too

Another favorite of our stop in Kyoto was the discovery of Okonomiyaki. The description of “cabbage pancake” does not do it justice – okonomiyaki is a delicious savory mix of cabbage, noodles, pork belly, eggs, covered in a variety of toppings. Ever since we had it in a restaurant in a busy Kyoto train station, we’ve been dying to have it again – we’ve made it at home many times and although delicious, we haven’t quite perfected the flipping technique required to not make a huge mess of it!

When we were in Hiroshima, we took a day to explore an island off the coast – Miyajima. In addition to seeing the floating torii and buying some of their traditional cookies (Momiji Manju), we hiked up the mountain – or at least part of the way 🙂 We ended up taking a cable car and hiked up the rest of the mountain. The sights were mostly obscured by fog, but this was maybe one of our favorite afternoons nonetheless.

A final callout from our trip is a quick detour we made from Kyoto to Nara. In Nara, we visited Todai-ji, a UNESCO world heritage site and wooden temple that houses the largest bronze Daibutsu. Despite not having a lot of time to explore the rest of Nara, we really enjoyed the history of Todai-ji and the many deer that we met!

Lessons Learned

Pay attention to holidays when planning your trip. We planned our trip for August 11 – 23, with a major traveling day on the 17th (going from Hokkaido to Kyoto). As we learned while in Japan, this coincides quite nicely with Obon week, a series of festivals that makes this one of Japan’s three major travel holiday weeks, with travel home landing on the 17th or 18th! In reality, it didn’t affect us much. However, we did run into problems getting seats for some of our trips – most importantly, we didn’t have a seat traveling from Hokkaido to Kyoto, for about 6 hours. That ended up being a LONG trip! So, lesson learned – if you are traveling during a holiday week, make sure you are ready for lots of people and packed trains!

Have a backup plan if staying in an Airbnb. As I covered in my last post, we ended up getting stranded for a couple of hours in Kyoto, with no place to stay. After our Airbnb fell through, we ended up being able to secure lodging at a hotel, but it was a stressful few hours.

Don’t buy sushi at a fancy restaurant. Being in Japan, we HAD to get some sushi – turns out we should have known better. The only sushi we got was in a super fancy restaurant and was all of the parts of a fish we don’t like! Next time we’ll try out a kaiten-zushi – a restaurant that serves sushi on a conveyor belt!

Go to Japan, it’s awesome! Lesson learned!