Around Japan with a Rail Pass

Japan is so expensive that you need to make full use of everyday so be bought seven day Japan rail passes.

The Japanese rail pass is only available to tourists. You buy on line and then take your exchange order  to the ticket office in a mainline station and they give you a pass. Apart from saving money it makes travel easy and simple. You can’t use the automatic ticket barriers as you have to be checked by a guard so sometimes you have to wait a minute or two but in efficient Japan this is never long.

We planned our week easily on line and printed out a complete itinerary . You can see the time of departure, length  of the journey, time it takes and which platform to wait on.

This is always correct so you can completely depend on it. Our carefully planned trip took in the places we most wanted to see starting with a visit to Hiroshima. So we travelled 894.2 km in 293 minutes and arrived in Hiroshima at lunchtime. Couldn’t have been easier.

We stayed in a simple hostel with futons and floor matting and a very weird toilet so we felt we were getting an authentic experience.

Of course everyone goes to Hiroshima to visit the Peace Park. Here you can see the former Industrial Promotion Hall now called the Hiroshima Peace memorial. The only building left standing in the centre of the city when the atomic bomb exploded on the  sixth of August 1945. While its a sad thing to see the atmosphere is the park is just peaceful and its a pleasant place to walk round.

 

It isn’t all sad we met a crazy dog lover and the shopping street is fun full of strange food and mysterious objects.

A nice touch when we got back to our hotel, the local schoolchildren make origami birds and leave them in hotel receptions to promote peace to visitors.