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This entry is part of a series, Planning Japan» July 17th (or early morning of 18th): After enjoying the best two days of the Giom Matsuri in Kyoto, we’ll be going to Hiroshima. Just to the south is an island with the famous Itsukushima Shrine; a ferry to get there leaves from the river in the Peace Gardens. Also in Hiroshima is the Mazda factory museum, and the famous “A-Bomb Dome” (the skeleton of a building vaporised by the bomb) but other than that, there’s not really a lot here…
A short trip further around the bay, in the town of Kure, is a naval dockyard and the Yamato Museum. From here a ferry will take us to Matsuyama. There’s not really a lot to do here, but it has a nice youth hostel which happens to be on the way to the next destination.
From Matsuyama we’ll be taking a train to another harbour further around the island, taking us to Beppu, famous for its hot springs which come in a variety of different colours. Carrying on, we get to Nagasaki. There is a lot to do here. Besides the Peace Gardens and Atom Bomb Museum, there’s also Temple Row running along the edge of the city, Dejima next to the marina of ancient ships, penguins, amongst other things. A fair trek to the north, is Holland. No joke.
The next stop is Aso Volcano region, which I want to go to more every time I see photos of it. No would be a good day to hire out a car. There’s a helicopter tour available for 5000Y, hot springs (occupied by wild monkeys though), and youth hostels, though they don’t seem all that great. If we chose to hire a car, the best place to do so would be from the nearby town of Kumamoto, which has a pretty castle and gardens (just like every other city).
July 21st, Arrive at Kagoshima, not really a lot to do here, but the local airport is where we’ll be flying from early the next morning. Destination: Amami-Oshima, one of the larger islands out to the south, from which the solar eclipse will be visible. The flight there should also give a great view of Sakurajima Volcano island.
The eclipse will only last a few minutes, but it’s best to get there early to snatch the best spot from thousands of other tourists. The further north we can get, the better, which is good as the airport is near the northern tip of the island. To the south, away from the airport and coastal towns, the island is unspoilt jungle. While I’d love to take a kayak tour, the jungle is famous for deadly snakes unique to this island, so I’m not sure I want to hang around for too long.
The cost for flying to Amami will make this the most expensive part of the tour.
Thoughts:
- Train from Beppu to Nagasaki has to go around a big inlet, perhaps ferry across might be quicker.
- Could get train direct from Nagasaki to Hiroshima (perhaps via Fukuoka) and see Beppu on the way back (you’ll see why in next part).
- It might be better to fly out to Amami the day before, but this makes the journey to Kagoshima more of a rush.
Costs:
- Peace Museum: 50Y (£0.34)
- Itsukuyama Shrine: 300Y-500Y (£2.05-£3.40) Ferry there looks like 170Y (£1.15)
- Transport Museum: 500Y (£3.40)
- Yamato Museum: 500Y (£3.40)
- Ferry to Matsuyama: 2600Y-6900Y (£18-£47), Depending on whether we go form Kure, and if we take the jetboat.
- Matsuyama Youth Hostel: 2625Y + 525Y Breakfast (£18 + £3.50)
- Penguin Aquarium: 500Y (£3.40)
- Nagasaki Museum: 600Y (£4)
- Ropeway: 1200Y (£8) Rtn.
- Flights to Kagoshima: 25300Y each way (£171 * 2 = £342)
Total: 58800Y-63100Y = £398-£427 depending on ferry.
This entry is part of a series, Planning Japan» *pre-disclaimer: nothing is set in stone.*
The journey begins on the morning of July 8th at Heathrow Airport, with a flight to Osaka via either Amsterdam or Paris landing the following morning (9th). The first thing to be done is picking up a 21-day rail pass (57,700Yen ) which allows for free travel on all trains (apart from the very fastest bullet train), or else we won’t be able to go anywhere. The aim of the first day is to get familiar with what We’ve let ourselves in for. At 5PM, a night train will be leaving for Aomori (9500Yen for a bed), followed by a connecting train to the northern island of Hokkaido, Arriving 10th. The 15 hour long journey (again, lying on a bed) will give ample time to rest after the long flight and adjust to the time difference.
Hokkaido is the most undeveloped area of Japan, made up of numerous national parks, and famous for its huge population of “endangered” cranes and other wildlife. I’m still to decide on the best spot on this large island to go and visit, but since the rail infrastructure isn’t so developed and the roads are generally quiet, I think now would be a good opportunity to try car rental for the day and explore via road.
July 11th/12th: From here, another long train journey back to Kanazawa to visit a friend that lives there, thankfully the train is another night train with beds, hence sleeping through the boredom.
The next port of call is the Fire Festival at Nachi Falls, with a day between leaving Kanazawa and arriving in Nachi, there are numerous choices of place to stop off on the way or way back. After the fire festival is the Giom Matsuri Festival in Kyoto, with a day between the two festivals, making two days in total for this part of the trip which can be taken easy. So, one of the days will be whale watching from a fishing town near Nachi called Kushimoto. The other will be spent probably watching sumo wrestling at Nagoya, near Kyoto, between Kanazawa and Nachi. In other words, we have a circle, needing to be at the bottom for the 14th, and at the top for the 16th, but travelling either way around is a question of timing. Also, between Kanazawa and this circle is a mountain range, again with numerous ways of crossing, though the most scenic by far costs just over 10000Yen as it involves several cable cars and busses. Another problem with his route is the lack of youth hotels in the area. There are two REALLY nice hotels, up in the mountains above the clouds and all that scenic jazz, not too expensive, but still a little much for a backpacker on a budget (19000Yen for 2 people).
Tracing the route on the map makes it look obvious it should go in the order of Nagoya first and whale watching after, but the trains aren’t as direct as illustrated, and as we need to be in Nachi for an early start, it will probably depend on which direction from Nachi has the best Youth Hostel to stay at for the previous- or following- night.
Own thoughts:
- Sumo Wrestling.. really worth a whole afternoon for?
- Hokkaido: The only unique thing here is the cranes, nice to look at yes, but really worth a £130 and 20 hours round trip?
- I’m going to include the price of the “scenic route” in the budget, as this allows for a cushion if something goes wrong.
- Could be second most expensive part of the trip (as all other locations have much cheaper youth hostels than the hotels here, and other night trains are free to sleep on with the pass).
Costs (luxuries):
- Return journey to Hokkaido with sleeper cart: 19000Y (£130)
- Car Rental in Hokkaido: Approx 8000Y/Day per car (£54, £27 Each)
- Scenic Route: 10000Y (£68)
- Alpine Hotel: 19000Y/room (for 2 people) (£130, £65 Each)
Total: £130 - £382 (£290 Each) + Food and Shelter
This entry is part of a series, Planning Japan» I was wondering how long before I made a post where the title would be totally self-paradoxial, and I didn’t think I could achieve it with just a single word. But hey, you need to speak Japanese (or be me) to understand what I’m going on about.
My plans for my tour of Japan this summer are pretty much complete, I’m just left to working out the finances, though it looks like costs should come to around £2k for a comfortable 21-day tour (including flights, railpass and accomodation and food), in other words, it may well turn out to be a lot cheaper, but this is my budget just incase anything unplanned happens.
For now here’s a very brief summary of the tour, in the form of a tracing over a map. I’ll give full details once I’ve 100% confirmed everything:
Thanks to the awesome power of my mom’s home internet, I’ve still got three hours to wait until the new Windows 7 Release Candidate build arrives, though I still wont have a chance to install it (I’m meant to be busy revising for an exam) until this weekend. This gives me plenty of time to get my hopes up about bug fixes I can expect. That said I can only think of one: I’m currently using Build 7000, ie the very first release, and shutting down is a pain, it seems to hang for ages, after I’ve had to do a forced shut down. It’s OK for when I’m leaving the house or going to bed, as I know it’ll shut down eventually and wont have been on all week draining away at the electricity meter while I’ve been on holiday, but when I need to do a reboot, particularly in a rush, then it can be a nuisance. But, that’s it really. I guess the only other thing I’m looking forwards to is the opportunity to reformat and clean up the mess on my hard drives, but that said, I haven’t really got much of a mess to be cleaned…
I’ll be reporting back this weekend with my first impressions of the RC, though my predictions are that I’ll not have anything to report. I’ve used Windows 7 Beta since it was first available, with Vista on a second partition just incase, and haven’t stopped using it or regretted installing it. At first I found it liberating to use, it seemed to fix everything I hated about Vista, and I had to nitpick to find bugs, which were fixed as more windows updates were released. In other words, I can’t imagine the release candidate as being much of an improvement as theres little to improve, apart from of course, performance. Performance can never be good enough. Never even satisfactory.
It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for a while now, a kiting (possibly kite-boarding) simulator, the plan was to originally do it a Wiimote project, but they’re damn expensive on their own, and I already have a (much cheaper) Xbox 360 controller, so I figured I’d use this.
At the moment I’m daunting myself with the task of getting the physics sorted, I’m amazed at how, despite being a kiter for several years now, I’ve never really appreciated how much kites defy the laws of physics. To make the job easier I’ve implemented PhysX, though this means you’ll need PhysX installed on your own PC should you ever want to try out this creation.
 First ever screenshot of the project, early days. I’m currently toying around with PhysX, working out how best to build the kite with what the engine has to offer. Cloths seem an obvious choice for the bridle, except as far as I can work out, PhysX doesn’t yet support non-rectangular cloths, so for now, the bridle only looks remotely kite-like. I’m almost having to use cloths for the lines, as it’s the closest PhysX has to offer in similarity to lines, the problem here is that if i make the lines any less wider than they are in this screenshot, the engine struggles to handle the physics of so many vertices, (the engine works cloth by cutting it up into squares, with thinner lines, the squares are smaller, so a lot more have to be fitted in the length of the lines). There are several work-arounds to this problem,I’ll investigate them in due course. The other problem at the moment is attaching the lines to the kite, I wont go into the details of how it’s done, but you can see the results in the screenshot. For the purpose of this shot, the wind is simulated with an invisible force applied to the cloth, which is pinned into place at 5 points along the top and bottom of it (hence the ridges you can see in the kite). Where I’m going to go from here? Well, despite only just starting, I need to take time off for exam revision, and then I’ll decide.
Continue reading Soaring low.
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