Today's the day we find out if we can get a visa for the rest of China or if our Chinese trip will start and end in Hong Kong. Applying for a visa here is actually quite common as you’re allowed into Hong Kong without any visa and can stay for 6 months, which is very different to the rest of China! Theres quite a few places that offer visas but we opted for a company called future bright based on [...]
What’s going on? People have stopped bowing at me and they’re no longer as polite. Everyone speaks English. Plug sockets are 3 pinned. Menus consist of non fish items. The traffic lights don’t beep to fun tunes. I have no complimentary pyjamas in my hotel room. Cars no longer look like boxes with wheels. There’s not a single umbrella in sight. Everyone has put on a few stones. Chocolate bars are n [...]
So you are planning a trip to Canada and want to experience as much of this beautiful country as you can whilst you are here. Where do you start, what do you see, what can you afford to miss? Well if you don’t want to miss too much you are going to need three weeks, two weeks in Canada is just not enough time to do everything. So what would a 3 week itinerary look like? That is what I am going to [...]
Taking the advice of the Brit we met yesterday we headed out of Hiroshima to Miyajima Island It looked close on the map but it was a good 30 minutes on the train. From Miyajimguchi station it is a short walk down to where the ferries take you over to the Island. The ferries run every fifteen minutes so no need to rush as you get off the train. They also have a locker facility meaning we could dump [...]
After already experiencing the bullet train, and knowing how expensive it is we decided to find our way to Hiroshima down the local tracks of the JR railways. This halved the cost from £80 to £40 but the journey time skyrocketed from 1.5 hours to 6 hours. This we really didn't mind and it was actually quite nice to just sit and watch the world go by catching up on blogging. We finally got to our H [...]
As we've travelled across Japan we've often come across 'love hotels' when searching for accommodation. On the likes of hotels.com they're often referred to as 'couples hotels' and their true nature isn't explained until you do a bit of digging on Google! We recently stayed in one of these Japanese love hotels in Himeji so if you want to know what to expect, read on.. What are Japanese love hotel [...]
Today is the day we leave Kyoto and start our long journey down to Fukuoka, where the flights are cheapest to Hong Kong. The problem came when we finally got round to booking our hotels, there was nothing left. Our first stop is Himeji and we could only find a “Love Hotel” that was in budget. If you want to know more about Japan's Love Hotels checkout Hayley blog post on the subject, What to expec [...]
Most of today was spent in the hotel catching up on bits and bobs. We was going to spend all day lounging around but thought we might regret not going to see the Ryozen Kannon Temple as it was only a few stops away on the train. The Ryozen Kannon Temple is home to a 24 meter Buddha statue and if it was anything like the one we saw in Nara, it would be well worth the trip! I’d seen pictures of the [...]