I thought I’d share on the trip to Japan I took just over a month ago, since a couple of the places I visited don’t come up too often on this Reddit. I travelled solo and without a car.
This was around my 12th trip to Japan. I’m trying to work my way through all the prefectures as it gets me seeing new places. 🙂
My itinerary was:
- Flew in and out of Fukuoka
- 4 nights Shin-Yamaguchi (arrived there at night, so 3 full days)
- 2 nights Matsuyama
- 1 night Hakatajima (on Shimanami Kaido)
- 2 nights Onomichi
- 3 nights Osaka (Tennoji)
You could basically call this the Citrus Tour, since nearly everywhere I went, the local specialties/omiyage featured various mikan, lemons, etc.
Yamaguchi
My Yamaguchi itinerary was:
Day 1: Explored Yamaguchi city (north of Yamaguchi station) and the Yuda Onsen area. I really liked the pretty riverside walks with the cute shops and restaurants (open after 11am, of course). I went to Sansuien (because I always like outdoor onsen) and the footbaths, but I probably didn't need to allocate a full day to this. 🙂
Day 2: Akiyoshi cave and karst plateau. This is a good half-day trip and the caves were impressive. I liked that I could just walk through them on my own without requiring a guided tour. That would never happen in Australia (I don’t know if it’s because we’re expected to hurt ourselves or if we're expected to damage the cave, but…).
Day 3: Day trip to Hagi. I took the earliest bus I could and it was a good idea, because it was easy to spend a full day here exploring the old castle, the beautiful old walls of the town, and so on. There’s not heaps to *do*, but it’s a place for just kind of taking in the vibe. I took a small sightseeing boat along the river – I was the only passenger. It was one of the few places where I actually had to get out my phone to find a place for lunch, because in hours of walking I stumbled across very few.
Staying in Shin-Yamaguchi was convenient with the bus timetables and day trips, but not the most interesting place for just hanging out. There are a few restaurants around – mostly izakayas – but there was definitely not much to do there; it felt like being in suburbia. Even the area around Yamaguchi station itself (which is not terribly near Shin-Yamaguchi station) felt quiet compared with other small prefectural capitals, and not full of the usual chain stores I expect to see.
As an early riser, occupying myself was a slight challenge – some buses for day trips didn’t go until quite late in the morning (for me) and if you did go somewhere earlier, most things wouldn’t be open yet.
From the Shin-Yamaguchi bus station, I got a 3-day bus pass – a perk for foreign visitors – that really gave me my money’s worth. (You could also get single or two-day bus passes.) The bus pass applied to a lot of day trip destinations, as well as city buses in Yamaguchi city, etc. I used it for every place I visited within the prefecture except Yanai.
A few specialties of Yamaguchi included natsu-mikan (a type of mandarin) and kawara soba (a tasty dish where green soba is served on a roof tile – so it kind of cooks and crisps up at the table – with various toppings. Hagi is well-known for its pottery, which is everywhere and (to an Australian) often cheap to buy. I also got this omiyage which was a kind of mikan-cream-filled ‘sand’ cookie called Shiokaze that the shop recommended refrigerating to eat cold. I don’t normally go in for that kind of omiyage pre-packaged snack, but I really dug this one and I wish I’d bought more. I found them with a Google search: 潮風サンド山口
Yamaguchi involved quite a bit of planning – I kept looking things up, double-checking timetables, looking up places to go, comparing transport options, etc. Bus was generally the most convenient way to get around, but buses were not always frequent, so it did make it hard to visit one place in a day.
If I were planning this trip again, I’d probably have one less day in Yamaguchi, and I’d visit Yamaguchi city/Yuda Onsen in the afternoon after visiting Akiyoshi in the morning. When I was planning, though, it wasn’t clear to me how easily I could get between these places with the bus service, or how long I’d want to spend in the city.
Ferry to Matsuyama
To get from Yamaguchi to Matsuyama, I took the train to Yanai. There’s a ferry connecting to Ehime prefecture.
This was also my first time using luggage forwarding – rather than take my suitcase on multiple trains, a ferry and a streetcar – and what a relief it was. It meant I could potter around Yanai for a couple of hours before catching the ferry.
I really enjoyed Yanai, which was a very pretty little white-walled town, but absolutely deserted. I was used to everything being closed before 11, but in this case there wasn’t even another soul walking around. So I got it all to myself!
Actually, there were a couple of things open off the main street – the soy sauce museum, which I didn’t go to, and an arts centre where I got to make my own fish lantern (a famous local product :)).
The ferries from Yanai to Matsuyama weren’t very frequent and I hadn’t pre-reserved, so I got to the port a couple of hours early to buy a ticket, only to find they don’t open to sell tickets until about 30 minutes before the ferry. In any case, only about five other people got on, so I hardly needed to worry about missing out.
This ferry terminal area – and the ferry itself – was fairly bare bones and functional. You get off at an unmanned train station; the ferry terminal doesn’t have a cafe or conbeni, and there’s no food on the ferry, Happily, I’d brought conbeni food with me.
The ferry ride was a relaxing 2.5 hours with some nice scenery.
Matsuyama
Food!! Yamaguchi had some good food, but I felt like I needed to plan my eating and to really know where I was going. Whereas when I travel, I usually just stop when I’m hungry and see what’s nearby. But in Yamaguchi, even in some tourist-y areas, sometimes I’d stop when I was hungry – and nothing was nearby. Also, some food options were limited. I kept looking out for ramen (my greatest love) but couldn’t easily find it.
Matsuyama, though, was more of a typical medium-sized Japanese city where you can’t walk ten metres without tripping over some new delicious option, and your biggest dilemma is on which delicious option to select and how many you can justify eating and how to avoid over-indulging in miscellaneous baked goods. Ha ha ha.
Anyway, you can tell I was excited to enter Matsuyama after being in Yamaguchi, even though I did enjoy the places I visited in Yamaguchi. 🙂
Matsuyama was a city with a nice vibe and was easy to get around without having to calculate how many hours until the next bus. 😀 I mostly went to the castle, Dogo Onsen and several shopping streets.
The castle and Dogo Onsen both had nice streets to walk along aimed at tourists. Two of the most prominent features were mikan (and similar citrus fruits – you could even do juice tastings where you filled up little cups from taps in the wall) and taimeshi, a rice dish with sea bream. Yum!
Shimanami Kaido
The Shimanami Kaido comes up here a lot, so a lot of people probably know it's a popular cycling route from Imabari in Ehime prefecture to Onomichi in Hiroshima prefecture. The route crosses from island to island across several impressive bridges.
I went to Imabari to pick up the bike I thought I’d reserved online, but my reservation hadn’t gone through. Luckily, they had a few bikes available at the station. I’m not much of a cyclist, so I was grateful for the e-assist bike I got for going up hills.
This section was the highlight of my trip and I really enjoyed myself. My first stop, at the Oshima rest station (Oshiumi Iki iki kan), was full of people barbecuing seafood, and it smelled so good I had to join them. 🙂 It wasn’t the cheapest lunch, though it depends on which creatures you pick out. ^^;
I stayed on Hakata island for the night, overlooking the beach there and enjoying some Hakata salt soft serve ice cream. It was beautiful and super convenient because the guesthouse was literally on the street you’d take while cycling through anyway. Hakata’s only about 1/3 of the way along the Kaido, but I didn’t care about completing the whole Kaido the next day; I wanted to take a more leisurely pace and enjoy myself.
The next day I took a short detour from Omishima rest stop to Sakari Port. (One-way would probably take 20 minutes for a normal cyclist; 25 for me. :)) From there I went to Okunoshima island, Rabbit Island, to see and feed the bunnies. 🙂
A nice thing about the Shimanami Kaido is that you can rent or return your bike from multiple points along the way. I returned mine to the tourist centre near Setoda Port; it was easy to return the bike and then walk to the port to catch the ferry to Onomichi, my next destination.
And into Hiroshima prefecture, land of lemons. The citrus theme continues.
Onomichi
I was in Onomichi for the evening and then one full day. This was like a rest day – a day when I wouldn’t be travelling anywhere new, taking any trains or ferries or anything. Though I did end up walking and walking and walking. I couldn’t help myself – I wanted to thoroughly explore the nearby hillside and temple walk area, which I found to be full of charming alleyways and interesting views. (I may have gotten lost once or twice as well…)
There were a lot of foreign visitors here – mostly getting ready to cycle the Shimanami Kaido or having just completed it. Some of the shops in the area reflected that. My favourite spot was U2, a complex on the waterfront where you could sit with a bakery treat in the morning or a wine in the evening to enjoy the sunset and watch the boats. In early October, it was still warm and humid, so the evenings were very pleasant.
Apart from chilled outdoor relaxation by the ocean, I also enjoyed the local Onomichi ramen. It has small balls of fat in it, which might not sound appetising, but the ramen itself is still pretty delish.
Osaka
I finished in Osaka so I could visit the Expo. I really enjoyed it – luckily, Reddit had prepared me psychologically to expect massive crowds, so that when I encountered them, they didn’t bother me nearly as much as if I’d gone in expecting to easily see everything I wanted to. I’m glad I went.
I won’t bother recounting Osaka, as it's not exactly novel on this subreddit. I stayed in Tennoji, which worked well for me, and I liked chilling in the Tenshiba area of the park with all the outdoor restaurants and cafe spots.
Discounted Sanyo shinkansen tickets
For shinkansen travel, I made the most of this:
https://www.westjr.co.jp/travel-information/en/tickets-passes/oneway/sanyo-shinkansen/
The savings were pretty significant and I could use them between Hakata and Shin-Yamaguchi, then Onomichi and Shin-Osaka, and then Shin-Osaka and Hakata/Fukuoka.
I used Klook, which I’d never used before. I later saw a number of people on here recommending not to use them as they can be more expensive and fiddly to deal with. I’m not sure if this – a discounted ticket that has to be bought through a travel agency outside of Japan – might be an exception, but in any case, I didn’t have any major problem with them. The only minor downside was that it took a bit longer to get my tickets as I needed to go to a counter for help each time (for example, to reserve a seat on the train), and some counters had long waits. And I had to do this at specific train stations.
Anyway, it was a very enjoyable trip. 🙂
by rafracia