March 26

After a short night flight from Kathmandu to Hongkong, we were happy that they had to upgrade us to Business class for the flight from Hongkong to Fukuoka, especially since Marloes felt very sick that day. She must have eaten something wrong during our last dinner in Kathmandu. This was a strange coincidence because we had just memorised that after 5 weeks of eating all kinds of local food (even from restaurants from questionable quality) we'd never been ill and the foodtaste always ranged from 'quite good' to 'very good'.

Entering Japan was an experience on it's own. Since we didn't know where we wanted to stay, we only filled in 'Hiroshima' as our destination and left the questions about the address and contact phonenumber blank. That lead to a range of questions from the immigration officer and the kind request to make a schedule the next time we come to Japan. The next officer also checked and opened our bags, but was making apologies as well for holding us up. Apart from that it all ran smoothly and we had our first experience with the Japanese efficiency.

Our next aim was to exchange the vouchers we had bought into a Japan Railways Pass. Tourists can only buy this pass outside of Japan and have to exchange the vouchers when they want to use the train. Whereas in China we'd experienced that two or even three people check one passport, in Japan it's the other way around: two people work at the same time on making the railpasses for the two of us. The friendly lady who handed them to Jeroen purposely said a lot of things in Japanese and ended with the question: "Did you get that?". When he said "Yes, thank you" she was a little bit surprised...

We then boarded the high-speed Shinkansen (bullet train) to Hiroshima. Since coming too late is a big embarassment in Japan, these trains run almost always as on time as a Swiss watch. Japanese efficiency goes further: in case you have a reserved seat, platform signs indicate where you should stand for that carriage entrance. And not only does the train pull in precisely to the schedule, the carriage door you need is exactly right beside where you're standing.

The tourist office at Hiroshima station perfectly helped us to find cheap accommodation (for Japanese standards). The next morning we went to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial museum, which was interesting and impressive. We've learned more about the devastating results of the dropping of one single atomic bomb. It immediately killed 75.000 people and by the end of the same year another 60.000 were killed by the aftereffects of the bomb. One can argue about he necessity of war but we strongly believe using atomic bombs is a too strong weapon for mankind.

We've spent the afternoon on Miyajima island. It has some World Cultural Heritage sites and one of the most photographed items of Japan: the floating Torii. It actually doesn't float at all, and since the rain poured down, it didn't look that impressive. But we had our first glimpse of Japanese culture and the traditional architecture, which was one of the reasons why we wanted to see Japan.

On our way to Kyoto we visited the Himeji castle, which was an easy walk from the Shinkansen station. It's one of the best preserved castles in Japan and was built in 1580. We also visited the gardens next to the castle, these are the former samurai quarters of the castle. The cherryblossoms were almost blooming...