Japan Cruise and Stay - April / May 2023
- Temples and Gardens of Japan -
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Our holiday this year was a cruise around the south of Japan's largest island, Honshu. The Heritage Adventurer, is a small 112 passenger ship on a joint charter with Noble Caledonia and Heritage Expeditions. After sailing round the coast we had to leave Japan at the port of Hagi and sail to South Korea for one day before returning to Matsue. Apparently if the ship is not registered in Japan, it has to leave Japanese waters after 7 days, then after 24 hours it is free to continue the Japanese cruise. On reaching the port of Kanazawa, we took the Shinkansen (Bullet Train) back across the country to the huge urban metropolis capital city that is Tokyo with it's estimated 37 million population.
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For me, the highlight of the tour was our visit to Hiroshima. This very poignant location was somewhere that I have always wanted to visit. It's lovely 'Peace Park', so far from the horrors that were unleashed on the city at 8:15 am local timeeon 6th August 1945 by the 'Enola Gay' aircraft.
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The modern museum in the 'Peace Park' shows the full horrors of that fateful day in incredible and horrific detail.
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For the second part of our trip, we visited our friends in the mountains of Saitama just outside Tokyo, where we stayed for a further two weeks with Alex and Anju and their genuinely lovely Japanese children.
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