Trip to Japan
Geographical Introduction 🌏
Japan is a volcanic arcipelagus of islands, the main are: Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku, Kyushu and Okinawa.
Physical map of Japan.
For our first trip to Japan we decided to visit the biggest: Honshu; here we could find the most important cities and attractions. Even with three full weeks at our disposal and a thight schedule we were able to visit just the central part of Honshu, as you can see in the picture below, there are many nice things left to visit in here as well as on the other islands.
Visited portion of Honshu, pink highlights the visited cities.
How did we arrive? ✈️
To arrive, we flew from Brussels BRUX to Osaka KIX with a layover in Bejing PEK and we took the same route for inbound, for a total of 12 hours flight (8 + 4). The airline was Hainan Airlines and the cost was 850 euros per person, two ways luggage included.
The good flight exeperience was ruined when our flight from Bejing to Brussels got cancelled without concrete explanations. The support wasn’t good since we had to fly to Bejing to know our destiny and only there we understood (with many communication barriers) that the only reasonable option was to go to Manchester and then finally to Brussels. In short, we don’t recommend Hainan Airlines 🫠.
Truth to be told, the perk of flying with a Chinese company was that we could fly over Russia and China and take a stright line to reach the destination.
The Chinese/Corean landscape was fascinating with futuristic cities and many skyscrapers, the Japanese one incredible, with mountains, villages, and island (see picture below), and well, the Russian one we cannot tell since it was always cloudy, but probably we didn’t miss much 😄.
Japanese landscape.
Corean landscape (Seoul City).