There’s no denying that Shinjuku is one of Tokyo’s most colourful districts, in so many ways. It’s famous for its extravagant shopping, the busiest train station in the world (with over 3.2 million people passing through on any given day). Its immense crowds thronging day and night. It’s crazy technicolour neon-bling and 3D billboards. It’s…
Tag: asia
Ice Ice Baby – The Sapporo Ice Festival in Susukino
There’s another aspect to the Sapporo Snow Festival, the Ice Festival in Susukino (which bizarrely translates as “Zebra Grass Fields” – go figure) the red-light district of Sapporo, one of the largest of its kind in all of Japan (again, go figure!) far away from kid-friendly Odori Park with its cutesy-pie Anime snow sculptures. Susukino…
Slip Sliding Away in Otaru, Hokkaido
We’ve paused the Sapporo Snow Festival for a day and headed out to Otaru, a charming old port town on the Sea of Japan and, believe it or not, on the same latitude as Vladivostok, which is just 766 kilometres away. Otaru is around 45 mins on a local train from Sapporo, and, on this…
Sapporo Snow Festival – Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow!
2025 marks the 75th incarnation of the Sapporo Snow Festival, now bigger than ever with over 200 snow and ice sculptures on display in the city’s Odori Park. We’re staying in a beautifully appointed Onsen Ryokan, a few minutes’ walk from this 1.5k narrow stretch of parkland in the heart of downtown Sapporo, so it’s a…
Snow-ward Bound To Hokkaido, The Frozen North
We’re here in Sapporo for the Snow Festival, a bucket list trip to Japan’s north island of Hokkaido, travelling from Tokyo on the Shinkansen to the top of Honshu then down through the Seikan Tunnel, one of the world’s longest undersea tunnels at 53.85ks and around 240m below the surface. It’s a frozen landscape up…
Out & About in Ameya Yokochō & Harajuku
Ameya Yokochō is another of Tokyo’s lively eat streets which runs alongside the railway tracks between Ueno and Okachimachi Station. Originally this district was packed with wooden tradesmen’s homes but during WW2 the entire area was carpet-bombed and burnt to the ground. However, almost immediately after the war had ended, rebuilding began with shops and…
Lost In Translation
Gosh, Tokyo is massive. You start to realise just how big the world’s largest city is (37 million at the last count) when you delve underground and tackle the monstrous and overly-crowded Tokyo subway system (no surprises then that Tokyo has the world’s busiest subway), which is daunting at first, but sort of manageable after…
Tokyo Skytree – “Gotta Catch ‘Em All”
As a complete contrast, we were drawn to the towering Tokyo Skytree. How could we not be, it looms over the Sumida River from Asakusa at some 634 metres, making it the second tallest structure on the planet (depending on which website you look up of course). It seems debatable, but Skytree is really, really…
Park Yourself In Ueno
Ueno Park is one of Tokyo’s most loved and visited city spaces and the epicentre of culture and recreation. The park houses the Japan National Museum, the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum and the Ueno Zoo – amongst other notable buildings, but I guess it’s the Sakura Matsuri Festival that draws the most crowds, when millions…
Home Away From Home in Downtown Asakusa
We’ve escaped the building ‘wet season’ of Cairns – the heat, humidity and increasingly heavy rain and headed to the frozen north (again). This time, a couple of weeks in Japan. One week in Tokyo, then a week via the Shinkansen up to freezing snowy Sapporo for the Ice Festival. More on that later. In…
Travels With My Ant 