Musings

Our final day in Japan, and this would be a post recording our experiences of arriving at Narita and leaving Japan! Firstly, perhaps it’s a Singaporean thing to over-plan and over-compensate when it comes to traveling. But we had been

Day 17 today was our last major relocation from Nagano prefecture back to Tokyo. We initially toyed with the idea of racing from Nagano to Tokyo and flying home on the same day, but we couldn’t find a suitable flight

We were targeting to stay within Nagano city and close to the train station for the Nagano segment of our trip months ago early on in our planning. Unfortunately, there seemed to be relatively few hotels around the train station,

So many people have already made this trip to see the snow monkeys at Jigokudani Monkey Park that it’s hard to really add any further value in any blog post about our visit. But perhaps I’d angle my post here

Day 16! And our last full day in the Nagano prefecture, we’d booked through Klook a day visit to a highland for snow activities and to also visit that very famous snow monkey park. In a sense, this day trip

We’re not massive snow activity persons. Nonetheless, when wintering in the country, we’d necessarily need to at least do some of it – if nothing else, just to tick off the item in the ‘must-do’ list! Unfortunately, the daughter had

This wasn’t in our planned itinerary, but we saw an information board at our visit to Matsumoto Castle yesterday that there is a nightly winter illumination night show, and it starts from 6PM. The show repeats every 15 minutes and

Day 14 today was originally planned for our snowshoe hike trip. But the guide we engaged alerted a few days ago that snowfall in the area was lower than expected this week, so the missus asked if he could swap

While Central Nikko itself was a pretty sedate small town, we were loathed to check out of Stay Nikko Guesthouse. Despite it not having the modern conveniences of numerous restaurants and cafes right at our door-step i.e. like at Toggle

We stayed two nights at the Stay Nikko Guesthouse, a small establishment owned by a lovely couple who look like they’re in their early 40s. I reckon most visitors to Central Nikko during winter won’t stay overnight unless they are

The performances at Nikko Edo Wonderland are only offered in Japanese. Judging from the audience’s reactions, they were probably very entertaining. Of the four we saw, we all agreed the Ninja Theater (Ninja Action Show) was the best: it simply