501 Places

We’re coming towards the end of our month in Japan and it’s fair to say that this will be remembered as one of our best trips. As with any good trip it has had its ups and downs (my next post will list the things in Japan that I won’t miss once I’m back in [...]

“Just press the button and see what happens. You’re not going to blow anything up”. That’s the rather cavalier advice I typically offer to my wife when she asks me computer related questions. It is a philosophy that has served me well throughout my life. Until that is, I encountered the Japanese toilet. I had [...]

We’re halfway through our travels through Japan and the weird and wonderful experiences keep coming thick and fast. While some of the habits and the etiquette are becoming familiar there are still things that don’t make sense.  Here are a handful of the questions that have us wondering if we just need a little more [...]

Perhaps our news should come with a health warning. A few weeks ago I wrote about the global media’s massive sensationalism in relation to the London riots and I was reminded of this again during our travels through Japan. I was asked by the owner of a guest house we had been staying at about [...]

The Shiretoko Peninsula on the north east tip of Hokkaido, the northernmost Japanese island, is designated a World Natural Heritage Site. The narrow spit of land that juts out into the Sea of Okhotsk is home to a huge variety of wildlife while the surrounding waters provide some of the world’s best whale watching. Sadly [...]

When touring a country it is very easy to spend so much time on the road that your entry/exit point, often the capital city, gets neglected. We made this mistake with Bangkok two years ago and were determined not to do the same with Tokyo. Having had a day and a half to look around [...]

Something of an experiment – this post is displayed via Youtube. All the words are there – they are found on slides and set to a wonderfully atmospheric piece of music. Do let me know what you think of this as a way of presenting a post.

I don’t know what it is about travelling, but we seem to be particularly aware of the extreme levels of service when we are away from home. We all have stories of the appallingly bad; whether it is imcompetence, incomprehension or service given with added undiluted hostility. Occasionally though we also experience the very highest [...]

I view tipping with a sense of distaste and see it as a sad legacy of a class system that should have died out decades ago. In a nutshell I don’t see why service staff aren’t paid a decent salary so they don’t have to beg to customers in order to make up for their [...]

In SE Asia, and no doubt elsewhere in the world, there is a growing trend for tourists to visit ‘tribal villages’. These are marketed as communities of people living in accordance with their ancient traditions. By inference, we are encouraged to believe that the state provides protection for these minority groups and that we, as [...]