Japan is an amazing place. It was a very good place for us to start our journey. The people are amazingly gracious. The food is good, the scenery beautiful. Getting around, eating, and finding lodging was pretty simple. With the good signage in English, and our Japan Rail Pass that allowed us to change plans frequently, Japan is very forgiving for rookie travelers. There were several times that we made mistakes, and easily recovered. We will need to be more careful in other places, where strangers cannot be trusted to help.
But our main interests on our journey are to meet the people, and to see the natural beauty. The language barrier proved to be too much to talk with many of the local people. With few exceptions, conversations were limited to figuring out logistics.
Since we are staying longer in other places, we hope to overcome this. We will be able to spend more time in single places. We will also check with local Scout organizations, and hope to meet up with people that way.
Also, it was too cold in Japan to explore the natural beauty very much. There is great hiking available, but most of it is covered with snow so we just did more of the tourist tour. We knew that before we came, but in retrospect we regret not really getting to experience the natural beauty of Japan. Perhaps we should have stuck with our original plan to visit in May. We saved $800 in airfare by going now, but we probably could have saved about that much by doing more camping.
Japan was great. We are enjoying ourselves, and having a good time. We feel like we didn't get to take advantage of everything Japan has to offer, but we certainly enjoyed the time that we were here.
