Even with travel restrictions largely lifted for a good part of Asia, there still is a mountain of immigration checks and documents to prepare. Apart from working out our detailed itinerary, a good part of the last month has also been spent putting together our vaccination documents, checking our insurance covers, making customs declarations and submitting them through the Visit Japan portal – all in the hope that we don’t have to spend hours going through immigration when we actually land in Japan.
We decided on the broadest strokes of our 15 day plan almost two months ago. From that point, our usual itinerary development steps is routinely:
Identifying the numerous places we’d be visiting
Prioritising the key places we are visiting this place
Finding out the travel times from place to place, and bus/train departure times (especially those in the less busy cities)
Working out how much time we should spend in each place
Optimising our plan of attack, so as to speak
I reckon some would think this is over-planning, and won’t it suck the joy out of the trip?! Well, I actually enjoy doing up and refining the hour by hour plan of our trips, and it – importantly – starts building that body of knowledge we’d need to make sure that we don’t create dead spots in our itinerary and also waste, e.g. by optimising our travel arrangements and making sure we don’t double-back to visit locations we’d forgotten about.
So, that out of the way, here is our current itinerary – which I reckon is about 90% in the bag.
The highlights for this trip include, or our way of making sure we don’t drop these places in any itinerary revisions we make:
Kyoto – Philosopher’s Walk: we barely did just 10 minutes of this walk in 2010, so are quite determined to do a longer stretch this visit.
Kyoto – Arashiyama Bamboo Forest and Fushimi Inari: two of the most beautiful and iconic sites in Japan and in easy reach when visiting Kyoto. We were lucky enough to visit both places in our 2010 trip around very sparse crowds. But – if more recent travel photos are anything to show, both places have become a lot more crowded in recent years. So, we decided to get to these two spots very early this second visit just to miss the crowds.
Nara – Deer Park: the poor deer must have been starving these few years that they’d taken to eating grass again! But really, we re-visiting this spot because of our kids!
Kobe – Animal Kingdom: an open-concept child friendly zoo included specifically just for the kids.
Kobe – Herb Garden: for the wife and her green fingers.
Osaka – Aquarium: one of the two aquariums we’re listing down this trip, and for the kids. We’d visited this aquarium in 2010 too.
Himeji – Mt. Shosha via ropeway: because no Japan trip would be complete without trying our best to go up mountains via ropeways.
Himeji – Castle: one of Japan’s most famous and majestic castles, if also finally re-constructed.
Kanazawa – Keroku-en Garden: one of the top three landscaped gardens in Japan.
Fukui – Tojinbo / Oshima Island: with its spectacular cliffs, and Oshima island that is accessible by a connected bridge.
Takayama – Shirakawa-Go: a UNESCO heritage site, and whose pictures in heavy snowfall are featured frequently in travel literature.
Gujo Hachiman: pretty off the well-trodden path by tourists, and some distance away from Nagoya. But one of the very few places left in Japan with stunningly clear and clean river waters.
Nagoya – Port of Nagoya Aquarium: the often-listed second must visit place when in Nagoya.
Nagoya – Toyota Commemorative Museum of Industry and Technology: the first relative to the above. LOL.
So, a fairly packed itinerary that hopefully still permits us some flexibility to drop and add places as we roll along. Unlike our 2019 Hokkaido-centered trip, we don’t expect to see nearly as much snow, apart from perhaps when we’re in the Takayama region.
And oh yes; our favorite travel friend and ang mo buddy – Matt – will be joining us this trip too. This will be our third extended family vacation then, the first two being to Telunas in 2012, and the Maldives in 2019.