Final reflections

So, our trip to Kapan is over and we're safely back home in Painswick following a very long journey via London and Manchester.

During our trip we made good use of the bullet train (Shinkansen) with a top recorded speed of 186mph. We walked A LOT and covered 225 miles in the 18 days that we were in Japan itself!

The country is fascinating, with ultra-polite people and good transport infrastructure. There are elements of technology that are cutting edge, which you might expect of Japan and the wifi in most places was extremely fast when uploading photos at the end of a day. However, alongside that technology there are also significant areas which don't seem to be so advanced. Many places still only accept cash and there is formality and bureaucracy that we don't get at home. Japan also felt a very safe place to be and was also relatively easy to navigate around.

We saw lots of temples and shrines and despite some areas being pretty heavily bombed in the war, not just Hiroshima, there were plenty of examples of old preserved buildings to see.

All in all we had a fantastic trip - I am sure there is plenty more to see should we decide to revisit!Read more