Dave Riley

Day 7- A Volcano erupts!

The place we were staying at Tomi city is dominated by  mountains all around and the most impressive is the Asama volcano, it is covered with snow, very beautiful. Then 2am on 2nd Feb the volcano erupted, #Bing bong bing# there is an anouncement system wired into the telephone system keeps the local people abreast of events such as earth quakes and volcanos. The girl announced (in Japanese of course) that the volcano had erupted but that it was within safety margins, although there...

Day6 – Matsumoto Castle

It was an exciting day, not only finally getting to see Matsumoto castle but experience driving there myself, a daunting prospect but it shouldn't be too bad only 2 major road changes and it is sign posted most of the way. We printed out a Google map of the route and off we went. After leaving the minor roads, we came to the first major road sign posted to Matsumoto, the Google map said take route 152 then route 254 simple! But when we got to the cross roads it said Matsumoto...

Day5- Suwa Lake

We went to Suwa Lake by car, it's hard drive so Shigeo took the wheel. It wasn't long before we were in deep...

Day4 – Japanese Spa

It took a while to persuade me to goto a Public Spa as you have to go in naked and that just doesn't seem a very British thing to do. I suppose the sight of the mountains and the thought of coming all this way and not doing something. Anyway it turned out not that bad no one payed any attention so that was ok. The men and women are separated so Brandon, me, Shigeo and Granda went through the blue curtain and Rie, Setsuko, Elizabeth and Austin went through the red curtain. There were 2 main...

Day3 – Nagano Temple

Nagano is a long drive so we took the train from Tanaka station. The ticket machines in Japan are very hard for non Japanese readers to understand, and usually there is no English speaking help, Japan must do something about this if they want English speaking tourist trade. Click for larger picture. Here is some of the route in Romanji but not much, it really makes it difficult for an English speaker to travel through Japan. So we have to hold our cigarettes...