In February 2010 a group of brave explorers, noted in legend as Simon, Katy and Dave, visited a strange foreign land known as Japan. They went on an epic quest to find their friend Malcolm and find him they did. During their journey together they discovered many wonderous and unfathomable things that defied description. Luckily many photos were taken and this site was built to house their magnificence for all to see.

If you want to see the photos head to the Gallery tab to check your browsers compatability with my online gallery and see them. Planning a trip to Japan yourself? Then the advice page has plenty of hard learned pointers! A list of acknowledgments and an overview of the web technologies used to make this site are tucked away in the About tab.

Photo Gallery

A picture is worth a thousand words. So by that logic, the holiday snaps for this trip are worth at least half a million words...

Click on any photo to begin

There's nothing like a trip to Japan to help you plan a trip to Japan. If you're thinking of travelling to Japan yourself I've got some advice for you, some of which is obvious and some is not!

Public Transport

Odds are you're going to be using public transport a lot while you are in Japan

• Japanese trains are expensive, a single journey from Tokyo to Kyoto on a Shinkansen bullet train can be over £100
• A Japan Rail Pass allows unlimited travel for the duration of the pass, meaning big savings if you plan to travel frequently!
• My two week pass cost £300 and was used for over £1000 worth of train journeys!
• The Rail Pass is valid for all except the Nozomi (direct) bullet trains, which means you can still use the other bullet trains!
• Bullet trains travel at 300km/h, meaning less time on trains and more time where you want to be!
• Public buses are charged by distance travelled, you collect a numbered ticket as you get on. Then when you arrive at the destination you pay the price next to your number at the front of the bus.
• Some inner city buses (for example the Hiroshima trams) charge a flat fee for usage, simply pay when you get off.

Money

• Japan is still a cash society, cards are not freqently used here
• Carrying fairly larges sums of cash is common and safe in Japan
• Travellers cheques can take over to an hour to change in a bank
• Changing travellers cheques at travel agents is very fast, altough some charge a 1% fee!
• The value of the coin is written in numbers on the coin. Unless it's a 5 yen coin.
• 5 Yen coins are considered lucky in Japan

Food

I have to admit, I'm not a big fan of seafood; so food was one of my biggest concerns when travelling out there..

• Eating out in Japan is comparable in price to the UK.
• Most restaurants in Japan have plastic models of what they serve in the windows!
• In tourist destinations there are usually translated menus available
• There are usually pictures of most things on the menu!
• Check the prices before you go in, if the shop doesn't display some prices in the window it means it's very expensive!
• Vegetarianism isn't really understood in Japan, so dish choices are likely to be very limited!
• Sashmi is uncooked meat, and is very tasty; just be sure of what you order. The sashimi chicken isn't from special stock: you can still get food poisoning!
• If the worst comes to it, there are usually at least a couple of burger places around! Not terribly traditional, but you can order yourself a teriyaki burger if you feel guilty!

Places to stay

• Traditional rooms consist of tatami flooring and roll beds
• Never wear shoes on tatami mats. Take shoes off before entering the room
• If it is possible you should try to book a few nights in a traditional ryokan
• Many ryokan have onsen (Japanese hot spring baths) which can be booked by guests free of charge
• Hostels in Japan are clean, safe and cheap. Travelling as a group allows you to fully book one of the smaller dorms.

Misc.

• Umbrellas are sold at every convenience store in Japan and cost about £3, so don't bother packing one!

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank...
The elusive Malcolm for giving me the excuse to go on this trip in the first place.
Katy for the photos
Dave for his excellent navigation skills and eventually giving me his photos perhaps...
Morcha for the browser icons used on the comaptatiblity listing.
The ubiqutous libraries of jQuery for saving me from writing thousands of lines more Javascript

Technical Details

Main page

Designed and built within a day to be a landing page for the site it has been expanded to include tabbed content as its role changed to convey more information. All the graphics on this site were drawn by myself, unless otherwise noted.

Gallery section

The gallery section is the most significant part of the website in terms of development time. Around a thousand lines of jQuery/Javascript build the core of the site. This codebase is supported by AJAX enabled PHP pages that store and retrieve information from MySQL database tables, Java code to extract the metadata from the photographs and store it in a javascript array and some powerful new CSS3 commands that enable the content to be displayed in a more dynamic and interesting way than previously possible.