One of my sources in Vietnam has been inviting me to visit them and their sites in Hanoi and I said Vietnam will be my first stop next year if the company travel ban is already lifted. I just don’t know when that will be but normally my travel-heavy months are February (after Lunar NY) until June.

I suddenly remembered that I used to travel heavily before for work and for holidays.

I miss riding trains to nowhere. I don’t like planes. If I would go to Hokkaido, I will take the shinkansen to Hakodate from Tokyo using JR Pass. Because the travel to your destination is half the fun. Although that will eat up 4.5 hrs of my life but that was not that so different when I traveled from Osaka to Kinosaki (with a stop at Amanohashidate). I get to see the countryside.

I recommend buying JR passes outside Japan since it gives you unlimited rides on the express and ordinary JR lines. Nationwide. This enabled me to travel to four prefectures in 8 days. It was exhausting but oh so worth it.

I went to Osaka in May 2018 and used it as my base when I traveled in different parts of Kansai region. I went to Hyogo Prefecture to visit Himeji Castle, the fortress of Toyotomi Hideyoshi. The ownership of it was transferred to an ally of Ieyasu Tokugawa after the Battle of Sekigahara.

Basically these castles are just fortresses and are just series of halls. The nightingale floorboards (they creak loudly when you step on them so that guards are alerted when ninjas are there to ambush the castle) are ever present. I first encountered these floorboards some years before in Nijo Castle in Kyoto–the base of Tokugawa’s reign until the restoration of the Meiji emperor. As far as Japanese castles go, Nijo is unimpressive since it’s not that high but its significance was huge during the Tokugawa shogunate.

This is the reason why they build high. You can see from a great distance if you’re going to be attacked by your rivals. It was exhausting climbing all the way to the top because the halls and stairs are made to confuse intruders/ninjas. It took me an hour to snoop around inside the castle but I spent three hours in the adjacent gardens where I contemplated about my life. Just because.

I tried to have a crash course in chado (tea ceremony) in one of the cottages within the Himeji gardens for JPY 500.

And I enjoyed the gardens some more. I had lain on the floor of that shed in the bamboo “forest” of the garden and rested my weary soul. I decided that I can no longer take my situation back home and I should get out of that soul-destroying situation somehow.

I didn’t book accommodations anywhere in Himeji since it was just an hour or 1.5 hrs away by Hikari from Osaka so it was ok to take the train back even though it was already late. My food choices, however, were limited since my hotel was not in the center of Osaka like near Dotonburi and the nearest restaurant wasn’t that spectacular. But I loved my hotel in Osaka because it was just 70m away from the nearest train station, right across the street is a Life Supermarket where I can buy bento dinners or lunches. The hotel also has microwave ovens and common coin-operated washing machines and dryers so I never ran out of clothes. It also has an onsen at the basement which I loved.

I want to be somewhere right now. Ride the train to nowhere.