Day 40, in which we go west

A quick coffee for breakfast was the only further attention Oamaru received from us, before we drove 40km south to visit Moeraki beach, where a rare geological phenomenon has created a series of large spherical boulders which – thanks to erosion of the soils surrounding them – now sit in pleasingly elegant clusters on the beautiful beach around them. The boulders closer to the sea were more eroded, with several split open to reveal their honeycomb interiors.

Rare geological phenomena aside, it seems like all of nature is determined to make this place glorious. To complement the pale yellow sand, lush green trees and bright blue sky Mother Nature had strewn a carpet of pale pink seaweed of a type I've seen nowhere else on the planet. Human beings are, as ever, less eager to assist with natural beauty, and we saw several names carved cruelly into the surfaceof the some of the more amazing boulders. At this rate, if Suze really does luv Derek 4ever then their love will be lasting much longer than these boulders.

We had a quick sandwich among the sand dunes before setting off south for Penguin Place outside Dunedin. Penguin Place is a private Yellow Eyed Penguin conservation centre, and getting onto one of the public tours is a difficult business. We had made our reservation for a visit at 12:15 today back in November, and it was only as we climbed into the car to drive there that we realised we hadn't even thought about how long it would take to get to the centre. We plugged in the sat-nav and cheered when it came up with an estimated arrival time of 12:25. After haring down the roads and round the winding lanes of the Otago Peninsula, we arrived at 12:17 to find we had only missed the introductions.

We were led first to the penguin hospital, where two damaged penguins were patiently standing around in the sun, and one executed a very humorous jump off a log, which appeared to require all of his powers of concentration and balance. Our guide then drove us round to the far side of the hill to visit the beachside conservation area itself. I had imagined there would be perhaps a small stretch of beach and a bit of fenced off field, but in fact the conservation area stretched as far as the eye could see, including two huge rocky coves and an absolutely beautiful expanse of beach which curved for several miles from our lookout point round to a rocky peninsula on the other side.

From the top of the hill where we were dropped off, we could see several large black seals playing in the surf, and down in their cove two male seals were having a fight while others were paddling or sunbathing on the rocks. This was already one of the most amazing things I'd seen wild in nature, and then the guide pointed out the little wooden houses built into the side of the hill beside us. Peering in through the doorway, you could easily make out the little blue penguins and their chicks having a nap inside. Clever birds, building little wooden houses like that.

But we weren't here for the titchy blues. We walked down towards the bay and then out across to the grassy area behind it, where the yellow penguins come to nest (the yellow penguin is apparently a forest dweller by nature, and Penguin Place is planting lots of new shrubs to assist this). We saw a couple of baby penguins standing around in the sun, and then were led through a series of covered trenches to various hides which looked out at penguins variously having a snooze or standing around. We mostly saw babies (all around ten weeks old) as the parents wereall out at sea looking for fish, but this was fine as they are fluffier and more ridiculous than their parents.

After a short walk around Dunedin itself – known locally as the Edinburgh of the South, although this suggests to me that the Dunedin locals don't get north very often, as a fudge factory and bagpipe player do not an Edinburgh make – we returned to the car and headed for Queenstown, turning west off our favourite Highway 1 to join Highway 6, which is just like the first only at one point this trunk road west actually reduced from single carriageway down to single track in order to cross a short bridge. Once you turn west the foothills and mountains rise up quickly, and we were soon driving past rugged mountains, vivid lakes and stunning gorges. Although a lot of this was too wild for humans to settle, the calmer plains and undulating hills closer to Queenstown were festooned with a wineries and orchards, all selling their fresh produce on the side of the road. Had we wished to fill the boot with apples, apricots and cherries we could have done so for little money, although I suspect that is not a prank of which Apex Rent-a-car would approve.

Queenstown itself is again a surprisingly small city, but unlike those we've seen before it is clearly thriving. The city is nestled at the foot of some mountains along one side of a very huge lake, and our hostel (the YHA Queenstown) sits on the waterside, with stunning views across the waters to the seriously rugged mountains which rise up on the far side.

We'd heard that Queenstown has a reputation in New Zealand for being overly commercial and too focussed on tourism, so we'd been expecting a mountain-top Ibiza. In fact, the place is just popular, and has made few compromises to accommodate its temporary population. The town centre is small and friendly, with plenty of restaurants and bars to keep people busy, and far from being populated by drunken teenagers out on the pull, we saw a healthy mix of teenagers, twenty-somethings, young families and elderly couples. Everyone seemed to co-exist happily and, as seems to be the way in New Zealand, there never seemed to be any risk of things becoming violent or dangerous. We had dinner on the balcony at a pre-dotcom bubble restaurant called @Thai and then – since that wasn't remotely filling and we weren't remotely drunk enough – we shared chips down by the waterside while the sun set, then retired to a local bar for a second bottle of wine.

Although we're staying in a youth hostel here, we're not really doing the backpacking thing (as, I suppose, is evident from our eating habits), although we've crossed paths with plenty of backpackers while we've been here. I always had a prejudice about the sort of person who came back from a gap year enthusing about their backpacking adventure, and it's good to see my assumption confirmed that they weren't all having life-changing experiences and discovering new worlds at all, they were in fact just traipsing around the same limited set of youth hostels each set in major destinations, where they would sit outside their accommodation smoking cigarettes, getting wasted and trying to pull one of the hundreds of other western backpackers who are all doing precisely the same thing. Which isn't to say this is a bad thing – that's all we were doing at home after all – but I always knew they were fibbing about the spiritual enrichment.

Paul also made me laugh extremely loudly today, by reporting that “a jellyfish cannae work in an old folks' home”. A veiled reference to abysmal movie Love Happens, you understand.

Day 39, in which we don't flash the baby penguin

We headed back round the harbour for breakfast today, for eggs on toast. Mine quickly became egg on toast when I lowered my defences to get some pepper from a neighbouring table and a gang of seagulls swooped down and gobbled up an entire poached egg and most of a piece of toast. Their leader – an ugly and noisy old thing – had been scoping us out from a tall flag pole the moment we'd turned up. I now have only one rule about seagulls: Kill them, if you can.

We had to leave Akaroa today, just two nights after falling in love with it. The landscape changed significantly as we left the Banks Peninsula and joined the main road south, with the wild and rugged becoming tame and flat – somewhat like Kent without the oast houses. The road was a single carriageway most of the way, and despite being the only trunk road on the east side of the island the traffic was very quiet and fast moving.

Around 1pm we arrived in Timaru for lunch. We had originally planned to stay in Timaru, but today we were very glad we had not. Timaru had all the look of an antipodean Blackpool, and although it had apparently seen glory days as a seaside town they were clearly long behind it. We stuffed a sandwich down our throats outside the tourist information centre (which, judging from its information boards, only specialised in helping people get the hell out of Timaru) and headed for our final destination for the day: Oamaru.

Oamaru looks less like a seaside town whose glory days are behind it, and rather more like Harrogate after global thermonuclear war (the guidebook is more euphemistic, suggesting it is merely “slowly gentrifying”). Apparently once the most attractive city on South Island, the town centre is now a rag-tag collection of Victorian buildings – including our own Empire Hotel Backpackers Hostel, a grand stone building with a neoclassical façade – distributed in between ugly or abandoned buildings, warehouses and factories, with many of the 'classical' buildings now bricked up and used as storage facilities. We should have guessed something was up as we drove down the main drag and passed no fewer than five separate people making their way into town in electric wheelchairs. This is not a hip and happening city.

Of course, none of this mattered as we had only come to Oamaru to see yellow-eyed penguins. We checked into our hostel and walked 5km uphill to a look-out point over the bay, then crested the hill and strolled down a remote country path to the far side of the coastline, where the yellow-eyed penguins live. These are a special, non-migratory and large form of penguin which are relatively unique to the area. We were told that one must be extremely patient if one wishes to see them and – as we're not very patient – we instead killed some time walking back into town for a spot of dinner at The Last Post, took at 90 minute nap and then drove back up to the colony to see if the penguins were up to much yet.

The lady in the tourist information office had warned us that we might not see any penguins at all (they are entirely wild, living on a beach completely naturally, so there's no charge to visit them and no guarantees). Fortunately, as we turned up (at 8pm) there was already a brave penguin strolling around on the beach, in the company of two giant brown seals. As the sun gradually set over the next hour, the penguins became more active and two more penguins appeared down on the beach. It was hard to make out much more than that as we were viewing the birds from a special walkway built high on the top of the cliffs above the bay, and as one American woman exclaimed “they're microscopic!”.

We had imagined that would be about it. Much to our surprise, however, a mother and her baby penguin suddenly appeared about a metre from the fence, high up the cliff wall among the shrubbery, where they politely posed for photographs (although they were visibly scared when flashes went off, something the volunteer attendant demanded we should not do and which – all the same – was a request various idiot tourists were unable to comply with). We were surprised to see them so high up the cliff, but it seems the penguins have made long winding pathways through the cliff-side shrubs and simply walk up from the beach to their cliff-top nests when they're ready for bed. These two were joined by another adult penguin, who posed briefly in front of the hide before shuffling off into the undergrowth with a nonchalant wave of one wing, as though to proclaim “Get out of my way, I'm fabulous!”.

After that, once we knew where to look, a few more penguins appeared in the undergrowth. As the wind raged and the sun began to set, the viewing platform emptied out and we were soon the last ones there. Although yet more penguins were now coming out of their nests for fresh air, we figured we should perhaps leave them with some peace and quiet.

It is a shame really that we were the last to leave, as our car refused to start and there was no one to give us a lift back into town (where I had conveniently left the AA phone number). We therefore enjoyed the walk back into town all over again and – since the AA refused to pick us up from the centre of town – we also got the wonderful opportunity to enjoy a second stroll up to the penguin colony, this time in pitch black and a howling gale.

We sat for some time in the car waiting for the AA – listening to disco tunes on the radio, and trying the engine periodically and without luck – until it was over an hour since we'd phoned for help. I tried the engine one last time and – dumb luck – it randomly fired up, so we drove back to our hotel and went in search of a recuperative drink. Alas, The Last Post was closed by 11pm, and the only other nightlife we had seen during our travels (on this, a Saturday night) was an octogenarian woman hobbling out of a disco at the Scottish Hall, a middle-aged man on each arm. We decided to wait until Queenstown for our drink and called it a night.


Update: Whoops. It seems pressing the accelerator when starting such a modern car as a Ford Focus means the engine can't fire up. I had assumed all cars were the same as my own, a 1971 wreck that typically needed more acceleration than I could provide to start. This was a lesson learned the hard way...

Day 38, in which we hunt endangered dolphins

After a mammoth amount of sleep, we slipped into wetsuits and joined the Black Cat Cruise company for a tour of Akaroa harbour. We were on the hunt for Hector dolphins (named after the marine biologist Sir Hector Dolphin, a noted dolphin). These are a particularly small breed of dolphin unique to New Zealand which – despite being entirely wild – have a soft spot for the old humans and like to come say hello when they can.

There were ten of us crammed in the boat, each eagerly on the look out, and although we spotted the occasional group of dolphins, when we stopped to see if they wanted to come and play they invariably circled the boat a couple of times and then vanished again. Still, even this was more wild dolphin that I'd ever seen before, and it was quite magical seeing these stubby little animals jumping gleefully through the waves and dancing around in small groups.

Hector dolphins have been dying in their hundreds of thousands over the years. They get caught in local fishing nets and then drown (a Hector dolphin can only hold his breath for four minutes under water, which you'd think he'd take as a hint that he's not meant for aquatic life). Although there are now over seven thousand dolphins left, most of them didn't appear to be in Akaroa harbour.

Dark clouds began to billow over the mountains and the water became choppier, which we were told is superb weather for the dolphins, who see waves as a sort of adventure playground. Our leader soon heard over his radio that another group had found a friendly group further out in the mouth of the bay, so we were driven over there and we all climbed into the heaving waters. Almost immediately my head was under the water and I was so cold I couldn't breath. I tried swimming in light circles but it wasn't helping at all, and deciding it was a bad time to test whether dolphins really do save drowning humans like they do in Greek mythology (and with the tiny Hector dolphins, I'd have needed a whole school of saviours) and climbed back out. Still, while I failed to get close to the dolphins from the comfort of the boat, everyone else failed to get close to them from within the choppy waters (except the lucky lady in the photo above).

We also saw a penguin, who wasn't curious about us in the least and seemed to be just drifting on his tummy wherever the elements might take him. The weather worsened as we returned, and the waves grew huger and more violent as the driver hit full throttle and we bounced home across the waves. This made for an excellent fairground ride home, and we got NZ$100 back as a refund for the poor turn-out.

In the evening we went to the somewhat flamboyantly named La Vie En Rouge – a rather ordinary French restaurant – followed by a stroll around the harbour, where the storm clouds were swirling around all pretty.

Day 37, in which we decide we might quite like New Zealand

We arrived at Christchurch in the early afternoon, and the contrast with Japan was immediately obvious. Everyone in New Zealand was happy, smiling and relaxed, the sun was shining, and outside the airport was a wide stretch of verdant countryside.

We hired a car from the most laid back man we've met all holiday and drove down to Akaroa, a small town on the east coast which will be home for the next couple of days. In any other country the drive from Christchurch would be a tourist attraction in itself: we passed soaring mountains, lush valleys, dense forests and sparkling blue lakes, all in quick succession and with not a blot on the landscape. Paul noted one bit was like “the Scottish Highlands in technicolor”, although during the 70km drive we also passed bits that looked like Wales, the Pyrenees, Rio de Janeiro and the Yorkshire Dales. In technicolor.

Arriving at Akaroa Harbour itself felt slightly unreal. The sat-nav was being experimental and had us creep up a steep mountain road rather than trundle straight to our destination, so we approached the town over the top of a mountain and our first sight of the harbour was from high above, looking down on the landscape laid out before us, the sea a strangely vivid blue colour and surrounded on three sides by huge and beautiful mountains, the sun shining gaily on all. It quite figuratively took our breath away.

We checked into the Bon Accord Backpackers hostel – a big old house with a superb garden, just a short walk from the sea – before wandering down to the harbour for a nose around, where again we were stunned by the sheer beauty of the place. We ended up having dinner at a restaurant called Ma Maison just as the sun began to settle across the waters, in what we agreed was the most spectacular place either of us had ever eaten dinner. The food was thankfully superb too: fresh fish, fruits and vegetables, and the wine weren't bad neither.

After a mooch along the beach and a bit of a paddle, we realised we hadn't slept in 32 hours and so went immediately to bed and - after three weeks on hard futons - were thankful to be reintroduced to the sprung mattress.


Note for would-be commentators: a few people have mentioned lately that they've been trying to post comments which haven't then appeared. I've got rid of all the 'please type the word above' nonsense for confirming you're a real human being, but it will still ask you to preview your comment when you first click 'post'. If you don't then click on 'post' again, your comment won't be submitted (note also that we love comments!).

Day 36, in which we underestimate our travel time just a smidge

With the morning to kill before heading to the airport, we wandered over to the Imperial Palace to explore the allegedly beautiful gardens they have there. Looking for breakfast on route through the skyscrapers of the financial district we somehow stumbled across a branch of Dean & Deluca and so we stopped to buy muffins, coffee and sandwiches to eat later for lunch. I was so pleased to find somewhere so nice to eat, I immediately declared Dean & Deluca the third best thing I'd seen all holiday; however, in retrospect this possibly was not fair to the Fushimi Shrine in Kyoto.

The Imperial Gardens were pretty much a flop, thanks to an over-use of tarmac and concrete, but we enjoyed our sandwiches and did enjoy a fairly small stroll garden in one corner, where the pathways were a couple of feet wide rather than ten metres and there was plenty of verdant shrubbery. Still, I was by this point stricken with Japan fatigue and when Paul asked what I wanted to do next, I simply shrugged and suggested we get the hell to the airport.

When discussing our travel plans, we both made the simplistic error of guessing that since Japan and New Zealand are both quite far away from the UK, they're probably pretty close to each other. Even two days ago we believed it would only be a three hour flight to Christchurch, so we had a little bit of a surprise when we checked our travel documents and realised we had a fourteen hour trip ahead of us – including a one hour change in Sydney. We flew with Qantas, an airline which appears to assume its passengers are all amputees as no room is provided to store ones legs. We consequently didn't get any sleep at all, although we did see the latest Jennifer Aniston flop, Love Happens, and Matt Damon's film The Informant!, which is not as funny as the editor of its trailer seems to think it is.

Day 35, in which we return triumphant to Tokyo

Today was almost entirely spent on trains, travelling the eight and a half hour journey back to Tokyo from Nagasaki. We ate some relatively terrible bento boxes on the way - multiple piles of unflavoured rice with breaded pork fat - and made the somewhat depressing discovery that our next destination is somewhat further away from Japan than we had imagined (around nine hours further, to be precise - tomorrow is also set to be fun).

On the plus side, I had a superb time reading a few short stories by O Henry (one of the few English-language books I could find in Nagasaki) and watching Nicolas Cage and Sam Rockwell (who were so superb together in Matchstick Men) finally reunited in the hit movie G-Force, a film concerning a band of guineapig super-agents and their mole friend, Sparkles.

We have now retired to the Villa Fontaine Hotel Ueno in Tokyo, where we are in the process of doing our laundry and other tiresome things in preparation for visiting a new continent tomorrow.

Day 34, in which we thank the gods for pink peppercorns

We tried the diner across the road from our hotel for breakfast today, which boasts having 'the first and finest self-service drinks counter in Japan' – a strange claim, perhaps, but with unlimited refills on coffee, ice tea and fruit juices all for just 75p, it certainly appealed to us.

Having already 'done' the Atom Bomb in Hiroshima – during which we learned about as much as you could read on wikipedia about the bombing, but with more pictures – we were not in much of a mood to repeat the whole exercise in Nagasaki (the principal difference being they got a plutonium rather than uranium bomb). So we skipped all that and stuck to the south of the city, which was largely overlooked by the bomb and so has a lot of buildings from the Meji era intact.

Our first stop was Glover Park, a lovely hillside park close to our hotel where the Nagasaki government has relocated a half dozen colonial era buildings in an outdoor museum of Japan's first proper interaction with the west. These included the tiny bungalow of a Mr Walker who brought the railways, industrial manufacturing and what became the Kirin brewery to Japan, and the Glover House, where former arms-dealer Mr Glover and his wife introduced education and commerce, while also secretly conspiring to change the very nature of Japanese government. Glover was also Scottish, which I suppose answers my question of why tartan is still so popular in Japanese school uniforms.

The park was very neatly laid out, and easy to get around thanks to a series of escalators and moving walkways. Nearby we also visited the Dutch Slopes, the original western enclave, so named as it's up a hill and most of the early foreigners were traders from Holland. This was pretty much a redux of our walk around Glover Park, with two traditional colonial buildings to snoop around, and largely the same views down the hill into the harbour.

The tourist information map made a great fuss about the "Site of the Former Dutch Factory on Dejima", an island which for 200 years was the only place foreigners were allowed to engage in trade or commerce. We happened to pass it on our way north through it is quite a mystery why it is still on the tourist maps. The original site has now been demolished, while land reclamation projects mean this isolated trading post is now so far from being an island it is actually a third of a kilometre inland. We didn't therefore stop.

A highlight of the day was taking the ropeway (or, cable car) up to the Mount Inasa Lookout, which commands an amazing 360 degree view across Nagasaki, from the city where we had started, round to the industrial harbour and out to the sea on the other side of the mountain, where the sun was setting behind a small group of islands. It was all rather special, and so to celebrate we drank two beers and waited for night to fall, when the city's rather blunt edges were lost in the darkness, and their field of lights down in the valley made for a beautiful view.

We had dinner at a Russian-French restaurant called Harbin, in the Hamano-Machi Shopping Arcade. We had not intended to spend much on dinner, but this is effectively our last proper night in Japan so we figured we might as well have a bit of a blow out: a scallop ceviche with a dill and pink peppercorn twist started the meal and was the first real burst of flavour we've enjoyed for weeks. We wept, rent our clothes and praised god for pink peppercorns. Slow-cooked shoulder of black pork and a rich and almost stew-like borscht followed, but alas Paul was let down by his beef stroganoff, which amounted to amazingly tender pieces of beef lost in a vat of cream. Only my lamb hotpot - served inexplicably from a two-litre earthenware jug, but fizzing and tasting softly of cumin - saved the day.

We had another spa bath, but this time in the ladies' pool since the men's was closed. Oddly, the women's pool is half the size of the men's. I guess the men in Japan are just generally more dity than the women.

Day 33, in which we go on a day trip to Hell

We resurfaced from our hotel at around 11am and took brunch at the Royal Host, a Japanese diner in Nagasaki railway station which served some very good fried eggs and one of the smallest sausages I've ever seen. We were on our way to Unzen, which required a 30 minute train journey to the middle of nowhere, and then a long and snaking bus journey through the countryside for an hour and twenty minutes. We were both a bit irritated to discover how long the bus journey took (there was no mention of a four-hour round trip in the guide book), until Paul remembered that sometimes taking a bus through the countryside can be a pleasure in itself, and then we settled down and enjoyed it.

We passed on route through the town of Obama – a settlement on the coast, with small chimneys built into the roads and buildings releasing large amounts of subterranean steam from geothermal activity – and it was nice to see that the tourist office was cashing in on the coincidence of names with a large (if not terribly convincing) plastic model of Barack Obama standing in front of the US flag.

Unzen is a spa town which sits over 700 metres up a mountain, and is famous for its geothermal activity. Japan as a whole is the meeting place of four separate tectonic plates, and its geography is almost entirely the result of plate collisions and volcanic eruptions. While active volcanoes pepper the entire country, Kyushu appears to have more than its fair share and Unzen itself lies in the shadow of Mount Unzen-dake, which last erupted in 1991.

Scattered around Unzen are large and sulphurous areas of steaming geothermal vents, and I really wanted to visit the main ones in the park thanks to a report in the guidebook that an old crone in a bonnet would lower an egg into one of these bubbling craters, and then remove it hard-boiled to eat (for a fee). The reality was somewhat more disappointing: a bored looking teenager in a hoody sat in a wooden shack, and when children asked for an egg he would pull himself to his feet, swagger to a wooden box filled with pre-boiled eggs, shove one in a plastic bag and then begrudgingly swap it for a handful of yen. If I don't get to see the egg being lowered into a boiling crater with my own two eyes, I'm not forking out any yen for it. Bonnet or no bonnet.

The rest of this geothermal park was rather disappointing, in that so much steam is generated you can't actually see the craters themselves. The most famous of these jigoku (or “hells”) was Daikyokan Jigoku, into which 33 Christians were boiled alive in 1630 as punishment for being Christian. I assume they were thrown in consecutively rather than concurrently, otherwise the hole would have soon blocked up and the Shogun would have at least 13 singed and angry Christians on his hands. Anyway, a helpful sign explained that the Japanese call these 'hells' because in the Buddhist faith hell is associated with sulphur, heat and smoke (perhaps the Shogun was not so dissimilar to the Christians), and the gurgling noise made by the hell is likened – somewhat fancifully, it seemed to me – to the screams of the damned as they plunge into Hell.

After taking in all of this sulphurous terror, we took a nice stroll up the mountainside in an attempt to reach the Nita Pass, where one can catch a cable car up to the top of the mountain from which the crater of the volcano can be observed. We had to walk since the tourist information guide had explained that the bus was not working today, but it would perhaps also have been nice if he'd explained that the cable car also was not working as this would have saved us a journey. As it was, we went halfway up the mountain before determining this for ourselves, but it was not an entirely wasted journey: we saw a wild boar, a self-driving motorised golf buggy and a superb view down to the sea before turning back.

Although Unzen has three separate tourist information offices, they were not generally very helpful. When we first arrived in Unzen – worried by the length of our return journey and eager to ensure we knew when our last possible bus home would be – we popped in to ask as tourist information. “There is one leaving in ten minutes,” we were told. “Is there not one three hours from now?” I asked, looking at the timetable in his hand. “Oh yes, but then you'd have to spend three hours in Unzen,” he explained, straight-faced, as though he truly considered the best advice for tourists to be “Get out, get out now and be glad!”

As it happens, he was probably right. The hells were a big disappointment and as the cable car wasn't working there was no real reason to go up this mountain rather than the one in – say – Nagasaki where we'd woken up. As we came back down the hill, full of suggestions of getting a late lunch or perhaps seeing if there was a hotel with a pool, we saw a blue bus destined for Nagasaki and boarded it without another word. Within an hour and forty minutes, we were home.

We bathed again in the hot spa on the tenth floor, this time in the company of an elderly man who sounded very much relieved to be in hot water, before heading out to the Dejima Wharf for a spot of dinner at the St Andrew's Inn. So far, all of the Japanese cities we have visited have been identical to each other: sprawling messes of boxy buildings built high and in concrete. Dejima Wharf bucks this trend, being a modern development of charming wooden buildings, built along the wharf and overlooking the estuary, with a range of interesting bars and restaurants. While sipping white wine here, I realised Nagasaki has a slightly different feel from Tokyo / Kyoto / Osaka / Hiroshima / Kagoshima, and may well end up being my favourite of the cities we visit this holiday (in Japan, at least).

Cultural Note #003: during our time in Japan we've come across a surprising number of examples of relatively mundane noises which have been given extremely poetic interpretations. A bubbling fountain in Kyoto was known as the 'Crying woman in the night', yet might better be compared to 'Urinating man in fountain'. The squeaking floors of the Nijo-jo – a clever alarm system installed to alert to intruders, and sounding mostly like the squeaking of baby rats – was interpreted as 'the nightingale song' floorboards. Most recently, the sound of raging geothermal water – reminiscent mostly of a kettle as it comes to boil – was compared to the sound of screaming souls as they plunged into Hell. It's elegant right enough, but suggests a cultural habit of euphemism in which one describes how one would like the world to be rather than how it actually is, and this may help to explain why Japanese society appears to be so incredibly straight-laced and conformist on the one hand and yet feeds a growing industry of schoolgirl prostitution and manga-porn on the other.

Day 32, in which we chew tobaccy

We spent a lot of time travelling by train to Nagasaki today. Although Nagasaki is on the same island as Kagoshima it is by no means on the same train line and so we arrived late in the day at the Loisir Hotel in downtown Nagasaki, and ready for a nap.

Our room sits in one corner of the building and so has superb views of Nagasaki: from one window, the estuary snakes down to the sea where the giant cargo ships ply their trade; and from the other the Dutch Slopes rise up through historic Nagasaki, nestled in a warm nest of urban sprawl. That was about as much as we saw of Nagasaki today, although we did indulge in some local history by visiting YouTube to see Bertie Wooster singing the Nagasaki song (“Back in Nagasaki / where the fellows chew tobaccy / and the women all wicky-wacky-woo”; as Jeeves commented: “Most exhilarating, sir”).

After a nap and a soak in the 10th floor baths (nude this time, but all male thank goodness) we went to the local Chinatown and discovered that just as Chinese food in the UK has been adapted to meet local tastes (fewer turkey feet and sea slugs, for example), it has also been tempered to meet the bland austerity of the Japanese palate: our prawns in chilli sauce were about as spicy as white bread soaked in milk, while spring rolls were stuffed with that bland, gloopy brown fluid which has proven to be so very popular over here.

Part III of Cleopatra occupied us until bedtime, and as we reached the end of the two hour epic – with Caeser dead and Cleopatra's plans in tatters – we were disappointed to see the title 'Intermission' rather than 'The End'. It seems there are two more hours to go and, unless Burton and Taylor really pull some twists out of their hat, I can't see it being two hours well spent.

Day 31, in which we explore the primeval forests of Yakushima

We got up before 6am today and took a taxi to Kagoshima port, opposite which Mount Sakurajima was getting angry as the sun rose, spitting up huge plumes of smoke. Sakurajima is made from such black volcanic rock that the sun's rays don't seem to illuminate at all, and so it sits on the horizon across the water from the port sheathed in ominous shadows and belching out black smoke while the local townsfolk just happily get on with their lives (while they still can).

We boarded the morning's first boat to Yakushima, a small sub-tropical island 100km from the tip of Kyushu. As we arrived we saw that most of the island is completely undeveloped, the boat pulling in to a small harbour settlement sitting at the foot of a mass of tall rounded mountains covered in dense forest. With the assistance of a cheerful lady in the tourist office – who was baffled by the idea we had only come to Yakushima for a day-trip – we worked out a hiking trail we could complete within six hours and still make it back in time for the last ferry.

A taxi took us winding up into the mountains to an altitude of 800 metres and dropped us off at the gates to the Shiratani Unsuikyo Natural Recreation Forest. After paying £2 a head, we followed a trail along a stream and series of waterfalls, before turning up-hill into the forest, following a series of occasional pink ribbons tied to the trees along a natural pathway supplemented where necessary by whatever rocks, logs and roots the park rangers found to hand.

The ancient forest is purposefully kept natural and unmanaged, and comprises a mix of wildly overgrown primeval forest – dominated by grand cedar trees, some over five thousand years old – and an accompanying freak show of the survivors of mutilation. While these latter trees were also thousands of years old, they had been chopped down to their stumps centuries ago to make roof shingles, left to become “second generation” cedars, regrowing with numerous twisted and exotic trunks and bulbous masses of branches. The local people are almost as proud of these fantastical old monstrosities as they are the grand trees which have survived untouched.

Kagoshima is the rainiest place in Japan (although it was clear and blue while we were there), and the sub-tropical weather has created an ecosystem very favourable to exotic ferns and rare mosses. In fact, moss covers absolutely everything, and the bark of many trees was long lost under a springy carpet of green, giving the wildly overgrown forests a pleasingly dark and lush feel which apparently inspired the imagery in Studio Ghibli's movie Princess Mononoke (although neither of us has seen it). The whole place felt magical and isolated, and we met only two other people the whole time we were in the forest, along with a couple of young deer feeding on moss by the track, and a small family of monkeys sunbathing on the roadside.

The last ferry to leave the island was at 3:45pm, but even in such a short time we both agreed it was the best thing we'd seen so far in Japan. There are so many other trails to take on the island – with an ecosystem that changes from tropical to temperate as you climb higher – that you could spend four or five happy days exploring Yakushima. In a few years' time, I think we'll probably put Yakushima at the centre of another trip to the Far East (albeit timed for warmer weather).

It took three hours to get back onto Kyushu, where we had sushi off the conveyor belt (an assured way to get what you want where no English is spoken) at Dolphin Port, before retiring to the hotel for another soak in the hot spa and then bed.

Day 30, in which we sleep in the shadow of a volcano

Today we took our longest train journey yet, in three legs from Hiroshima to Fukuoka on the island of Kyushu; from Fukuoka down to Shinyatsushiro; and from there down to Kagoshima. Apparently by next year the Shinkansen will have been extended the whole way, which just proves we're ahead of our time.

Kagoshima is a nondescript little city in what is generally regarded as the backwater of Japan, and its primitive nature only revealed itself to us as we tried to take the train to our hotel. We completely missed our stop because we hadn't realised it was a stop at all: there was no sign announcing the station name, no station building and no means of crossing the line to the street (as one little Japanese man demonstrated, it was necessary to climb down from the platform onto the tracks and then cross on foot, hopeful that you would catch your train and not the other way round).

We travelled to the next stop where there was a station building, and asked for directions. The ticket inspector was very friendly but spoke no English, so our conversation mostly involved saying 'Thank you' and 'Bye' over and over again. Eventually we found our way back to the main road and paid for a taxi to take us to our hotel, which was the best £7 I've ever spent. Once in the Kagoshima Tokyu Hotel we were able to relax. Our room was perhaps three times larger than anything we've stayed in so far, with a nice seating area in front of French windows, leading out onto a balcony with a view across the sea to Mount Sakurajima, an active volcano on the other side of the bay. Although still active, spitting our smoke and dust every day, we have been reassured that Sakurajima has not erupted since 1947 (and not significantly since 1914, when the lava flows blocked one entrance to the harbour, creating a new bank of wonderfully fertile soil where the locals can grow radishes five feet in diameter).

We took a taxi to the Dolphin Port for dinner. Tourists are thin on the ground this far south and so the locals speak virtually no English. We had to resort to the 'Waffle House' method of food selection, i.e. just pointing at the picture of the thing we want to eat. This is far from foolproof: while the Italian restaurant we went to had a very long selection of pizzas, they sadly only had photographs of two and so those were the ones we had to settle for.

Back at the hotel we changed into our swim shorts and hotel regulation costume of white gown, towel and straw slippers and wandered down to the al fresco onsen, two large geothermal plunge pools filled with naturally occurring minerals and salts. The waters were almost too hot and, combined with beer from the hotel vending machine, far too soporific. And so to bed.

Day 29, in which we attend a Derwent Enterprises breakout session

Long-standing readers of my holiday blogs will know that I don't consider it a holiday unless I get to visit the scene of a Second World War human horror, mass slaughter or heart-breaking tragedy. We rolled all three into one today by taking the train down to Hiroshima.

There are very few things for tourists to do in Hiroshima, all of which are atom bomb related, which is largely thanks to the atom bomb itself which destroyed the city's temples, castle, zoo, parks and museums along with the rest of the city back in 1945. We thus went for a stroll in the Peace Memorial Park, a rather bland 1950s concept of a memorial – all modernist statues, wide boulevards and bland lawns – which is designed to provide an uninterrupted view from a sarcophagus housing the names of all of those who died in the bomb at one end, through to the so-called Atom Dome – one of the few buildings to withstand the blast – at the other. Just behind that is a giant black blot of an office building, which I suppose is a reminder that the Japanese revere commercial considerations over almost everything else.

The park also houses the Atom Bomb Museum, which takes a very neutral stance (about who was to blame in the war, I mean, not about whether or not destroying Hiroshima was a good thing), and presents the evidence in a relatively factual way. In the first room we learned on the one hand about the rise of militarism in Japan and the army's belief that Japan's victory was a predestined matter of divine will, provided enough of their people sacrificed their lives; and on the other we learned about the US army's desire to scientifically measure the effects of its new weapon in a real life situation, as well as their need to send a clear message of superiority to the Soviet Union. All of this was then followed by a few personal accounts of the bomb going off (from both the bombers – who reported that their plane got a bit rocky when the bomb went off, poor dears – to an old man who turned around to see the sky split open above him. Apparently to those in the city, it appeared as though the sun was crashing to earth).

The next room was about the reconstruction of Hiroshima and was rather dull so we pretty much waltzed through that one; and then the third room was about the personal effects of the nuclear explosion on the population of Hiroshima. Many were vaporised of course, leaving behind nothing but a shadow burned into the pavement, and those that weren't made for rather upsetting photographs of melting skin and screaming faces. The most moving exhibit was a series of children's possessions, explaining in turn how each of their owners had died, sometimes in somewhat too graphic detail. There were also sections where you could examine the effects of the blast on bricks, roof tiles and – in one room – human body parts, which had been extracted and preserved in formaldehyde.

Hiroshima as a city seems to come out of it all very well. You might expect them to have been angry or driven to seek revenge, but they've largely mopped up the damage, forgiven the United States and are now dedicating themselves to the pursuit of world peace. The city itself bears few scars, and is barely distinguishable from Kyoto or Osaka (except in size, of course: it is a small and friendly place). Only occasionally do you stumble across one of the few remainders of the old city. A coffee shop we tried to visit turned out to be in a converted bank that had been half-destroyed in the blast, and we stumbled across a few more occasional ruins during our jaunt round the city.

After a trip around the park, we went to visit Hiroshima Castle. For hundreds of years the castle was a much admired flat-land military building in Japan, considered unassailable due to a series of concentric defensive moats, however these great defences did little to protect it from the power of Little Boy and the castle was completely destroyed in the blast. To improve morale after the war, the authorities rebuilt the castle in 1957, although unfortunately it was not a particularly good example of restoration work as the new castle is constructed entirely from ferroconcrete with wooden cladding. Admirable from a distance, once you enter the castle it is like being in a municipal leisure centre. The rest of the castle grounds were restored in 1991 – the moats and outer buildings, this time built only from wood – but with this concrete monstrosity sitting in the middle of it all it can only be considered to be stage scenery.

We checked into our hotel – the Chisun Inn in central Hiroshima – and had a light nap before popping out to the lovely Sawadee Lemongrass Grill, a Thai restaurant near the hotel which is very much recommended. The atmosphere was only slightly polluted by the loud bellowing of two western businessmen, who made Fry & Laurie's 'Dammit, Marjorie' sketches tame by comparison.

We watched Part 2 of Cleopatra, then bed.

Day 28, in which we race pensioners up the hills of the Minoh Valley

After our complimentary breakfast at the hotel – which mostly comprised frankfurters, a very dry omelette and some brown pineapple – we took the train out to the Minoh Quasi-National Park, an area of mountains, forests and rivers just thirty minutes outside of Osaka.

This made for a pleasant walk up through the woods to the 33 metre-high Minoh-waterfall, a walk which in autumn times is regarded as a national treasure on account of how it “makes visitors hearts gentle with the vivid colours in the seasonally changed nature”; however, it was also a lovely walk without the autumnal maple leaves, with the mighty cedars retaining their vivid green.

According to local literature, there is a legend of an exalted Chinese man who attempted to visit the waterfall but “was so frightened by the arduous pass around him that he could not step forward, and so went back.” I'm not sure what motivated this fear as it was a gentle ascent through pretty charming forest all the way there – with everyone else on the walk being of pensionable age – but then the Chinese are prone to over-excitement.

Minoh is also famous for its monkeys. There used to be a zoo here, and when it was closed down instead of moving the animals or having them all put down (as they did with the zoo near my childhood home) they simply released the monkeys into the wild. I was hopeful of seeing at least one wild monkey, but it seems likely they've misinterpreted the “Don't feed the monkey” signs as “No monkeys welcome”, as they all stayed away today. Ultimately, the only monkey we saw was Cheburaska, who has moved into modelling and now fronts a Japanese mobile phone campaign with his friend, That Crocodile:

We arrived back in Shin-Osaka completely exhausted, so took to our bed and watched Season Two of Nighty Night, which lost the subtlety of the first series and was just a sequence of over-the-top plot developments and characters. For dinner we travelled into town to visit the Shinsaibashi region, where the guidebook recommended a particularly good Mediterranean restaurant. Alas, as with about 50% of the book's recommendations, the restaurant was no where to be seen, so we explored the area instead.

Shinsaibashi is a seedy version of Soho, where the men are all dressed as either serious businessmen or Yakuza hitmen, and the women are all dressed like Barbie dolls. We struggled to find anywhere pleasant to eat, and ended up in a rather down-at-heel bar which served allegedly home-made pizzas, while the atmosphere was provided by two chain-smoking ladies who shouted down their mobile telephones.

We retired to the hotel for a nightcap in the bar, where alas the evening's earlier karaoke entertainment had now ceased, then bed.

Day 27, in which we travel thirty years into the future, to 2015

Today we took the train down to the docks on the eastern side of Osaka to visit the Universal Studios fairground, one of the greatest collections of queues in Japan. It may sound as though we have given up on Japanese culture and are simply seeking cheap thrills at an American theme park, but these parks are actually a key part of Japanese culture. Escapism is huge in Japan thanks to the importance their culture places on conformity, and so theme parks – along with comic books, computer games and the regularly consulted mobile phone – are big business here for adults as well as children.

Universal Studios Japan was built in 2002 as a direct copy of the US version, however this was at a time when most of the US rides were already quite dated. The US site has subsequently been upgraded and replaced, while the Japanese version was presumably too expensive to stand much immediate redevelopment and so remains a fossil of the 1990s original. The somewhat pleasing effect is that the Japanese rides are all based on childhood movie favourites: Jaws, Back To The Future, ET, Spider-Man and – ahem – Backdraft. In fact, so dated are these films, it wasn't lost on us that the 'present' of Back To The Future is now 25 years ago, while the future of those films – all flying cars, Mr Fusion and hover-boards – is just five years away, in 2015. I can hardly wait until I can get my ugly plastic self-expanding jacket.

The best ride by far was Spider-Man, which involved a combination of a roller-coaster ride and 3D Imax, using multiple screens and other effects (water, explosions, strobe lighting, etc) to create a thrilling ride through a New York infested with super villains. Probably the worst – after Backdraft, but only because most of that didn't work at all and so the entire 'ride' just involved a smug (and much younger) Ron Howard wearing an ugly jumper and talking in a very deep Japanese voice – was the ET Experience, in which Steven Spielberg addressed us in the same deep Japanese voice and then we were led into one (apparently deranged) man's vision of what ET's home planet might look like, which comprised a corridor infested with giant smiling cartoon plants.

We also saw the long-awaited sequel to Terminator 2: Judgement Day – T2:3D – in which Arnold Schwarzenegger conveniently forgets that he was burned to death and is not Japanese and rides into the auditorium on a Harley Davison from the post-apocalyptic universe and drags a Japanese John Connor into direct confrontation with Skynet, a glowing pyramid protected by one of the few examples of a T1,000,000 unit. I also finally got to go on the Back To The Future ride, which I remember my cousin Helen telling me about in 1991 when she went to the US park. I remember she sold it well and I was desperate to go on it myself, and it is fortunate for me – 19 years later – that while the ride no longer exists in the US I can still try it here myself in Osaka. It was everything she had promised.

All said and done, then, it may have been a little out dated but it all made for a great deal of fun and was pretty cheap compared to Thorpe Park and Alton Towers in the UK. We returned to Osaka and decided to visit the Sky Garden – two towers topped by a single 'floating garden' 173 metres above ground level – to have a drink while the sun set. 173 metres was a scary enough prospect, but my fear of heights was especially tested when it turned out that the automatic elevator which rose 47 storeys was made of glass, while we then had to ascend the final three storeys in a glass escalator which bridged the space between the two towers. Still, once we were up there it was a pretty spectacular way to see Osaka, with none of the other sky-scrapers even approaching our height.

Back down to earth, we discovered that the plot of open ground next to the Sky Garden towers is a radish patch, which shows an interesting approach to urban planning and land pricing. We had pizza in a local department store, then home.