Best Day trips from Sendai
Sendai is a brilliant base for day trips, especially if you want to see more of Tohoku without changing hotels every night.
Sendai is a brilliant base for day trips, especially if you want to see more of Tohoku without changing hotels every night.
Sendai gives you access to a different kind of Japan. You have proper shopping, great restaurants, easy trains, forest parks, mountain temples, onsen towns, whisky distilleries and the coast all within reach.
While staying in Kimihurura, we put together our own self-guided art walk through the area. We took a moto to Niyo Arts Center and then made our way back on foot, stopping at different art spaces along the way.
Windhoek is often treated as little more than the starting point for a trip around Namibia. Most travellers fly in, pick up a rental car or join a tour and head straight for the desert, national parks and dramatic landscapes the country is famous for.
The Kibiji Cycling Route was one of the easiest and most enjoyable day trips we did from Okayama. It is flat, well signposted, simple to organise by train, and gives you a completely different side of Japan: rice fields, quiet lanes, working farms, old shrines and a five-storied pagoda rising above the countryside.
Okayama worked best as a practical stop rather than a city we fell madly in love with. It has good train connections, easy access to Kurashiki, and one of the nicest low-effort cycling routes we did in Japan: the Kibi Plain route between Bizen-Ichinomiya and Soja
Tottori is not a city packed with endless sights, but it does have one very clear reason to visit: the dunes. Huge sand dunes rolling down towards the sea are not something you expect to find in Japan, and that alone makes Tottori feel different from anywhere else we visited.
North Sumatra was one of the most varied parts of our Indonesia trip. Within a relatively short distance, we went from trekking through rainforest looking for orangutans to climbing an active volcano for sunrise and relaxing beside the enormous Lake Toba.
Lake Toba was probably the place we connected with least during our time in North Sumatra.
That’s not to say it isn’t beautiful. It absolutely is. The enormous volcanic lake, green hills and traditional Batak villages make this one of the most distinctive landscapes in Indonesia. But after spending five nights on Samosir Island we came away with mixed feelings.
For some reason, the atmosphere just felt a little off to us. We also found people noticeably less friendly than elsewhere we’d travelled in Indonesia, where we’d become so used to incredibly warm and welcoming interactions.
We’re still glad we visited, though. Lake Toba gave us a completely different experience from Bukit Lawang and Berastagi and introduced us to the culture and traditions of the Batak people.
On our Northern Sumatra trip we spent one night in Berastagi, and there was one main reason for stopping here: to climb Mount Sibayak for sunrise.
After several days relaxing in Bukit Lawang, we travelled by taxi through the mountains to Berastagi. The drive itself was beautiful, taking us through the green landscapes of northern Sumatra before reaching the town.
The following morning, we were up long before sunrise and heading towards Mount Sibayak, an active volcano just outside Berastagi.