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.
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.
The former Taikyuji Station still feels half-forgotten, and the bamboo grove looks like something from a Studio Ghibli scene.
Kurayoshi has a lovely old town, some excellent coffee, a wonderfully odd pear museum and one of the most atmospheric abandoned railway walks we found in Japan.
Is Fukuoka worth visiting? We think so, especially if you want a calmer and less touristy Japan.