Visiting the famous Matuse castle in Japan.

The garden was beautiful, boats go and forth in the moat which also adds a nice color to the view of the castle.

The beautiful moat and bridges around Matsue castle, Japan

There are many old houses in the vicinity too. For example one of the old houses are Samurai or Buke yashiki. They display old Samurai tools inside the house so you can see their lifestyles back then.

We recommend Matsue as a must visit place.

After that we made the long journey to Hiroshima. The first part was a local train to Okayama and then we transferred to Shinkansen.

We arrived at Hiroshima in the early evening and had not yet booked any hotel accommodation which proved to be a struggle for the price range we wanted. Also most of the budget / business hotels were fully booked.
So we resorted to an Internet Cafe, which we had tried once before in Nagano.
With internet cafes you do not book in advance, only we you turn up.
We were lucky that they had plenty of availability and we even got an upgrade to a family sized room from a double cubicle.
We were very impressed by the room and used the cafe’s discount coupon to book dinner.

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They visit the castle and lakes of Matsumoto Shirakabako Suwako. Matsumoto is a famous castle in the Nagano region and the lakes of Shirakaba and Suwa ice over during winter.

We passed around Shirakaba-ko or Shirakaba lake, which is still frozen and white. It was very beautiful.

Then we went near Suwa-ko or Suwa lake. We could see Suwa lake from higher point of express way. Also we could see ‘Yatsugatake’, 8 mountains in a row.

Then we went to today’s main landmark, Matsumoto castle. Matsumoto castle is one of the three Japanese treasure castle (Other two are Hikone & Himeji castle).

View of Matsumoto castle was magnificent!

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