Kyushu 2023 - Train to Dazaifu

 

Morning breakfast at the hotel. Most times when I am travelling, I prefer to have breakfast in the hotel. It's convenient, and I can eat while my travelling companion is spending hours in the toilet :P At Tokyo Stay Hotel, I love the amenities inside the room. Look at that beautiful white kettle! It's something that I would have loved for my own home but I always ended up buying something cheap and functional instead of aesthetic. The hotel actually came with a washing machine inside the room that has a washer and dryer too. It is an amazing place to stay!

Just for scale, this is how big my dorayaki was! I especially bough it because of the size. I wanted to feel like a child again eating such a huge pancake!

After breakfast, we took a walk through the connector of madness again to the more populated town area.

There were some nooks and cranny that looked interesting, but everything was closed as it was still too early when we set out to find the train station. Anyway, long story short, we made our way to the station to buy a combination tickets to Dazaifu, but was told that they don't sell those tickets anymore. We were told to go to another station to purchase the tickets. Luckily for us, we still have our 1 day bus pass, so we quickly made our way to the bigger station to get our tickets.

This is what the ticket looked like. I wanted this ticket because it came with return ride on the train, entrance tickets, as well as free snacks! all for just 1,000 Yen! Which is less than 10sgd at that time.

There is even discount coupon that came with it. It was fun to have! I love these local combination ticket and would always search for them whenever I am travelling by bus or train. Even though we hardly use any of the coupon, we did make use of one to visit the doll museum :)

Anyway, maybe I was still suffering from lack of sleep from previous day, but I found I didn't know how to navigate the train station! Lol. I couldn't read the signs, and I couldn't understand the announcements. But we managed to ask around, and managed to board the correct train. We had to change train along the way, and thank goodness the transit station was a lot more tourist friendly. It has been a while, what with covid and all, since I  was back in Japan. After this trip, luckily my solo trip and the trip with my friend was a lot better.

See! English words! 

The combination ticket was curtesy of Nishitetsu Company that runs the train and buses in Fukuoka area. Love the minty green and orange colour of the train!

Finally, we arrived at Dazaifu station. Problem was, so did every tourist in Fukuoka! -______-

Kyushu 2023 - Fukuoka First Dinner, Supper and Street Art

After walking around Ohori Park, we made our way out of the park to look for a bus home. One of the wonderful thing about travelling on our own is, we can go anywhere we wanted at any time. So while looking for bus stop, we also went to explore some convenient shops and bought some snacks for our supper and breakfast. Taking the bus back also allows us to sight see more of the local area. Night scenes came alive as the sunset, and restaurants and shops lighted up. Fukuoka is actually famous for their mobile hawker cart called Yatai. Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to try any during this trip :(   Maybe next time....

For dinner I told my husband I wanted to eat at Sukiya. I always have problem spending too much money when I land in a foreign place. Sukiya was a budget restaurant so I though it would be a safe bet to save money. Plus, I saw while on our way out that they have Unagi rice bowl! Unagi and beef rice bowl for only around 10sgd!

So that was what I ordered. It was a satisfying meal, just kinda too little to filled me up, lol.

So between our hotel and the main road where we took the bus from and where all the local shops are, we have to walk through this weird looking underpass road. It was busy or anything, mainly bicycles commute through it. But it looks kinda weird and frankly rather eerie. It reminded me of Japanese urban ghost story. I am pretty sure I would meet with some weird ghost at midnight if I was walking here alone!

It didn't help that they decorated the walls with paintings to brighten up the place. The painting itself was rather freaky themselves!

Here are more samples. I think I have more as we had to walk through this road the next day as well!

The rice bowl wasn't enough for me, so when I got back and showered, I made myself some supper! Or dessert depending on how you look at it :P Free hot coffee from the lobby, and these lovely affordable canale from a pharmacy shop we went to earlier on our way back from Ohori Park. So there you have it, how our first day in Fukuoka was like. We were staying two nights here before heading out to explore the rest of Kyushu! 

Kyushu 2023 - Spring Time at Ohori Park Fukuoka

 

After taking a nap in the hotel to sleep off our red eye flight, we started to venture our again the later afternoon. Can't let our 100yen a day bus pass go to waste can we? We walk around to find the bus stop that would take us to Ohori Park. I was secretly hoping to see some cherry blossom at the park. But along the way there, we saw these beautiful tulips all popping out in the middle of the streets! They were so colourful and huge that they almost looked fake! I can testify that they are absolutely real cause I went up close to one to check it out, lol. They are just so beautiful, something I don't see everyday in my hot and humid hometown.

We also saw some cherry blossom trees near a small park near our hotel. I wasn't sure if they were actually cherry blossom, so I took some photo and send them to my friend in Tokyo to confirm. He replied back a solid Yes! I think this was my 2nd time seeing real sakura. My first was in Hokkaido long long time ago when I went backpacking with some ex-colleagues around Japan. Those were at the end of the sakura season, so it was quite a sad sight. During this trip, it was also at the tail end of the sakura season.

After a short bus ride, we arrived at Ohori park, and we saw more flowers! Loveliest tulips I've ever seen in my life! Whatever I saw in Garden by the Bay doesn't count as those are artificially planted with a controlled climate!

There were also all these small flowers on the road side, signalling the start of summer? 

Jogging tracks around the park. It was almost sunset timing as we made our way around the pond. 

Luckily there were still some day light left to take some nice photos of these pink flowers and the sculpture.

Ohori Park has a huge pond in the middle of it, kinda like Lakeside Garden in Singapore. I was surprised my husband say it was ok to walk around it! He is usually grumpy from lack of sleep on our first day :P Anyway, we saw some lovely pavilion going out into the waters. 

Some bridges, and buildings behind it. Actually, it kinda looked like a Chinese place, Taiwan or Singapore, lol. But it was still a lovely place for a walk.

There was some small land where some trees were located, filled with all these giant birds. Since it was evening, it was probably their nest where they come back to each evening. It reminded me of African safari somehow, and I was rather fascinated by it.

I wasn't planning on staying out late, but my husband assure me we can find our way home using google map, so we stayed on. At the back of my mind, I recall Fukuoka has the highest number of Yakuza in all of Japan! But I hope they really are organised crime with their code of honour! Anyway, I love this photo with the swan paddling boat thing. This one reminded me very much of scenes in Japan :)  It reminds me of Japanese romantic drama, or summer time with families in the park. It was a super productive first day in Kyushu!

Kyushu 2023 - Arriving at Fukuoka

 

As promised, here is the start of my travel blog on Kyushu in 2023. It was probably our first trip out of Singapore since Covid ended. (excluding Malaysia). Kyushu is kind of a special place for me, and for many years I couldn't bring myself to visit this place. Eventually I managed to put my past behind me, and planning for this trip was quite an adventure! Will elaborate more on that in the later post, but thankfully Krisflyer extended my Elite Gold membership through out Covid, and I actually managed to use it for 3 more trips before it expired in 2023 August 31! 

There is always some confusion over the Krisflyer Silver and Gold Lounge. Just to clarify, the SilverKris Lounge is the more high class lounge. If you are flying economy, you can only go into the Gold Lounge. And frankly these days, airport lounge aren't as exclusive as it used to be. Most people with a high value credit card often have access to it.....

Still, it was free food and free alcohol, so no complain there. This was a night flight, so we had some supper and a glass of white wine to wind down for the flight. I was at my chilled Chardonnay phase in life... Lol. I don't know why though, it has been years, but it did bring back good memories somehow.

I managed to visit the newly opened Bacha Coffee shop inside the terminal. It looked really fancy. The price even more fancier. To-date (I'm writing this in 2025) I have yet to purchased any coffee from them. I have however drank a pot of coffee at their shop inside Takashima. It cost 10sgd a pot and good for 2 cups of coffee, so I think it's much more affordable to drink it at the shop than purchasing a drip coffee box from them....just my opinion anyway....

Since it was a night flight, I must have slept through it. No photo memories of it whatsoever.  Upon landing at the Fukuoka Airport, there was a massive queue at the immigration! That was not expected as I though nobody would be headed to Fukuoka. Surely it wasn't high on tourist's visit list in Japan! I think we were stuck for almost 1.5hrs in the queue! Upon clearing and collecting our luggage, we headed to the bus terminal, and I activated by bus day pass which cost only 100yen a day! How cool is that! I found this from social media, and downloaded the MyRoute app to purchase 2 100yen day pass and absolutely love it! For a start, it gave us a free ride to town - Hakata Station. 

Here's my husband on the bus. Since it was pretty early, around 8am or so, the bus was pretty empty. And unlike other location in Japan, Hakata Station was rather near the airport, so it was very convenient to get to.  First thing we did upon reaching Hakata Station was bringing my husband to buy  a pair of shoe. His disintegrated on his way to Japan. We have also left our luggage at our hotel nearby since it was too early to check in. 

Next task was to settle our train tickets as it was still too early for lunch. The queue at the JR station was just as bad. We spend around 45minutes queueing. I was very excited and nervous about it. I have bought a JR Kyushu 7 days pass, and have listed down all the trains I wanted to take in those 7 days in two sheets of paper because 1 sheet was just not enough, lol. This was like having the staff checking whether I did my homework correctly and did I pass my test. Luckily for me, I have worked in a Japanese company for 3.5 years before, so I am familiar with the culture of paperwork in Japan! I was so impressed when the staff handed me my stack of train tickets! Not a single mistake! Everything was OK! Yay!

Happy now, we went to look for our lunch to celebrate. I always like to settle everything before I reward myself. It's just a habit I have. And the first meal we had there was at a traditional Japanese restaurant. 

Ah! Authentic Japanese food. One of the best thing in Japan! And with the strong Singapore dollars vs Japanese yen, we were so going to eat so much of it, especially living through Covid and surviving mainly on Donki Sushi and Sashimi! Do note however that the air flight was ridiculously high for this trip, at least for my husband. I got my flight free via point redemption. I did help lighten his load by paying some of his train JR Kyushu pass for him since I felt guilty about the high price of his ticket :P

After lunch, and wondering around the station a bit to get ourselves orientated, we finally head to our hotel to check in. We stayed at Tokyo Stay hotel chain, and it was pretty affordable and very well equip! I would highly recommend this hotel again! I think I have some photos of the rooms in later blog post to tell you why I think this is a great place to stay. It cost maybe just 50sgd or 60sgd a night per room and quite near the station.

At the lobby they have a coffee machine. It was the start of spring, and the weather was still pretty cold, so it was so nice coming back to the hotel and helping myself to a cup of free coffee to warm my hands and my soul up! I realise most hotels in Japan has this, and it just a plus point that says so much about Japanese hospitality. These machines are also life savers during summer time cause they also serve ice coffee! 

Tea selection at the lobby to help yourself with. I went for green tea and houjicha of course! When it's free, I usually use two packet to make a cup of tea so that it is stronger. I love the green tea flavour here cause it's pretty strong and kinda taste like seaweed to me :P

Anyway, the purpose I motivate myself to finally start on this entry is so that I can guilt myself to finish it eventually. I have another trip coming up soon, and I can't afford to have more backlog than I do blog post! At the same time, I am also doing photo editing work on my most recent Japan trip too! So much to get done! Which idiot said I would be bored and idling when I stop working is surely a fool!

Cordy's Blogging Process

It's been almost a two month's break from blogging. Just know that I have not been slacking off. I've actually been doing some photo editing and organising at the background. In order to make that more believable, I thought I'll do an entry on my blogging process before I start on my next travel blog. So for today, let me just show you just how much effort it is to create these blogs. By the way, one of the reason from my leave was I'm back to Singapore and have been adjusting to life here again :)

Let's start! To take a travel blog as an example, after the travelling and all the photo taking is done ( I do edit some photos and throw away junk shots on the go), all the photos that survived has to be transferred to the laptop in order for me to start work on. And since I hate wires, and data is so cheap these days, all the photos (and videos if any) are uploaded to my Dropbox account and downloaded to my MacBook. I've created a specific folder for photo bridge sharing purposed in my Dropbox account just for this. 

All the photos are categorised by year and location upon landing into my laptop. As you can see, there are backlogs that I plan to work on. Above are only the more recent trips! I have more in my hard disk! Raw photos are backup into the hard disk before any photo processing is started. As a person with IT background, we must always Backup! Backup! Backup! Push! Commit!

Next the raw photos are grouped into daily category. Luckily I am also very organised in my travel planning, so I always have an excel of my trip I can refer to. Maybe I'll do a separate blog on how I plan my trips. It has been so BAU now that everything just works via a template. Every trip is almost like a Project Plan for me, with the Project Folder Template, Excel template, and all the finances, broad plan and daily details. Luckily I love planning my travels :P

This is what each folder with their content looks like. Not very meaningful for blogging is it?

So the tedious task of tagging the selected photos I like to be on the blog begins. This is one of the most time consuming task cause it means going through all the hundreds of photos. After selecting the photos, the planning on how it will appear on the blog also starts here, hence the prefic 1xxxxx so that I know this will fall into the first post of that topic. Not all the photos ended up on the blog. Actually most just ends up in my hard disc to die.....

Once the photos are categorised accordingly, each photo is then shrink to less than 1MB of size because I don't like the thought of overwhelming my blog with heavy photos. During the shrinking process, some photo editing and cropping might also be carried out. Hence the original photos are always backup before this process starts. This part of the process can also be quite mechanical and brainless, so I often do this when I feel that I am unproductive but don't feel like doing too much :P

Besides the photos I took, there are also photos that are taken by my travelling companion. These are process next as the volume is a lot lower. Mainly these are whatsapp photos, and sometimes videos. 

Yes videos! Another data hungry file format. These days, I upload them to my YouTube channel, and link them to my blog where applicable. YouTube has become my video storage location. I've though about doing video clips before, but the thought of video editing really tires me off. Besides, I'm more of a word person than moving picture person..... But we'll see how the future goes. For now, I am quite happy just maintaining my blog. It's a great place to visit to see what I've accomplished in life, and also gives me an outlet to share and express myself.  

So now you know the process I go through maintaining this blog. A lot of hours actually goes into it, but it's something I enjoy and don't mind spending my time on. And with that said, I better start on my next Travel blog before the momentum dies down again! Enjoy!