Moving on again today. And it was a beautiful sunny day – but it was a travel day today so we spent most of it on a train.

Breakfast and checkout of our Ryokan – little bit disappointed with this place. Our room was nice and spacious but it was so far out of the way and wasn’t even in a very nice location. The view from our window was some sort of wood factory. Out of all the places we have stayed so far, this wasn’t one we were sad to leave.

We went and waiting for our favourite local bus and lugged our suitcase on to the bus. The bus driver was very friendly and spoke to us with a small amount of English and we spoke back with a small amount of Japanese and all the other people on the bus thought we were the funniest thing ever.

We will however, miss the town of Kurashiki. Our Shinkansen wasn’t leaving until 1pm so we had the morning to enjoy so we put our luggage in a locker at the station and caught the train to Kurashiki.

First stop, our new favourite cafe.

After coffee we had another quick wander around the old town district- and another visit to the Miffy bakehouse.

Then we suddenly started running out of time so we picked up some bento for our lunch on the Shinkansen and headed back to Shin Kurashiki station, retrieved our luggage and went and waited for our train. And this was no ordinary Shinkansen we were waiting for….because this was the HELLO KITTY SHINKANSEN!!!!!

It was such a cute train – although we were in reserved seats which weren’t all decked out in the Hello Kitty decor which is a shame, but you can go for a walk through the train and check it all out. We were catching the train back to Kyushu- stopping at Kokura, Kita Kyushu, before catching a local train to Mojiko. It took quite a few hours – especially because the HK Shinkansen is the Kodama train that stops at all stations instead of flying through them at like 300 km per hour. oh and we also had AMAZING bento on the train – Hokkaido Ikura (salmon roe) & Uni (sea urchin) & Kani (crab)

Oh and Miffy cream buns!

Mojiko is a cute “retro town” It seems very European.

Our hotel is pretty cool – more of a normal type of hotel, which seems weird to us.

After checking in and dropping off all our luggage, we went for a bit of an explore. Very cute around here.

We decided to go up the observation tower because it was only 300 yen which is basically free. It was really cool up there with great views. We stayed up there until after sunset.

We eventually needed dinner, but the only thing they sell here is baked curry (wait for tomorrow’s post) and I really didn’t feel like that. For some reason we were craving MOS Burger – the closest store was back at the previous train station. So yeh, we caught the train back to Moji station (actually 2 stops away) and then wandered down some dark streets until we saw that familiar green glow of the Mos burgers sign. It was actually really good, we enjoyed this meal.

Then we caught the train back to Mojiko. Did I mention that our hotel is a bit weird?