By the end of March 2009 I went to Japan for vacation, my first visit ever to Japan. I went this time of year to experience the cherry blossom, which is a big thing in Japan. I travelled around by train, as Japan Railways (JR) offers a rail-pass that entitles you go with almost all their services. The connections are very frequent, and if you go with Shinkansen it's really fast, 285 km/h. My trip went along the Shinkansen line that goes south-west from Tokyo through the most densely populated parts of the country.
Before I left home, I bought a new camera, a Panasonic TZ5, with more zoom and more megapixel than my five year old Minolta, and this lead to a small disaster: I came back with almost 1400 pictures. I set off to delete duplicates and less successful photos, but here are almost 900 of them, which still is far too many. To make it somewhat manageable, I've selected 76 pictures as a summary of the trip, and those are the ones you find below.
The rest is split up on a number of sub-sites. First of all there is my Cherry Blossom Special with almost150 pictures of cherry trees in various degrees of bloom (and quite a few more flowers). Then there are the following sub-sites, approximately in the order that my trip went (and you will find a quite some cherry blossom there as well):
Some of the pictures in the summary reappear in the sub-sites, but in many cases I've selected different pictures when I have had more than one on the same thing.