Padmassana went travelling around Kyushu in June/July time. Here is the final of three extracts from his travel journal.

From Kagoshima I went on a day trip on a small bus to Chiran. The bus took about an hour and a half and cost about £10 return. Chiran is famous for Samurai houses and the Kamikaze museum – very interesting but little information in English, most interesting part is the now de classified documents relating to the USS Curtis which took a direct hit from a kamikaze plane. Kagoshima has plenty of things to see including a superb aquarium with giant crabs that live at 300m at the bottom of the sea and a good jellyfish exhibition and good English signs.

From Kagoshima I travelled north to Kumamoto, which took about three and a half hours. I stayed in a beautiful Ryokan with tatami room, even if I did have to get a postman to show me where it was! Kumamoto is easy to get round with trams and busses, though most of it is walkable. Went to the super castle and a wonderful Japanese garden.

Kumamoto is a very nice city, it has some Suizenn-ji gardens, which were built by a Shogun in the 16th century for him to have tea, as there is a spring there perfect for making good tea. Around this he built fabulous Japanese gardens complete with koi carp ponds. This is a very popular destination with Japanese tourists who go there to have their pictures taken with Mt Fuji in the background. Around the edge of the gardens are little stalls, which sell the locally famous “fish on wheels” and spinning tops, great souvenirs. Kumamoto-Jo or castle is largely new and inside apart from a bit of armour there's not much to see, outside is a little more interesting and again there are signs in English explaining what you are seeing.

From Kumamoto, I went to Mt Aso. To get to Mt Aso, you have to take a local train from Kumamoto, then a small bus up the side of the mountain and then take a cable car to see the inside of the volcano crater. But I was unable to do this, as it was active! A little while ago, the volcano started spewing poisonous gas and lumps of rock, and as a woman was killed so the authorities put a 1km exclusion zone round it. Went instead to the museum, which is not bad, although there was not much signage in English but it does have the feedback from 2 live video links from inside the crater. Today’s pictures were pretty good – a shame that there was no lava, although I suspect that the locals are relieved.

Next, I took the train from Kumamoto to Nagasaki, a nice city, it’s quite industrial, and obviously new. Went to the temples and went to the A-Bomb museum, the No. 1 tourist attraction, full of Japanese school children but also has a scenic river that has stone bridges that used to lead up to a stone temple but this is not there any more. There is another temple with a roof shaped like a tortoise, which is a really nice place to visit. Inside this, it has a Foucault’s pendulum that shows the earth’s rotation – one of only three in the world, the other 2 being in Paris and Leningrad. Nagasaki's “temple row” is quite interesting, many of the temples have started to produce little leaflets in English as the west’s interest in the east and Buddhism has grown in the last few years.

I went up the Nagasaki cable car to get a view over the city yesterday before getting the train back to Hakata/Fukuoka. The train took about 2 hours and was included in my two 5 day passes. The city has two names if you didn’t realise: the airport is called Fukuoka, but the train station is called Hakata. Was going to go up the Fukuoka tower but despite being 80 degrees it was very hot and sticky with low cloud, so did what the Beetle would have done and went shopping! Bought myself a little Japanese garden that you build yourself, saw one in a Ryokan and have been looking ever since, would you believe I found one in the basement shopping area of Hakata station at 7.30pm on my last night. And then ready to come home back to the UK.

A note on Japanese train passes: Japanese train passes are only available to foreigners and must be bought outside Japan. Once you start a pass you have to travel from that day onwards. Passes come in 5, 10, 14 and 21 days. This works out much cheaper than buying train passes as you go. Some ferries and buses are included in the passes.

If you would like to contact Padmassana to ask him about his time in Japan, he can be e-mailed on: padmassana@globetrotters.co.uk

This is the third of three descriptions of the 24 sites of “outstanding universal value”, that have been designated world heritage sites by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

These are as follows:

• Franciscan Missions in the Sierra Gorda of Querétaro, Mexico: Built during the last phase of the conversion to Christianity of the interior of Mexico in the mid-18th Century. The richly decorated church façades are of special interest as they represent an example of the joint creative efforts of the missionaries and the Indios.
• Wooden Churches of Southern Little Poland, Poland: The churches represent outstanding examples of the different aspects of medieval church-building traditions in Roman Catholic culture.
• Citadel, Ancient City and Fortress Buildings of Derbent, Russian Federation: Part of the northern limits of the Sassanian Persian Empire, which extended east and west of the Caspian Sea. The town of Derbent has retained part of its medieval fabric.
• Mapungubwe Cultural Landscape, South Africa: An open, expansive savannah landscape situated on the northern border of South Africa joining Zimbabwe and Botswana. Mapungubwe developed into the largest kingdom in the sub-continent before it was abandoned in the 14th Century. The almost untouched remains of the palace sites, a settlement area and two earlier capital sites survive.
• Ubeda-Baeza: Urban duality, cultural unity, Spain: The urban morphology of the two small cities of Ubeda and Baeza in southern Spain dates back to the Moorish 9th Century and to the Reconquista in the 13th Century. In the 16th Century, the cities were renovated along the lines of the emerging Renaissance.
• Gebel Barkal and the Sites of the Napatan Region, Sudan: Includes several archaeological sites, over more than 60 km (37 miles) in the Nile Valley, of the Napatan (900 to 270 BC) and Meroitic (270 BC to 350 AD) cultures, of the second kingdom of Kush. Tombs, with and without pyramids, temples, living complexes and palaces are also found on the site.
• Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, United Kingdom: The historic landscape garden illustrates the art of gardens from the 18th to the 20th Centuries. The gardens house botanic collections (conserved plants, living plants and documents) that have been considerably enriched through the centuries.
• Matobo Hills, Zimbabwe: Distinctive rock land forms associated with human occupation from the early Stone Age to early historical times, and intermittently since. They also feature an outstanding collection of rock paintings.
• Central Amazon Conservation Complex, Brazil: Comprises the largest protected area in the Amazon Basin and one of the planet's richest regions in terms of biodiversity.
• Imperial Tombs of the Ming and Qing Dynasties, China: These tombs were inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2000. The property inscribed this year as an extension consists of two distinct burial sites of the Ming Dynasty emperors. Xiaoling, the first emperor of that dynasty is buried there, as are 13 others.
• Archaeological Site of Panama Viejo and the Historic District of Panama, Panama: Panama Viejo covers the location and ruins of the first European settlement on the American mainland and pre-Hispanic remains. It features impressive ruins. Moreover, older remains, dating to up to 1,000 years before the arrival of the Europeans, were excavated on this site.

Source: BBC News