From Kiso valley, I wanted to make my way to Kanazawa, but stop to see some places on the route. Initially, I chose Nagano and Matsumoto because of some potential day trips into the nature of Japan, but these turned out to be too complicated to organize without a car, so I ended up visiting just the cities themselves. My first stop was Matsumoto, where I just spent one night and one day – visiting the famous Matsumoto castle. At the entrance of the castle, I saw a desk of volunteers offering a free guide in English to show you around. In most other countries, I would suspect them asking for money in the end, but in Japan, this was really just set up for locals to be able to practice their English – and for tourists to learn something more about Matsumoto castle. It was kind of nice getting some more historical information rather than just walking around in the castle grounds by myself. I got lucky with the weather so that I was able to see the mountains in the background.

Other than that, Matsumoto didn’t have a lot to offer, but I still enjoyed my short stay there. On to Nagano, it was. Nagano is of course famous for the winter Olympics it hosted in 1998. Unfortunately though, there aren’t many buildings left from then and what is left is rather spread out and difficult to reach on public transport. In the end, I just walked around the city, visited the main temple and some nice streets. I really liked Nagano! Originally, I had wanted to do a trip to see the monkeys taking a bath in the onsen in the snow, but the more I researched the more I was turned off going. It seemed like a tourist spectacle and also, it seemed as if the snow would probably already be gone and therefore not many monkeys might be enjoying the hot water baths anymore. Nagano and Matsumoto were still nice stops along the way, but probably not any cities that I would return to.