3, or 4 Days in Kyoto

Japanese ladies walk outside Tofukuji temple in Southern Kyoto.

Say you have a full week to be in Japan. After spending three days in Tokyo — where the main theme is modern Japan — like most other first-time travelers to the country you would naturally want to visit Kyoto, a hub for traditional Japanese culture.

The first time I went to Kyoto, I realized three days were not enough – there are just too many places to see and too bad to miss. And you would want to enjoy the old capital of Japan in a leisurely pace, not as though you had to keep an ambitious count of places to visit. So, if possible, I recommend 4 days in the city. You can keep other places in your next visit list (yes, Japan definitely deserves more than one visit!). It’s no fun visiting too many places in a short amount of time anyway.

Kyoto is roughly divided into five regions: Southern, Western, Central, Eastern and Northern Kyoto. Check out this Japan tourism site for details on sightseeing spots in each region: http://www.japan-guide.com/e/e2158.html. I found it really helpful. They have maps to access tourist hot spots and everything.

A simple map of most popular Kyoto sites. (From Traverse World)

But of course it’s impossible to visit all the tourist spots. Kyoto has countless temples, shrines, historic and nature sites that you simply have to decide which you want to see the most – and let the rest of your visit flow (somewhat) naturally.

So, here is my itinerary recommendation for a 4-day tour in Kyoto. The list is based on personal experiences/preferences from my two visits there in 2015 and 2016, and taking into account factors such as proximity between places and to near public transport options. If you can afford 3 days only, just scrap the last one.

Berlin-Based Indonesian Working to Turn Sunlight Into Fuel

Fatwa Abdi. (Photo by Erwida Maulia)

Berlin. A young Indonesian scientist in Germany is working on a new technology that might in the near future allow the storage of solar power in the form of transportable fuel, at an affordable price.

Fatwa Abdi, a 32-year-old working for Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin for Materials and Energy, a German government-funded research agency, believes that solar power holds the largest potential for a primary renewable energy source in the future — and could be the key to solving Indonesia’s energy problems.

Solar power is in abundance – the surface of the earth receives 120,000 terawatts of solar radiation – and is indisputably environmentally friendly.

He notes, however, that there is one major problem with it.

“The problem is, it is intermittent. Sunlight is not always available – sometimes it’s there, sometimes it’s not. We’re talking about times [of the day], weather and geographical conditions,” Fatwa said in an interview in Berlin last week.

“But by storing it in [the form of] a chemical fuel, we can actually extend the availability. So what we’re trying to tackle in our institute is how to store this energy in the form of a chemical fuel,” he adds, citing gasoline as an example of widely-used chemical fuels.

Scientists Warn of Food Security Threats From Seagrass Meadows Degradation in Indonesia

If you’re a baby fish, and everything around you probably wants to eat you, you need somewhere to go and hide.

The reef is full of a lot of really big fish that want to eat you. But if you’re in a seagrass meadow, it’s full of dents, shoots, places where you as a small fish can hide.

A starfish resting in a seagrass meadow in waters off the Turks and Caicos Islands. (Photo courtesy of seagrass.org.uk)

Jakarta. A team of British scientists is launching a project this week that will investigate the condition of seagrass meadows off the coasts of Indonesia’s South Sulawesi province – amid growing concerns over losses of the important marine ecosystem across the archipelago.

Richard Unsworth, a marine biologist from Britain’s Swansea University and the leader of the project, said in an interview with the Jakarta Globe earlier this week that seagrass meadows were as important as mangrove forests and coral reefs were to marine life and food security.

Not to be confused with seaweeds or algae, seagrasses are a group of flowering plants that live in shallow sheltered areas along coastlines. Similar to grasses on land, seagrasses often form vast meadows underwater – thus the name seagrass meadows.

Unsworth says these meadows provide an important nursery ground for many species of commercial fish and sea invertebrates.

And yet, very little attention has been paid to the largely unknown ecosystem, even amid reports of disappearing and degraded seagrass meadows in many parts of the vast Indonesian archipelago.

Parks of Tokyo – A Travel Note

A cherry blossom tree outside the Tokyo Imperial Palace, basically a large garden/park.

An urban jungle, another place crowded with steel and concrete — only with cutting-edge technologies differing it from most of other world’s cities. That was the image that first came to my head whenever I heard the word ‘Tokyo’.

So if you’re a nature fan like me, visiting the capital of Japan might sound unappealing. Well, it did to me at first; that was before I went to see the city myself.

And now, I don’t think I could have been more mistaken. Tokyo does have a lot of skyscrapers, modern railway networks that include the high-speed Shinkansen bullet trains, with men in business suits (and women in fancier work dresses) traversing in hurry through the stations and down the streets every rush hour.

But hey, it turns out that Tokyo is way more than that. The Japanese capital appears to have no shortage of greenery. I saw parks, parks and parks across many parts of the city. And they’re among the major reasons why Tokyo ends up becoming my top favorite place, out of the total five cities and towns I visited during my trip to Japan in April — which include Kyoto, Nara, Osaka and Koyasan.

So here are the list of my top five favorite places in Tokyo, most of them are parks or have a park, from the least to most favorite:

In Indonesia, Caution Urged With China’s New ‘Silk Road’ Plans

Nusa Dua, Bali. China is making clearer its intention of engaging Southeast Asia to support its ambitious plans to revive the ancient Silk Road commerce routes, but observers in Jakarta remind Indonesia — which has expressed interest in China’s new initiative — to exercise caution.

The joint “Belt and Road” development is the topic of a forum in Nusa Dua, Bali, taking place on Sunday and Monday, which was attended by officials and community representatives from China and member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

China has been touting the phrase Belt and Road to promote its ambitious initiative of engaging other countries to jointly develop the so-called Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road.