Japan

You dress as your favourite Nintendo character — Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach, Bowser — and then you drive a real go-kart through the actual streets of Tokyo. Not a track. Not a closed circuit. The actual streets of Shibuya and Akihabara, with traffic lights and pedestrian crossings and Tokyo's 14 million residents watching you drive past in a Toad costume at 40km/h. It is completely surreal, completely Japanese, and there is genuinely nothing else like it anywhere on Earth.

Tours operate from multiple starting points around central Tokyo, with the most popular routes passing through Akihabara (electronics and anime district), Odaiba (futuristic waterfront island), and Shibuya. Costumes are provided. You need a valid international driving licence — bring both your home country licence and the IDP translation.

The Tsukiji Outer Market opens around 5am and remains the best place in the world to eat breakfast. Show up before 6am, find a counter with 8 seats and a chef who has been doing this for 40 years, and eat the best sushi you've ever had for about $25. The inner market (the famous tuna auction) moved to Toyosu in 2018, but the outer market stayed — a dense network of tiny stalls, counter restaurants, and wholesale dealers that has been feeding Tokyo since 1935.

The atmosphere before dawn is extraordinary — chefs collecting fish directly from stalls, the smell of charcoal and soy sauce, steam from tamagoyaki pans, the sound of knife on cutting board at 5:30am while the rest of Tokyo sleeps. Bring cash. Arrive early or queue.

Japan's most iconic image — the perfect white cone rising above the clouds — is also one of its most achievable high-altitude hikes. Mt. Fuji stands at 3,776 metres and is climbed by around 200,000 people each year during the official season (July to mid-September). The standard overnight route from the Yoshida 5th Station takes 5–7 hours to ascend and 3–4 hours to descend, with mountain huts open for rest and food along the way.

The reason most people climb overnight is Goraiko — the Japanese word for the sunrise seen from the summit. Standing above the clouds at 3,776m as the first light turns the Pacific coast amber below you is one of the most transcendent moments Japan offers. The summit crater walk takes about 90 minutes and passes the actual highest point, Kengamine. Bring proper hiking gear, layers, and rain protection — temperatures at the summit drop to near-freezing even in summer.

Hanami — the Japanese tradition of gathering under cherry blossom trees to eat, drink, and celebrate spring — reaches its peak form in Kyoto. Maruyama Park, the Philosopher's Path, and the grounds of Kiyomizudera are the most famous spots. Peak bloom typically lasts 7–10 days in late March to early April, with the exact timing varying by year. The density of temples, shrines, and traditional wooden architecture provides the perfect backdrop for the pale pink bloom.

A guided hanami experience adds the cultural context that transforms it from a pretty photo into something genuinely meaningful — the tradition of seasonal appreciation, the philosophical acceptance of transience (mono no aware), and the specific vocabulary the Japanese have developed around the different stages of bloom. The week of full bloom is extraordinary; the week after, when the petals fall like pink snow, is arguably more beautiful.

Chado — the way of tea — is one of Japan's most complete cultural practices: an art form, a philosophy, and a physical ritual compressed into 45 minutes in a tatami room. An authentic tea ceremony in Higashiyama, steps from Kiyomizudera temple, involves a trained host who has spent years studying the precise sequence of movements — the folding of the fukusa cloth, the warming of the bowl, the three-and-a-half rotations of the whisk — that transforms the preparation of matcha into a meditation on presence and transience.

You make your own tea, learn the etiquette of receiving and drinking, and eat a wagashi sweet chosen to complement the bitterness of the matcha. In a 16th-century machiya townhouse, with the sound of the city muffled by shoji screens, it produces a stillness that Kyoto specialises in and nowhere else quite replicates.