IELTS Speaking Part 2: Describe a Journey You Have Made

I'd like to describe a train journey I made across Japan about four years ago, travelling from Tokyo down to Hiroshima over three days with various stops in between. I was travelling alone, which was intentional. I'd been through a period of sustained professional pressure and decided I needed both time alone and total unfamiliarity to reset my thinking. Japan seemed perfect: entirely unlike anything in my previous experience, yet comprehensively organised and safe for a solo traveller. The Shinkansen from Tokyo to Kyoto was the first time I'd understood what people meant by infrastructure that feels designed with the passenger in mind. Silent, punctual to the second, comfortable — and every few minutes, through the carriage window, a landscape of extraordinary variety: rice paddies, bamboo forests, glimpses of Fuji in clouds, then sudden dense urbanisation. The contrast between ancient and modern that Japan presents felt visually continuous. What I remember most vividly is arriving in Hiroshima in the early evening and feeling a weight to the city that I hadn't expected — a seriousness in the air, or perhaps that was projection. The Peace Memorial Park was unlike anything I'd seen as a tourist site: it didn't offer spectacle, it asked for stillness. I sat there for a long time. The journey was memorable not for being dramatic but for providing space. Three days of moving through a foreign landscape alone gave me the perspective I had been seeking. I came back having resolved questions I hadn't consciously known I was carrying.