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While copying the photos from this trip to my networked share drive I discovered that we had, between us, taken almost 6000 photos at over 22 gigabytes of data and written around 18,000 words in the blog.

As I watch the aircraft fly down along the valley on descent into the airport I find it difficult to convince myself that the holiday has come to an end. But it has. A pile of dried millipedes greeted us at the front doorstep when we arrived home. The dog did his business on the…

Every time it is the same. I sit here late on the final night gazing out of the window at the neon cacophony that is Shinjuku, listening to the last of the trains passing through, sad, not wanting to leave. It is long after midnight, but still there is life on the streets, less now,…

Rocky, who had spent a year on a working holiday in Sydney at Shinka in The Galleries Victoria, wondered why it was so uncommon for Australian men to become hairdressers, unlike in Japan. We explained that Australia’s most famous hairdressers are male, but that Australian men tend to pay less attention to hair than their…

Asia wakes late and stays up later. We made breakfast at the hotel this morning, but many shops were yet to open by the time we checked out. Wandering the streets of downtown Kyoto we went in search of gifts and dried foods. The latter we purchased from Nishiki markets which sell everything from fresh…

The Japanese love France, or at least love the idea of France. I’ve heard that many suffer near fatal culture shock when the actually visit dirty, smelly Paris (must be eau de metro or piss in other words), but there are shops and patisseries scattered around Kyoto and elsewhere in Japan with French names and…

Oh it was good to sleep in! Alex woke up early, then went back to sleep and we barely made the hotel checkout time of ten am. When Alex awoke the second time it was with a “woof” and a cheeky smile as he pretended to be a dog. Then we crossed over to Izumoshi…

I’ve really messed up planning this trip. When I went looking for somewhere to stay today everywhere was booked out. I ended up with a double room in the second Toyoko Inn of Okayama as our existing hotel only had smoking rooms available. That was still better than any of the other cities on my…

I’ve got my bag back. More than two hours travel for a transaction that took ten minutes. But it wasn’t just my computer that I was missing. My camera battery charger was in there as well and my battery was down to one bar! We began the day with a Japanese breakfast of rice cakes,…