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Published: October 28th 2008
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Slow boat FROM China
Waving goodbye to a misty Shanghai Armed with our newly acquired Japan Rail Passes and plenty of snacks (Claire seems to have developed a monkey nut fetish on this part of the trip - she just won’t travel without them), we boarded the Su Zhou Hao ferry bound for Osaka. We were welcomed on board by smiley and efficient Japanese staff and shown to our spacious 4 berth cabin with tatami matted lounge and panoramic window, which we ended up having all to ourselves as there were not many passengers on board. Hurrah.
We popped up onto deck to watch a very hazy Shanghai disappear behind us as we picked our way up the Huangpu River past just about every kind of sea-going craft imaginable and out into a flat, calm (thankfully) East China Sea. It was good to see the sea again; we’d not seen it since Norway and hadn’t realized that we had kind of missed it a bit. It’s something we know we definitely take for granted at home as the coast is never very far away for us. For others it is something they will never see in their lifetimes - possibly something nobody in several generations of a family has ever
Osaka Castle
Well, a bit of the wall but the rest of it was pretty good too! seen.
The ferry was fairly small and entertainment on board was limited to a ping-pong table, DVDs (mostly very bad, poorly dubbed films - one being about killer bees on a plane!) and a karaoke room. Needless to say, we both enjoyed showing the Chinese passengers how to (or not) do karaoke! The Chinese sang nothing but cheesy love ballads, (which a very helpful Chinese lady translated for us whilst other people sang) so, along with some of the other westerners on the boat, we paid our 100 yen a tune and showed them how to rock!!
On the morning of our arrival in Japan, we were all summoned into the main lobby area, given numbers and made to queue up in number order to have our temperature taken. Apparently, if you are found to have a fever, the Japanese will not let you in the country! Dan was a bit worried as he was suffering with a small hangover after finishing off the Mongolian vodka the night before! All was fine though and eventually we were all cleared for entry bringing a very relaxing and enjoyable journey to an end and we bid adieu to our new
friends and stepped out into the Japanese sunshine.
Osaka greeted us with clean, wide streets, careful drivers and 80% humidity! Phew! After successfully negotiating the metro network, we found our home for the night - a cosy little guesthouse - where we made our first faux-pas, failing to remove our shoes at the door and putting on a pair of slippers. Slippers are something you have to get used to in Japan - you will spend more time adjusting footwear than doing pretty much anything else, at every possible opportunity you are invited to remove your shoes and slipper up. You get slippers when you enter a house, separate slippers for the toilet, slippers in temples, slippers in museums, slippers everywhere. Not only that, but if you enter a tatami mat area, even your slippers must be removed!!
With limited time available we headed off to Osaka Castle to get a taste of old Japan. The Castle itself was a beautiful structure, the museum not quite so good but interesting enough. It was a stupendously hot day and we walked through the extensive and beautiful tree shaded gardens ducking the 2-3 inch long Cicadas who, when not
buzzing noisily in the trees, were flying across the path at head height (Claire loved that bit!) We stopped only to tuck into the local delicacy - Octopus Balls (very popular with the locals, not so popular with us - like a small round half-cooked Yorkshire pudding with a big chunk of Octopus inside and HP sauce on top!) before continuing our wanderings through the backstreets to try to get a feel for the place. We found ‘Food Street’ in the evening, a crazy place full of dazzling bright lights and giant Crabs of the fronts of buildings, all a bit mental after 2 days of tranquillity on the boat.
A short train journey the following morning brought us to the amazing, new train station at Kyoto and a great tourist information centre which left us not only fully furnished with more maps than even Dan could desire (proper, accurate, up to date, useable maps with useful information are not something we got in China) but with numbers for several local Ryokan. We called a few and ended up at an absolute gem of a place, Yuhara Ryokan, right next to the canal in a quiet part of town
but only 10 mins from the train station. Base established we headed straight out to the Temple area in the east of town. Walking through the main grid system of wide clean streets full of tall square buildings put us in mind of Vegas or New York and as we slipped into the backstreets, the tightly packed mainly 2 storey timber buildings made us think a little of Scandinavia, a nice combination. We certainly noticed the care with which things were constructed, a level of detail that was distinctly lacking in China!
The temples themselves were pretty impressive, similar in style to the Chinese temples, but with more curved eaves and the ‘lightening strike’ decorations of Zen Buddhism as opposed to the Swastika symbols of more ‘traditional’ Buddhism. I’m sure there are many more differences but the aesthetics were the obvious ones!
After only managing two temples on the first day we realized distances were a little far to be walking everywhere (the maps were great, but we couldn’t find a scale!) so after hiring bicycles we set out to explore more of the city. We stumbled across some amazing places. Original (well original-ish, fires permitting) timber palaces and temples full of beautiful murals, painted screens, tranquil Zen gardens, bamboo forests, pagodas, immaculate gilded shrines and Buddha statues, as well as the perfectly manicured backstreets that connect them all. As we visited each place we got higher and higher up the side of the mountains that surround Kyoto and we reached the highest point for the start of sunset. It was a beautiful sight so we sat a while to enjoy the view and when we descended we were lucky enough to catch a glimpse of a real Geisha in the backstreets of the old architectural section of town.
That evening was the Daimon-ji Gozan festival where fires are lit in sequence on five of the mountains around Kyoto in the form of Japanese characters commemorating the dead. So we hurried off to where we were told would be the best vantage point to see them all only to find we were by no means the only ones hoping to get a good view! It was like being in a mosh pit at the front of a Prodigy gig (without the jumping around and the sweat obviously) so we stayed until it got so packed it became difficult to breathe (after the second fire) and along with quite a few other slightly misshapen squashed people made our way back to the metro.
The following day took us to the castle (Nijo Jo) and more stunning detailed murals, Zen gardens and immaculately detailed, inspiring architecture. (We particularly liked the ‘nightingale’ floor - a timber floor designed to squeak so that any intruders would be detected!) Before a quiet Sunday evening at a local restaurant where we sat cross legged on a Tatami floor and cooked our own Teppenyaki whilst chatting with some other guests from the Ryokan and prepared for the 14 hour train journey to Hokkaido.
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Sandy
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Yeah whatever, we had snow in London in October. Beat that with your hot weather and stunning scenery!!!