Land of heated toilet seats!

Japan gets a thumbs up from me! The cities are clean and easy to get around, very pretty countryside and helpful people. There is loads of history and loads of new stuff as well. Toilets even in the railway station all have heated seats - that must be the hight of civilisation!!

When I arrived my friend Taka (who has been on this blog before) met me at the airport and took me back to his place for the first couple of nights. I didnft know what to expect at all but still I was surprised. Within a couple of hours of Tokyo center they live in wonderful hills covered in bamboo, maples, pine and willows making a beautiful patchwork of fresh spring greens. The "house" is actually an old tour bus with a kitchen and bathroom built outside. Come back in a year or so and there should be a more conventional house there offering tourist accommodation and a surfboard showroom.

That evening we had a sushi feast which is still the best meal I have had in Japan - and the food here is fantastic! To help that settle I had a soak in the oil drum hot tub before snuggling into a big sleeping bag out in a tent. Coming from the Philippines the weather was quite cool - in the low teens.

I headed into Tokyo to drop my passport off at the Kazakhstan embassy. I managed to find the place just as they shut for lunch but thatfs always the way. When it came to depositing the processing fee with a local bank I was helped out by two very kind Japanese men who saw me looking lost at an ATM type machine with no English!

I have to go back to Tokyo later in the week so only stayed one night. Next stop I took the Shinkansen to Hiroshima. Two evocative names in one sentence! The trains here are brilliant, Fast, clean, on time, not over crowded and easy to use. I was even given reservations or two trains with a 2 minute connection time and it worked!! Thatfs after 4 hours on the first train.

Hiroshima is a lovely city. Very well laid out with plenty to see and plenty going on. The atomic bomb almost completely flattened the city and has shaped what it is today. The Peace Memorial Museum shows the horrific damage that the bomb caused and how the city has re-grown. It also makes a very powerful plea for a world without atomic weapons. Scary moving stuff.

From Hiroshima I hopped on the train again to Kyoto. Kyoto is crammed full of world heritage sites mostly temples, a place for getting a serious overdose on thousand year old architecture and history. The temples are impressive (no photos inside) and all set in immaculate gardens. The pictures of Japanese gardens and temples that we see in the west almost all come from here. I have also been strolling around the district of Gion (anyone read Memoirs of a Geisha?) and have even spotted a couple of Geisha. With kimono and makeup they are strangely unreal looking, real pieces of art.

Japan isnft as bad as everyone says for price unless you want it to be. English is less widely spoken than I expected but on the tourist trail all the signs and information are in English - even the buses have an American ladies voice telling you which stop is coming next and which temple its for. When you check in to stay at a place where no English is spoken they usually have the important things written on a sign somewhere in reception. The public transport is the best anywhere in the world that I have ever visited and the food is great. Just walking into a small restaurant and pointing at the menu randomly has always worked out well so far!

On the roads they drive lots of very box shaped cars - including the Nissan Cube, which is cool. Fashions can be quite crazy! Men dress very much like men in the UK but young women have a distinctly different style (unless the UK has changed lots since I was there). Knee high socks or boots with short skirts or short shorts is the general idea so they flash plenty of thigh. In general young people dress with lots of style. Business men are all about five foot five with a dark suit and black hair cut short.

Being a normal tourist in a normal tourist place is strange. What amazes me is how rude other tourists can be (mostly to Japanese hotel staff or bus drivers) and how helpful random locals are. I am sure that I will be bemoaning the lack of this sort of easy organization later in my trip home.

My last main destination was Kamakochi in the northern Japan Alps. Very cool mountain place (lots of snow around) and 3000m plus mountains. Itfs a mountain resort town that is only open for the summer - I got up there on the first day of the season! Of course I had a go at getting up a mountain but without a map, crampons, axe, hat gloves etc I wasnft really equipped. Back in the hotel I soaked in the hot spring baths and had a very posh dinner with about 11 different dishes! The staff were very much practicing on me as the first foreign guest of the year.

So time to head for the next country! In the morning I have to collect my passport at the Kazakhstan embassy then I am booked on an overnight bus to Osaka where I board the ferry to China. Itfs a 48 hour trip so plenty of time to catch up on the diary.
Next blog from China

Have fun
Matt

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