CrosbysAtLarge

The room here is beautiful with rice paper walls however, rice paper does not make for a very good curtain and the sun comes up around 4:15 here. After pulling the window shades closed and removing every possible entry point for light, Brett tried to get some more sleep without much luck. Despite having reasonably good sleep for most of the trip, we have been getting up very early every day and we can't even blame the time zone difference as were only 30 minutes different to normal. We were booked in to do a trip to Shirakawa-go which is an UNESCO-listed village with 300-hundred-year old, thatched-roof houses with only 140-odd people living there. After a quick walk through the morning market, we wandered to the bus stop and took the hour-long trip to the first ... read more

Woke very early this morning. We have a train to catch to Hiroshima and wanted to get away early. Alarm was set for 6:00 but we were both up before the alarm went off to finish packing bags before heading down to breakfast. We chose the Japanese breakfast this morning. It was a beautiful selection of tasty morsels of fish, rice, chicken, miso soup and some fruit to finish with. Portions were sensible and it was an excellent start to the day. Because we were up so early we were able to transfer to an earlier train once we were at the station. Again, our timing with catching trains and busses has been amazing. We arrived at the station around 7:45, swapped our tickets, and were pulling out of the station at 8:00 bound for Hiroshima. ... read more

Wow. Worst night's sleep in, like, forever. Don't know why but I tossed and turned all night. I think I was too hot, then too something, then too whatever. Today is the day of my knife-making course so not the day to be foggy and clumsy. After breakfast, Pamela wandered off to her conference for the day leaving me to find my way to the forge in the countryside. I caught the train to kameoka and the went to catch the bus to nishikaya only to find that the bus schedule that I had been looking at was incorrect. I was under the impression that there were regular busses to where I wanted to go however I was told at the information counter that the only bus was not leaving until after 1:00 pm - my ... read more

We got up early this morning and managed to get down early to have a nice breakfast again. It meant we could get to the station and get on our way to NARA Which was our destination for the day. We found the ticket station easily and found the right platform but still managed to catch the wrong train. Luckily it was a local train that stopped at a station that connected with the right train. A quick dash and we basically caught the same train that we should have so all good. Arrived at Nara and bought a local loop pass for the bus so we could get around easily. Arrived at the first stop and there were deer wandering around everywhere. It was quite amazing to see them all and how comfortable they were ... read more

I've had some pretty interesting trips before, like the time I had to jump start a helicopter just prior to going up in said helicopter - which made for some interesting thought processes however, I digress. Frankly, there is no better argument for the existence of God than Him absolutely toying with your flight plans in a way that can only be explained by divine intervention. The plan was to catch a daytime flight to Japan so we could arrive early, settle in and get our bearings. All good in theory! First there was the late arrival of the connecting flight. Not by much, a 45 minute delay. this actually gave us a little extra time to make it from the domestic terminal to the international terminal so it appeared to be a blessing in disguise ... read more