Day 7 We headed back to Kyoto on another train line today then caught the bus to Kinkakuji, the golden Pavilion. Once again, you can't go inside the building itself, you just wander around the gardens and admire the building from the outside. I found the sand gardens fascinating - apparently this is a very Zen thing, to rake the sand into waves and patterns but it's very beautiful and strangely relaxing/peaceful. Next we headed off to Arishyama where we strolled through the bamboo groves and visited Gioji temple's moss gardens. If there's one thing the Japanese know how to do well, it's gardening. Like the sand gardens, the moss gardens are so simple but so beautiful and complex at the same time. Once again, the maps are not to scale and we ended up walking ... read more

Day 3 - Shizuoka We caught the iconic shinkansen (bullet) train from Osaka to Shizuoka today. Travelling at speeds over 300kph, we arrived about 2 hours later and picked up a Mazda rental car. I was a bit nervous about driving in Japan but the driving itself turned out to be easier than I'd imagined as the road rules are quite similar to ours and the traffic wasn't too bad (probably helped that it was lunch time on a Sunday). Anyway, we made our way out along Highway 1 towards Mt Hakone. Unfortunately, we only had Japanese GPS and even though I had maps that I'd downloaded from Google, it was still difficult trying to find our way due to the lack of signs in English. We eventually ended up where we wanted to go which ... read more

Day 1 - Nara We slept well last night after arriving at our motel just after 8pm. It's a very basic room but clean and considering the budget price we're getting it for, quite satisfactory. Today we decided to brave the subway/train system. We were going to head back to Tennoji because we were going to get Kansai Train Passes there but we couldn't find how to get there from our subway station so we decided to head out to Nara instead. It was a very hot, humid day as we walked up the hill towards the deer park and it wasn't long before we got our first close encounter with a deer - or 4. Caitlyn bought these biscuit looking things that a street vendor was selling as deer food and as soon as she ... read more

Day 17 - Port Augusta to Adelaide Unfortunately we didn't have enough time to head up to the Flinders Ranges from Port Augusta as we needed to return the car to the depot in Adelaide by 3.30pm. I had actually tried to extend our car hire by one day so that we could spend some time in the Flinders but car hire had apparently been fully booked out 7 months previously. So we settled for a drive up to Alligator Gorge in the Southern Flinders range instead. I hadn’t realised until we drove the road up to Alligator Gorge that I had actually been there before, on a family holiday when I was only 5 years old. I remembered parts of the road and how scared I had been driving along it - back then it ... read more

Day 14 - Uluru to Kulgera The wind sprang up last night after we went to bed and blew the tent around quite a bit so we didn’t get much sleep. Consequently, when we heard the hoards of cars and motorbikes start their engines and take off in the wee hours to make their way to the sunrise viewing area, we just rolled over and tried to go back to sleep. I wasn’t successful in getting back to sleep so I decided to get up and eventually Caitlyn joined me. I talked her into going for a drive to see if we could get any good morning photo’s so we headed for the road that does a loop around the rock. It was a dull, overcast morning and I’m glad I didn’t bother to get up ... read more