Photos from Japan click here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/phase_k/sets/72157606704526761/
Mount Fuji Area:
After our exhausting climb up Mount Fuji it was a relief to check into the most gorgeous hostel we've been to, K's. They had a beautiful kitchen, comfy sofa's looking out onto a garden, a TV den with more comfa sofa's, and a Japanese style area with low wooden tables and huge cushions on a tatmi mat, a perfect place to chill out!
The area around Mount Fuji is beautiful and worth a couple of days of sightseeing. One cool
thing we did was get a cable car up a nearby mountain to look over to Fuji, unfortunately the day we did this it was really cloudy so we couldn't make out the mountain but we did learn a very nice story about a farmer, a rabbit and a raccoon. The Farmer worked very hard to toil his land, one day the raccoon deceived the farmer and the farmer was very upset. The farmer asked his friend the rabbit to help him, and the rabbit agreed. He sought out the raccoon and they went to collect some firewood together. When the raccoon had the firewood on his back, the rabbit set fire to the wood and the raccoon also caught fire. The next day, the rabbit went fishing with the raccoon, but his boat was made of wood, and the raccoon's boat was only made from mud, so the boat sank with the raccoon in it. Now the farmer was avenged and he was happy. The end!
It was time to move on from our mountain paradise and there's no better place on earth (I think anyway) to travel around than in Japan. The trains are always on time, clean and oh so comfortable! Expensive too but it's worth buying the Japanese Rail Pass which lets you do wherever you like! The bullet trains are extremely fast, topping out at about 300km an hour (when they have passengers), arriving at their destination in no time, the countryside whipping by in a blur.
Homeless in Kyoto:
So far along the trip we have pretty much always booked our accomodation a few days in advance and then turned up at the hostel and everything has been fine. Not this time! Try as we did we could not find a hostel within our price range for the first night in Kyoto, but we thought we'd head there anyway as there was bound to be something right?! Wrong!!! But all
was not lost, we went to the Pig & Whistle Pub and played darts with some really nice people who were studying Japanese, and got roped into going for our very first private Karaoke room experience! It was all we could drink for two tune belting hilariously funny hours. We were with 2 Japanese girls who thought our rendition of Queen's "Bohemium Rhapsody" was the funniest thing on earth, who would have thought that one western girl and 4 western boys all red in the face from singing at the top of their lungs and jumping up and down with so much enthusiasm could be funny?
At 4am after singing our lungs out everyone else had to go home as they had work in the morning so Karl and I booked another Karaoke room and had some more fun singing (very badly I think) before trying to get some kip (that's the done thing when you have nowhere to stay!). Then we really were out of ideas and just strolled around the town, that was OK until the alcohol had completely worn off and then we saw some people down by the river, so we thought - why not? We actually slept by a river people, and we did feel a bit like tramps especially in the morning when the people came out to walk their dogs! No dark night to hide behind anymore! All in all Japan is very safe so we didn't feel in the least worried about that, it was just the next day was a blur cos we were so tired! We did check out a great art gallery in Kyoto and wandered around some beautiful gardens though so it wasn't a waste!
There are literlly thousands of shrines and temples to explore in Kyoto and explore we did! We walked for miles and miles and gazed at the wonders built so many years ago to protect people against various ominous happenings. One shrine which was especially beautiful was thousands of small statues built to protect children, it's really a sight to see there are so many of them. Unfortunately they are so old that many are crumbling but people still go there becuase you can see fresh flowers in various places. People can go there to pray for their children and I am sure it would be a great comfort to some people in their times of need. All over Japan there are little shrines and people can often be seen praying to them, lighting some incense or making a donation to their deity, it's pretty cool.
Newsflash! We ate at a revolving sushi bar, it was OK and nice for the experience but everything tasted pretty "samey"! And YES! Karl tried some Sushi too! Unfortunately the bit he got was full of Wasabi (really hot green spicy stuff) and ruined the flavour but he tried it, I'm so proud!
Himeji Castle:
Whilst we were on Mount Fuji we met this lovely Australian girl called Alicia who said we must absolutely check out Himeji Castle, check it out we did and it was SO worth it! The area around Himeji is really well kept also and we had fun walking down to the castle, and we had the most delicious spinach and cheese pastie EVER! We so miss regular food at home sometimes!
The castle has huge grounds with lots of different bits of garden, some of which have been
turned into a lilly pond with coy carp (very peaceful) a rose garden (my favourite!), a tea garden and a lush green lawn which would have been fun to sit on if it wasn't so hot, you couldn't sit in the sun even for a minute! The castle itself has 6 stories you can wander around and explore and it has the traditional Japanese style tiles roofs which turn up at the corners. Any renovation which has been done has been done in the old original style and building materials from back in the day so that it really does look so authentic you feel that any minute now an emperor is bound to come walking around the corner. It was amazing to look at the different tiles as they are embossed with the markings of the tradesman who laid them and it was a great honour to be able to work on such a grand building. As a castle, you have to say it rates highly as no-one ever managed to penetrate it's walls, in fact no-one ever tried as it looked so imposing! We tried to imagine people approaching it with a view of attack and then thinking - no maybe not!
Osaka:
We had lots of fun in Osaka playing in the arcades and taking silly pictures with Japanese people in those funny boards with the hole you poke your face through! Apart from that I think we were staying in the wrong part of town so we did not think much of the architecture or anything, just another town really and we felt it was a little anticlimactic as our final destination in Japan after the magnificent architecture and wonderful sights that we had seen up till then.
Japan is really a wonderful country which I would not hesitate to visit again. At first it was a little bit of a culture shock as it was our first asian country but the people are so proud of their nation and there is evidence of this on every corner. Everywhere you look there are people cleaning everything, the streets are filled with so many people going about their business in a quiet non pretentious way, people wait for the green man to cross the road, apologise a million times to you even if it was your fault you bumped them by accident, stop and ask you if you need help if you linger on a street corner for more than a few seconds, they are just so very welcoming to foreigners it's brilliant.
Music Festival Japanese Stylee:
MY OH MY, we forgot to write anything about Summersonic! How could we forget our first ever music festival abroad? It was an experience that was for sure! We went whilst we were in Tokyo, a huge splurge on the budget but worth every penny. We saw (amognst others) Vampire Weekend, Perfume (a japanese girl band who sing to dance music), The Verve, Prodigy, Alicia Keys, Coldplay it was awesome.
The festival itself though was not much like we're used to. For starters, the Japanese people
only clap for maximum 5 seconds after a song or even when the bands finish playing! Also no-one really dresses up funky like we do and the venue was really strange. It was set across two areas which were divided by a main road, as the road was so busy you had to walk to the nearest bridge which was a good 1/2 an hour away and back up the other side of the road. If there were bands back to back on different stages there was no chance of seeing both as it took an hour to get across! Aside from that it was very well organised and they even had a beach stage on the beach which was awesome. It's given me the bug to go to more festivals abroad, I hear there are some great ones in Europe so looking forward to those in the future!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/phase_k/sets/72157606704526761/
Mount Fuji Area:
After our exhausting climb up Mount Fuji it was a relief to check into the most gorgeous hostel we've been to, K's. They had a beautiful kitchen, comfy sofa's looking out onto a garden, a TV den with more comfa sofa's, and a Japanese style area with low wooden tables and huge cushions on a tatmi mat, a perfect place to chill out!
The area around Mount Fuji is beautiful and worth a couple of days of sightseeing. One cool
thing we did was get a cable car up a nearby mountain to look over to Fuji, unfortunately the day we did this it was really cloudy so we couldn't make out the mountain but we did learn a very nice story about a farmer, a rabbit and a raccoon. The Farmer worked very hard to toil his land, one day the raccoon deceived the farmer and the farmer was very upset. The farmer asked his friend the rabbit to help him, and the rabbit agreed. He sought out the raccoon and they went to collect some firewood together. When the raccoon had the firewood on his back, the rabbit set fire to the wood and the raccoon also caught fire. The next day, the rabbit went fishing with the raccoon, but his boat was made of wood, and the raccoon's boat was only made from mud, so the boat sank with the raccoon in it. Now the farmer was avenged and he was happy. The end!It was time to move on from our mountain paradise and there's no better place on earth (I think anyway) to travel around than in Japan. The trains are always on time, clean and oh so comfortable! Expensive too but it's worth buying the Japanese Rail Pass which lets you do wherever you like! The bullet trains are extremely fast, topping out at about 300km an hour (when they have passengers), arriving at their destination in no time, the countryside whipping by in a blur.
Homeless in Kyoto:
So far along the trip we have pretty much always booked our accomodation a few days in advance and then turned up at the hostel and everything has been fine. Not this time! Try as we did we could not find a hostel within our price range for the first night in Kyoto, but we thought we'd head there anyway as there was bound to be something right?! Wrong!!! But all
was not lost, we went to the Pig & Whistle Pub and played darts with some really nice people who were studying Japanese, and got roped into going for our very first private Karaoke room experience! It was all we could drink for two tune belting hilariously funny hours. We were with 2 Japanese girls who thought our rendition of Queen's "Bohemium Rhapsody" was the funniest thing on earth, who would have thought that one western girl and 4 western boys all red in the face from singing at the top of their lungs and jumping up and down with so much enthusiasm could be funny?At 4am after singing our lungs out everyone else had to go home as they had work in the morning so Karl and I booked another Karaoke room and had some more fun singing (very badly I think) before trying to get some kip (that's the done thing when you have nowhere to stay!). Then we really were out of ideas and just strolled around the town, that was OK until the alcohol had completely worn off and then we saw some people down by the river, so we thought - why not? We actually slept by a river people, and we did feel a bit like tramps especially in the morning when the people came out to walk their dogs! No dark night to hide behind anymore! All in all Japan is very safe so we didn't feel in the least worried about that, it was just the next day was a blur cos we were so tired! We did check out a great art gallery in Kyoto and wandered around some beautiful gardens though so it wasn't a waste!
There are literlly thousands of shrines and temples to explore in Kyoto and explore we did! We walked for miles and miles and gazed at the wonders built so many years ago to protect people against various ominous happenings. One shrine which was especially beautiful was thousands of small statues built to protect children, it's really a sight to see there are so many of them. Unfortunately they are so old that many are crumbling but people still go there becuase you can see fresh flowers in various places. People can go there to pray for their children and I am sure it would be a great comfort to some people in their times of need. All over Japan there are little shrines and people can often be seen praying to them, lighting some incense or making a donation to their deity, it's pretty cool.
Newsflash! We ate at a revolving sushi bar, it was OK and nice for the experience but everything tasted pretty "samey"! And YES! Karl tried some Sushi too! Unfortunately the bit he got was full of Wasabi (really hot green spicy stuff) and ruined the flavour but he tried it, I'm so proud!
Himeji Castle:
Whilst we were on Mount Fuji we met this lovely Australian girl called Alicia who said we must absolutely check out Himeji Castle, check it out we did and it was SO worth it! The area around Himeji is really well kept also and we had fun walking down to the castle, and we had the most delicious spinach and cheese pastie EVER! We so miss regular food at home sometimes!
The castle has huge grounds with lots of different bits of garden, some of which have been
turned into a lilly pond with coy carp (very peaceful) a rose garden (my favourite!), a tea garden and a lush green lawn which would have been fun to sit on if it wasn't so hot, you couldn't sit in the sun even for a minute! The castle itself has 6 stories you can wander around and explore and it has the traditional Japanese style tiles roofs which turn up at the corners. Any renovation which has been done has been done in the old original style and building materials from back in the day so that it really does look so authentic you feel that any minute now an emperor is bound to come walking around the corner. It was amazing to look at the different tiles as they are embossed with the markings of the tradesman who laid them and it was a great honour to be able to work on such a grand building. As a castle, you have to say it rates highly as no-one ever managed to penetrate it's walls, in fact no-one ever tried as it looked so imposing! We tried to imagine people approaching it with a view of attack and then thinking - no maybe not!Osaka:
We had lots of fun in Osaka playing in the arcades and taking silly pictures with Japanese people in those funny boards with the hole you poke your face through! Apart from that I think we were staying in the wrong part of town so we did not think much of the architecture or anything, just another town really and we felt it was a little anticlimactic as our final destination in Japan after the magnificent architecture and wonderful sights that we had seen up till then.
Japan is really a wonderful country which I would not hesitate to visit again. At first it was a little bit of a culture shock as it was our first asian country but the people are so proud of their nation and there is evidence of this on every corner. Everywhere you look there are people cleaning everything, the streets are filled with so many people going about their business in a quiet non pretentious way, people wait for the green man to cross the road, apologise a million times to you even if it was your fault you bumped them by accident, stop and ask you if you need help if you linger on a street corner for more than a few seconds, they are just so very welcoming to foreigners it's brilliant.
Music Festival Japanese Stylee:
MY OH MY, we forgot to write anything about Summersonic! How could we forget our first ever music festival abroad? It was an experience that was for sure! We went whilst we were in Tokyo, a huge splurge on the budget but worth every penny. We saw (amognst others) Vampire Weekend, Perfume (a japanese girl band who sing to dance music), The Verve, Prodigy, Alicia Keys, Coldplay it was awesome.
The festival itself though was not much like we're used to. For starters, the Japanese people
only clap for maximum 5 seconds after a song or even when the bands finish playing! Also no-one really dresses up funky like we do and the venue was really strange. It was set across two areas which were divided by a main road, as the road was so busy you had to walk to the nearest bridge which was a good 1/2 an hour away and back up the other side of the road. If there were bands back to back on different stages there was no chance of seeing both as it took an hour to get across! Aside from that it was very well organised and they even had a beach stage on the beach which was awesome. It's given me the bug to go to more festivals abroad, I hear there are some great ones in Europe so looking forward to those in the future!
which affords you views back down the mountain at the town below. At points it was more challenging and almost like rock climbing with only a chain to hold onto and seperating you from a big drop. We made good progress and were at our accommodation by 19:30. We had a Japanese style dinner before settling in for a sleep until midnight. I have never climbed a mountain in the middle of the night before so this was somewhat of a unique experience. We shared a torch between us and set off for the summit, sunrise was just before 5:00 so we had plenty of time.
