We where awoken by my alarm nice and early for breakfast. The lady of the house called us to the dinning room. The room was along a wooden corridor with open glass doors to the garden on one side. We took our seats. A selection of small dishes had already been laid out for us. There was baked salmon, fruit and rice. We ate our breakfast and planned our day over drinking fresh coffee and green tea. I grabbed our things while Beverley checked out. We checke...

Tonight we write our blog entry from the mountains around Nagano. We are the guests in a traditional Ryokan, but I will come back to that later. Our day started abruptly with a phone call from reception saying we had missed our check out time, and we had being doing so well. Bags packed. We walked through Nagoya to catch a train to our first stop of the day... Matsumoto. The train was like all the others clean and punctual. The geography outside started w...

The day started with us catching up on sleep due to our walking and skyping the day before. Bags packed and stored at the hostel, we checked out and headed into Kyoto central. Cafe on the way called for a breakfast stop. The temperature had already starting to heat up and made the environment very humid. With blood orange juice in us we grabbed the subway to the a Imperial Palace. The train dropped us off at the bottom edge of the Imperial gardens where we m...

The day started at 2pm as we slept in due to jet lag. With sleep caught up with, we showeres and headed out. As we missed out on Hiroshima this morning we thought we would continue with our plans in the afternoon. With help from a friendly station master who helped us buy a day pass and then double checked we had the right pass as we brought a 2 day pass. We headed to Kyoto station and took a bus to Kiyomizudera (Water Temple). The temple was at the end of a...

We spent most of the day on the plane. The flight was nice enough but we both struggled to get confortable. Bev's feet also swelled and really hurt. Arriving in Osaka, Japan at 5:30pm and was sadly greeted with a 2 and a half hour wait at passport control. Finger print and mug shoots taken we collected our bags and passed the test from a very polite customs officer. Beverley entered the train station to get our Japan Rail passes. She was served by a very frien...