Well, 14 hours is a very, very long flight and not one to be recommended! Suffice it to say that we won’t be doing many more - after we get home that is.The only upside was that having booked a Japan Airlines flight, we got access to the BA loungs at Heathrow which made the pre flight wait much more comfortable. This is a benefit that we wouldn’t have got if we had booked a BA flight. Ridiculous!

Anyway, after a 14 hour overnight flight we managed to arrive at 18.00 the following day thanks to an 8 hour time difference. I’m sure the jetlag will be an issue.

After the immigration machine managed to take our fingerprints - difficulty possibly being due to sweaty fingers (or just old fingers) - we were allowed in. With a bit of help from some locals, we managed to navigate the metro and find our way to the hotel. Then a quick bite to eat and bed.

As envisaged not a lot of sleep until about 6 am when we both crashed out and woke up with a start at 9.10 - due to Andy having failed to set the alarm properly (or even at all)!

Then a rush for breakfast so that we could make the appointment for our Fish Market tour. Our plan to take the metro ended in confusion and failure. And a cab journey!

The tour however was very good and incorporated a visit to an important buddhist temple, and a tour of the streets with many, many shops and stalls selling anything from fishy related foods, to stalls cooking fresh fishy snacks of many varieties, to restaurants, to knife shops (kitchen type) and a lot of things in between.

We shared the tour with another couple (he was French and she was American and they work in Hong Kong). Our guide bought us various tasters of roasted eel skewers, tuna sushi, egg roll (slightly sweet) and some sort of sweet strawberry rice delicacy. He then took us to lunch in a local fish restaurant! After that he took us up 46 floors to a viewing platform looking out over the river and Tokyo bay.

Feeling a little jaded after this and having had little sleep, we headed back on the metro to our hotel to refresh.

The next thrilling instalment will follow!

A & L xx