Today turned into one of the longest days of travel and sightseeing. Probably we were a bit ambitious in our planning... We left Nikko early this Saturday AM for our return towards Tokyo. Instead of stopping at Tokyo, we changed trains there and headed to the town of Kamakura located south of Tokyo. Since we brought very little luggage with us for our one night in Nikko, we didn't have much baggage to deal with and didn't need to stop by at our hotel in Tokyo. ...

Today's plan was to stay a bit closer to home and explore more of north Tokyo. We didn't plan to get up so early, but we are not yet used to the time difference and were up very early again. We made our typical walk through Ueno Park (past all the joggers) to the Ueno station. We bought tickets to take the subway over one stop to Asakusa to check out the very famous Senso-ji Temple complex. The word on the street is this is Tokyo's most spectacular temple, and ...

Our first day to explore the metropolis of Tokyo! Being completely jet lagged, we woke up 4am. This was perfect as we wanted to go to the Tsukiji Fish Market very early to see the fish action. We realized that we were probably already too late to see the auctions which occur at 5am and apparently tourists start lining up at 2am to get one of the coveted 120 spots available. There was no way we were going to try and get there that early! It was a cold but crysta...

Had a pleasant flight to Narita. Both Craig and Efren were in business class, so that was nice. We were on separate flights, however, but they arrived within a few minutes of each other. Craig arrived first and had no problems with customs or immigration (despite fretting over bringing medication into Japan). Bag showed up right away and headed up to the arrivals lounge to wait for Efren. While waiting for Efren a suspicious package was left in the arrivals lou...