Having arrived in Osaka first thing in the morning we had a few hours to kill before the ferry to Shanghai departed at noon. We managed to fill the time waiting for a bus that wasn't running, walking with our packs to the wrong ferry terminal and eventually finding the correct terminal! Our ship was called the Su Zhou Hao and was mighty big as it also presumably carried a lot of freight. It has a capacity to carry 240 passengers, but on this trip only 44 brave ...

We were both super excited at the prospect of visiting Tokyo, especially as neither of us had set foot in Japan before. We wanted to visit Japan and as our travel plan was taking us to south-east Asia we decided to include Japan in our itinerary in order to give us a taste of the country, hopefully as a precursor for a longer stay in the future. Whilst we were excited we were also a little nervous as we had heard that, unlike India and Hong Kong, there is very...