Things got much more interesting last night after I posted the blog. We got talking to an Australian girl called Sheryn who was also staying at our hostel and she was able to solve the mystery of why the windowsills are covered in the remnants of broken spoons. Apparently the hostel owner is some kind of mad psychic who believes in UFOs and reckons he's an amateur Uri Geller... We all got quite tipsy (me especially so as I was knocking back what I thought was su...

Hello hello, writing this from Matsuyama in Shikoku. We caught the Shinkansen from Hiroshima to Okayama and then changed to a limited express train (the exterior covered in cartoons!) for the 2.5 hour journey to Matsuyama. Once again I slept through most of the journey with my ipod on (just realised how much I miss music). It's been a pretty uneventful day to be honest. We found our hostel, which is at the top of a freakin hill - so knackered by the time we made...

Evening all, I`m very sleepy writing this despite having a good hour`s worth of kip on the Shinkansen to Hiroshima. I woke up nice and discombobulated, ready to navigate us to our hostel. Consequently, we got lost again. What should have been a 4 minute walk took us approximately 30mins (but bear in mind I have 16kg of backpack to lug around with me, compared to Jim`s 9kg and Don`s 11kg) in the sweltering heat. Again, we roped in a local for directions and he e...

It's our final morning in Kyoto and we're off to catch the Shinkansen to Hiroshima in about an hour. Had a manic final day here yesterday, squeezing in lots of sightseeing to make up for our general slackness the day before. The first stop was Nijo-jo (the castle). It comprised of two internal palaces, walls, a moat and landscaped gardens. We paid to walk through one of the palaces and it had nightingale floors which had been fashioned so that the floor boards m...

Konbanwa! It's 10pm here in Kyoto and we're relaxing in the hostel with dubious looking cloudy saki and beer from the vending machine... Had a pretty relaxing day today after the mayhem of yesterday. We hired bikes and cycled around Southeast Kyoto, stumbling upon an amazing Zen temple called Tofuku-ji. After looking around there we set back off for our original destination, Fushimi-Inari Taisha. It's a shrine with hundreds of vivid red torii (they look a bit ...