Nihau from Beijing! Well arriving here from spick and span Japan was a bit of a culture shock! We went to a local restaurant on the first evening and ate a meal surrounded by people spitting on the floor and throwing half smoked cigarettes still burning down next to us! The weather was also a shock at minus 10 degrees. The guesthouse we are staying in is a really sweet local place where the people are super friendly but it's pretty chilly with our room opening...

Well It's time for our last blog in Japan which makes me very sad- we have truly loved it here. On Monday we had one final destination before we left the Kansai region and that was Kobe for lunch...it sounds strange but their beef is world famous! Lots of people (including us before we left) think that the super tender beef is called Wagyu but actually Kobe is the one that is the super special tender one- the rumours about it are everywhere but some people say ...

Well as you can see we are now in Osaka. I am sitting in a super technical internet cafe unlike no other one that I have been into in my life! You even get to choose your chair- from a standard all the way through to a massage chair in a private booth- they also have double booths for 2 people where loads of people are chilling out watching DVD's. You can spend 8 hours here and it's not a bad deal at 15 quid- much cheaper than a hotel and there are free drinks...

A diary from the last few days...... 4th Jan- Tokyo Today was another dazzling day in Tokyo- we started with a soba noodle set lunch which set us up- a bento box with nice cold soba noodles with a yummy dipping sauce, grilled fish, miso soup and prawn tempura- it sounds a lot but it's actually just a a little bit of yummy everything. we managed to choose from the 4 dishes available in English compared to an 8 page Japanese menu so goodness knows what we were m...

Konnichiwa from Tokyo and Happy New Year! We are sooooo excited to be here and it couldn't be more different to everywhere else- even when you are expecting it! We spent the last few days in Ho Chi Minh city where the highlight was visiting the Chu Chi tunnels 92km outside of the city. The tunnels were used by the vietcong in the Vietnam war and there are 200km of them going all the way to Cambodia. Kitchens, dining rooms, sleeping areas and even hospitals were u...