This morning we went to Arashiyama Monkey Park. We took a tiny 2 carriage street train to Arashiyama where we firstly sat by the river and ate our baked breakfast treats which included a festively snake shaped sweet bun, to celebrate the year of the snake. After a quick 20mins hike up Mt. Iwatayama, we arrived at the main viewing area for the monkeys. We bought some treats to feed the monkeys. Their favourite treat was apple, followed by chestnuts and then peanu...

We had a bit of a rusty start to the day, especially Shannon, but we were out the door and eating ramen for breakfast by 10am. After filling up we took the subway to a nearby shrine which is famous for its large numbers of orange torii gates, think "Memoirs of a Geisha" when the young girl runs through that orange tunnel. The Fushimi Inari Shrine is a huge shrine with dedications to foxes. It was incredibly packed with people wishing to make their prayers for th...

Happy New Year! For this evening's celebrations we decided to go on a pub crawl that had been advertised at our hostel. We met up with everyone in our lobby at 6pm and then set out with our Japanese hosts to go to the bar. Our first stop was at a basement bar where we stayed for about an hour. We were allowed two drinks and 3 shots. It was a nice place to start the night and warm up for everything. We made friends with Australian and Japanese people alike, altho...

Today was a beautiful sunny day and we took the opportunity to go on the Philosopher's Walk which is a 2km stroll which takes you past some temples and shrines. We stopped at a few temples and shrines along the way and snapped some good photos of everything. We also passed a section along the canal where a whole bunch of stray cats were hanging out. And we saw a sweet little Shiba puppy napping in his little tent out the front of his house. The last stop on the...

We said goodbye to raining, wet Kochi today and hello to raining, wet Kyoto! The 3 hour or so train ride was relatively uneventful and seemed to go by quickly which was nice. As I said, it was rainy in Kyoto and we had a bit of a wet walk from the train station to the hostel but fortunately it's not incredibly cold here. Kyoto is such a cool place! It's great to go from small cities such as Kochi and Himeji to a big city like Kyoto. It's a novelty to see other r...