Tuesday 26th March

We were in Premium Economy for the first time & it was more spacious but the food was very ordinary. The next flight was to Osaka via Taipei in Taiwan. Arrived at Osaka at about 2.45pm & after clearing immigration & customs, were met & taken in a swish people mover to our hotel. Most of the route was through the extensive harbour area with large warehouses & a huge refinery.

At the hotel we checked in but they knew nothing about the tour, a bit of a worry. We met 3 other Australian couples in the same boat & agreed to meet up at 7am tomorrow. The room is great & is well appointed.

Wednesday 27th March

Woke up in the night to find a big notice under the door to meet at 9.15 for a 9.30 start. Went down for breakfast, where the range of foods on offer was amazing, including European & Japanese items. Met the rest of the party this morning & found that they arrived at about midnight last night.

Hero, our guide is a middle aged Japanese man who is friendly & kind.

First stop was Osaka Castle, the largest in Japan & a giant it is. The site covers several acres with huge stone walls surrounded by a big moat. We were astonished at the number of buses in the park but the tourists were mainly Japanese with a few groups of foreigners. It is just slightly too early for the cherry trees to blossom but they should do it soon. The other trees are also bare & the day was coolish with a max of 20C & a sharp wind. Some of the granite stones of the wall are huge & they were trimmed to fit in a dry format, as in Peru but not quite so well finished. The central castle was rebuilt in the mid 1920s from public donations & is a museum to the conflicts around the area.

Apparently, the builder was a warlord who first unified Japan in the 1500s & made Osaka its capital. The capital was moved later to Kyoto & then Tokyo.

From there we drove to the commercial centre of Osaka, where we walked through covered narrow streets & arcades & came across a couple of small temple/shrines in which people threw a ladle of water over creeper covered statues. We assume that it was a Shinto activity but are not clear on this. After a feed of golf ball sized battered octopus we wandered around the shops before catching the bus again to Kyoto. The road to Kyoto was elevated for about 40km way above the houses & factories & later on, small fields for horticulture.

In Kyoto we visited the Fushimi Inari-taisha shrine, on the Iniariyama hill, in southwestern Kyoto. It is a huge complex of shrines off a path lined with thousands of torii gates, red painted pillars with lintels above. We walked up for about 2km before we gave it away & returned down. Along the way we saw many people dressed in traditional outfits, kimono & thongs for the women & long tunic jackets over wide trousers in very fine fabrics also wearing thongs, for the men. Most were busy on selfies. One chilling site was a notice warning of boars & monkeys which weren't to be approached.

Some of the group then went to a tofu dinner but we found a small café & had noodles for dinner. Back on the bus we went to our very smart hotel.