After our somewhat horrendous day yesterday, Darren and I decided to have a bit of a break and take it easy today. Sort of.

I say "sort of" because today was after all a travel day and we were moving on from Kyoto to Tokyo. We had a nice sleep in, as our lovely hotel's check out time wasn't until 11am, which is very generous. When we got up we had a nice cup of tea, got packed up and stored our luggage at reception.

We decided to just go for a walk and check out the shops on the other side of Kyoto station. We managed to navigate through the station without any issues and began walking down the street. There were a few souvenir shops, but not much else. We did a bit of last minute shopping and then went and had chocolate orange mochas at Starbucks. The girl who served me seemed to have the best English in all of Japan. "Where you from?" She says to me. "Sydney, Australia", I say back. "Ah, you say, G'day!" she says back to me. "G'day!" I say back to her and we both giggle.

It was nice to sit down in the warm coffee shop and just zone out for a bit after almost ten straight days of being on the go. After our coffees we walked back to our hotel, collected our luggage and trooped off back to the station. We picked up seat reservations for the "Hikari" bullet train to Tokyo which would take almost three hours. Darren and I agreed to take turns with the window seat. I volunteered to have it for the second part of the trip.

My hour and a half with the window seat on the bullet train was one of my standout moments from the trip. I just put my headphones on, turned up the travel tunes and watched the world fly by. Doing that has always been one of my favourite parts of being on the road. I saw a lot of interesting things go passed, but the main thing I noticed is that Japanese people really seem to like Ferris Wheels. Every town we went past seemed to have one.

We arrived into Tokyo at about 5pm, and miraculously I managed to get us out of the correct entrance at the massive Shinjuku station which is apparently close to where we are staying. We came out and even though Google maps said it was only six hundred metres again, we got a cab. I think Google maps may have been on crack this time. It took a fair while to get to the hotel. Not that we minded, it had just gotten dark and oh my God, the lights! Darren and I were both as slack jawed as each other! I'd never seen anything like it, so many bright colourful signs all over every single building. I didn't know where to look.

We checked into our hotel, the Granbell and had another smallish room, although not as small as the hotel in Osaka and a lot nicer. We had a look at the lovely roof top bar and then went out to explore.

It was kinda funny, we both went into full tourist mode and kept looking at things, bumping into people, backing into poles. We wandered through the red light district and found an amazing place to eat. We had pork and seafood with this amazing sauce, I have no idea what it was, but it was one of my favourite dishes from the entire trip….and it was very cheap.

After our lovely dinner, we went for a walk around the shops, so many cheap clothes and shoes! We decided for our sanity's sake to stay on the same street so we didn't get lost. So when we reached the end of it, we crossed over and walked back via the pretty lights on that side. We found our hotel and went upstairs to bed in our cosy little room.