In what was not my finest piece of logistical planning, today we found ourselves sitting on trains for the two and a half hour journey North from Kyoto, back via Kanazawa, to Toyama. We've never been to Kanazawa or Toyama before this trip, but we've now seen more than enough of both places.

In my defence, this little detour to Toyama was never on the original agenda. I only found the Alpine Route fairly late in the planning stages of this trip, so I decided to cut 2 days off our second Kyoto stay, and do 1 night at Toyama, and 1 night at Matsumoto, with the hell of the Alpine Route in the middle.

So today, largely uninteresting, involved lots of travelling, and not much else.

We awoke to our last day in Kyoto, our favourite city in the world. We've had 10 days there this trip though, so it honestly feels like we've seen enough of it this time. In past trips, there has been a genuine sadness when leaving Kyoto, and a sense that there was a lot left to do there that we didn't have time for. This time felt different. We did what we came for, and Veronica and I agreed that it could have even been a day or two shorter, which I don't mind, because I don't feel bad about moving on.

So packing up at a leisurely pace, and after thanking our hosts and having Isabelle give them a bunch of Australian gifts, we set off for the train station.

Easter Sunday today. Japanese businesses, like any businesses I guess, get onboard with any holiday or scheme which will make them a profit. Even though the religion is predominantly Buddhist and Shinto here, Christmas is promoted heavily in the stores. Similarly Halloween is massive over here. Easter however, surprisingly, is absolutely non existent. We found virtually no Easter signage or promotion anywhere, even at chocolate shops, and Easter egg sales just didn't exist. We managed to find small packets of 4 tiny hollow Easter eggs at one store, and that was it.

Strangely, we've been on many many train rides on this trip, but we've not yet bought genuine eki-ben meals until today.

Eki-wha?
An Eki-ben is an Eki (train station) Bento (lunch box). So it is a lunchbox purchased at a train station, and is almost a must for long distance train travel in Japan. There are entire businesses built around the manufacture and sale of Eki-ben, and each region has their own specialties. In fact, it is common for people to ride the trains to different regions just to sample the Eki-ben along the way.

But this was not our motive today. Rather, we were hungry, and we didn't have time to get breakfast anywhere else, so we purchased surprisingly cheap fried chicken karaage eki-bens, and we were soon on our way to Kanazawa, before changing to a Shinkansen for the final 30 minute sprint from Kanazawa to Toyama.

After coffees and lunch at a bakery at the surprisingly crowded Toyama station, we walked the 5 minutes up the road to our hotel, the Toyoko Inn, and checked in with the same speed and efficiency that we've come to expect from Toyoko Inn's.
Since we're getting the bags shipped to the other side of the Japanese Alps in the morning, the next hour was spent repacking the bags, and throwing out clothes and things we're not going to bring home, to reduce the number of bags we have to ship down to just the 2 big suitcases.

A convenience store run for dinner, and and early bed time was in order, since we'll be up at 5:30am tomorrow to commence the Alpine Route madness.

If the blog entry doesn't get posted tomorrow night, you'll know I was either too exhausted to write it, or we missed the last bus and we're huddled together freezing in a mountain hut somewhere at 2500m.