The final day in Nagoya today. We were planning on sleeping in, leisurely packing up and venturing down to Kobe for a relaxing day. We could not have deviated from the plan much more if we'd wanted to. I've been watching the weather reports for any chances of snow that were within reasonable visiting distances. We came close to seeing snow in Takayama at the start of the week, but even though it was cold enough, no snow fell. According to the weather reports,...

Dear Nara Park Curators, In addition to selling deer biscuits at the entry to the deer park, can you please also provide tasers for those who don't appreciate being headbutted by numerous deer as they attempt to elicit food. Thanks, Andrew. As you can probably notice, I'm not the worlds biggest deer fan. Prior to today, I had never really considered my feelings toward deer. Kinda cute, occasionally tasty with the right preparation, but other than that I h...

Woke up very early this morning. I guess we're all getting a little bit over novelty of sleeping on the floor. As nice as the ryokan was, it is still a thin mattress on a hard floor, with a pillow which is soft on one side, and ******* the other (one side of the pillows are soft, and one side are traditional "bean" pillows which are like laying on gravel). We went down for breakfast, of similar content to yesterday's breakfast, and needless to say, far too much ...

We all slept in a little too long today. So much so that we were awoken by Veronica saying "Everyone get up. It's 10-to-8 and they stop serving breakfast at 8 o-clock!". Super. With bleary eyes and messy hair we made our way down to the dining room to see what breakfast weirdness awaited us. It turned out to be a lot better than I was expecting. Breakfast was a mix of both familiar and unfamiliar foods, most of which wasn't bad. Stuff like ham, pasta salad an...

Started the day by preparing to bid Yokohama farewell. Yokohama remains my second favourite city in Japan (behind Kyoto), not because of the attractions in the city, but because of its convenient location and laid-back and comparatively uncrowded populace. Stupid ramen museum aside, Yokohama is a good place to base yourself in Japan, especially if you dislike Tokyo as much as we do. Didn't even bother with the Toyoko Inn breakfast this morning, after the unins...