Today was designated to be a quiet day. It is now 10:45pm, and I'm just sitting down to write the blog entry. Things never go to plan on our holidays. After the massive day of walking and sight-seeing yesterday, nobody had sufficient ability or motivation to rise at our normal time, which meant that we actually got a small rest on our holiday. A concept which is a little alien to us, and to be honest, feels a little like wasted time. By about 10:30am we were d...

Walking for miles and miles was never on the agenda for today. We're all still not feeling the best, so the plan was to take a small walk east from our apartment, then head south through the temple district on the eastern side of Kyoto, then find public transport, either a bus or subway, to get back to the hotel. The plan went well, up to the point where we tried to find the public transport, and the crowds and inconvenience of it all made it easier just to walk...

I think I was destined to feel short-changed at Sumiyoshi ryokan. Yesterday at breakfast I had the western style breakfast, which was honestly ordinary, while the Japanese breakfast of hoba miso on rice with the side dishes looked fantastic. As a result I changed my breakfast order to a Japanese style breakfast, and was very much looking forward to my delicious hoba miso. Everyone but me thought it was very funny when they'd changed the menu for the second da...

They say you shouldn't meet your hero's, because it's bound to end in disappointment. On the last trip we visited a hamburger restaurant in Takayama, called Center 4 Hamburgers. It was, without a doubt, the best burger I'd ever had. Risking tainting that memory, we decided to go back there today to see whether it really was as good as I remembered it, or whether it was going to ruin the memory forever. But before I get to that, onto the events of this morning. ...

The first half of today was a tedious endurance test of our sanity and patience, as we endured over 5 and a half hours of transit time, and 3 train changes, to get from Nagano to Takayama. Japan is blessed with countless vast and rugged mountain ranges, unfortunately one of the biggest runs almost vertically between the location we started in, Nagano, and the location we needed to get to, Takayama, in the Hida region. Some buses can make the direct journey ove...