Ah, today - what a day! Possibly the most challenging. I am yet to find my money! But this morning at breakfast in Kyoto, I met a french man as he put on Queen at Wembley Stadium 1986 instead of Japanese game shows as usual - he seemed amused at my french but humoured me, I wish I had met him before I had to leave! So, I packed my bags, swung the 20kg onto my back and braved the light rain to catch the bus to Kyoto for the last time. Because I did have the pack o...

Today was my fumble day. I realised I had lost my travel wallet with 30000 yen in it (under investigation), lost my train pass (again), went to 2 wrong bus stops and tripped over twice. There's always that day when travelling where things do not go your way, and that day was supposedly today but I chose to ignore it. Despite losing about $325 and with blister bound feet - I refused to let it slow me down! Yesterday, I talked about how Robert Frost inspired me wi...

How do I start on a day so full of action? Well, having woken up by an accidental 16 hour (well deserved) sleep, I thought we were in for a gloomy day judging by the weather. This is not unreasonable as it is rainy season here! But then, once it hit 9.30am, the sun rose above the smog. One thing I did not counter in was the 1.5 million population of this city and the pollution, I hadn't experienced it before! Anyways, I was provided with a French breakfast befor...

Exhaustion. There are many levels and forms of exhaustion. Post-exam exhaustion. Post-marathon exhaustion. And then there's sheer, travel induced exhaustion. It took me 24 hours to get to Tokyo Haneda airport including all travel time. On my flight from Singapore to Tokyo I was sat next to the only man on the plane who insisted on having his reading light on and on the aisle. I tried sleeping for 4 hours, once I finally fell alseep at 3.30am Australian EST, I wa...

So despite my sudden and distressing realisation that in fact I was about to spend a month backpacking in a foreign, asian country and being dropped off at the furthest possible point from my terminal in Sydney and spending well over an hour getting through customs post peak hour sydney trasffic at 7am - I managed to get on the plane and make it to Singapore. I was inbetween some lovely people and sitting being the first class bathrooms which meant A+ for leg spa...