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We are now home and very jetlagged.

Mt. Fuji FAIL

Today we set out on a tour to see Mt. Fuji. The morning consisted of five hours sitting in Tokyo traffic jams on a crowded coach two rows behind Tokyo's most ill-behaved toddler and nursing mild hangovers from a Friday night out in Shibuya. However, it was all worth it when we saw the SPECTACULAR VIEW from Mt. Fuji:


Yes, our run of good luck when it comes to weather finally ran out and Mt. Fuji was completely shrouded in clouds when we got there. We couldn't see it as we approached nor see anything from the 5th station, about half way up the mountain. This leaves us in the unusual position of having been to Mt. Fuji but not having actually seen Mt. Fuji. (Okay, technically we saw it from roughly 1.5 meters away but it's difficult to capture the grandeur of the mountain from that distance.) Last vacation our ascent of Illiniza Norte was turned back by bad weather and now Mt. Fuji hides from us... mountains don't seem to like us.

The afternoon picked up as we took a gondola up another volcano where we explored a crater where sulfurous plumes and steam still rise to the surface.


Locals cook eggs over the sulfur vents and sell them to tourists. The eggs, which are turned jet black by this cooking method, supposedly add seven years to your life if you eat one (THIS IS A SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN FACT!!!). However, they only sold them in groups of five and we couldn't agree on who got the extra seven years for the last odd egg so we ended up not buying any.

Tomorrow we head home.

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Nara

Nara is overrun with two distinct Japanese faunae.

The first is the so-called "messengers of the gods" - sacred deer that are completely tame and quite insistent to be fed the crackers you can buy from local vendors.


Much more deadly are the roving bands of Japanese schoolchildren who have homework assignments of practicing their English on gaijin.


We're convinced that Japanese schools must be completely deserted since all the students are in Nara Park. The first three times we were "interviewed" it was amusing (and you get rewarded with a piece of origami) but then it really started to slow our progress through the park. Eventually our commute turned into a "Warriors"-esque odyssey as we weaved our way around packs of schoolchildren desperate to meet their quota.

Luckily, if you were clever you could capture the deer and the students in the same shot:

First night in Koya-san

Today, four trains followed by a cable car ride then a bus brought us to the remote mountain village of Koya-san. Unlike Tsumago, which exists purely as a tourist destination, Koya-san is an active religious destination for the Shingon sect of Buddhism. This means that it is more authentic as compared to Tsumago, which thus far has been a mixed blessing...

We're staying in a practising Buddhist temple, meaning spartan rooms and traditional Japanese shared baths. Breakfast and dinner are shojin-ryori, vegetarian cuisine dominated by tofu and bean curd.


Delightfully prepared and presented, this cuisine basically consists of different varieties of foul-tasting, slime-covered mush... and, sadly, lots of it. Getting through dinner was a struggle. Fortunately, our camera battery died just as dinner was served, otherwise this blog posting would consist of nothing but shots of pained facial expressions as we tried to force ourselves to swallow. We have two more breakfasts and one more dinner of this to look forward to - we might manage to lose a little weight while we're here. Back in Tsumago, the "adventurous" part of our dinner consisted of wasp larvae cooked in soya sauce; tonight we go to sleep yearning for the subtle delicacy of wasp larvae.

Tomorrow off to explore Koya-san to find out if it was worth it...

Koya-san

Up at 5:30AM to watch the monks pray but unfortunately we got there two minutes too late and the door was already closed. We’ll try again tomorrow.

The highlight of Koya-san is Okuno-in, a vast cemetery with 100,000 tombs nestled among 300 year old cedars. It was quite large and felt like something out of the “Lord of the Rings” movies.


The afternoon was spent touring more temples and then some more temples. We’re pretty much templed-out. The nice part was that everything was absolutely deserted.

After lunch, Jessica headed back to the hotel whilst Andrew got adventurous and experienced Jukia, a formal ceremony for taking refuge in the Buddha, which was a little too “real” for comfort. Then he tried his hand at Shakyo (sutra copying) which started off relaxing but got old fast – it took almost an hour to copy the entire thing. After trying for almost an entire 90 minutes, Andrew gave up on trying to attain enlightenment.

Koya-san has no fewer touristy spots than anywhere we’ve gone so far, but once you’ve done them there is NOTHING TO DO! No internet, no TV, no bar, nothin’. We killed a bit of time using the outdoor onsens in our temple but after that ended up killing time playing Scrabble on the iPhone and dreading yet another tofu dinner. Luckily, Jessica had the bright idea of buying some pot-noodles from the grocery store and using the hot water they provided for tea.

Tomorrow off to Nara.

Kyoto

Kyoto has a lot of temples. A lots. It's turtley with temples.

First, we saw the temple with over 10,000 Shinto gates:


Then there was the temple with the 1001 statues of buddha:

[NO PHOTO BECAUSE THE MONKS THREATEN PHYSICAL VIOLENCE IF YOU TAKE PHOTOS OF THE BUDDHAS (SERIOUSLY)]

Then there was the temple with the great view of the Kyoto skyline:

[NO PHOTO BECAUSE THE KYOTO SKYLINE IS NOT THAT INTERESTING]

Meanwhile, this was supposed to be the rainy season in Japan. Today it was +30C and sunny (and we ran out of sunscreen this morning).

Tsumago

We left Tokyo on the high-speed shinkansen (bullet train) through Nagano then onto Tsumago. This is a remote town in the Japan Alps which used to be a stop on the trade route between Kyoto and Tokyo which now makes it trade offering tourists a taste of traditional Japanese rural life.


Being the off-season, the town was quite empty, and combined with a temporary turn in the weather towards cool and wet, this was a welcome change from the heat and crowds of Tokyo. Our hotel was styled as a traditional Japanese lodge with the standard paper walls, thatch floors, and low ceiling beams which Andrew head-butted (or chin-butted) at least twice an hour.

The next morning brought bright sunshine and heat as we hiked some 8km of the old trade route through bamboo forests and old rural villages.

Now back onto a few more trains and on to Kyoto.

P.S. Andrew loves the Japanese: they are organized, efficient, and polite. (Just like Andrew.)

Leaving Tokyo

We're leaving Tokyo today and heading west for Tsumago, Magome, Kyoto, Koya-san, & Nara, then back to Tokyo in a week. I'm not sure what our internet access will be like for this leg of the trip so there might not be any blog postings.

Day 3: Karaoke

According to the Wikipedia page on Karaoke:

"Karaoke is a form of interactive entertainment or video game in which amateur singers sing along with recorded music (and/or a music video) using a microphone and public address system."

That is all we're going to talk about Karaoke on this blog.

Move along.

Nothing to see here.

Day 2: This Photo Requires No Explanation

Day 2: All over Tokyo

Jet lag has been a real bitch on this trip and we've not managed to sleep more than a few hours at a time yet. Meanwhile, our guidebook said that to really see the Tsukiji Fish Market in action you had to get there by 6:30AM when it is truly busy. Therefore, we used the power of jet lag for good instead of evil and popped out of bed at 5:30.

The fish market is HUGE, with thousands of fishermen, mongers, wholesalers, and packages plying their trade. Best of all, they seem to be used to random tourists getting in their way and blinding them with camera flashes.

For the record, "Sushi for Breakfast" is not as strange as it might sound, especially when:

1. You've spent the last hour looking at and smelling fresh and/or live samples of just about everything the sea has to offer.
2. The fish is so fresh that most of it was still swimming when you got out of bed.
3. You've been up for three hours already.

For the late morning we hit the Imperial Palace which was, in a word, boring. The Japanese haven't managed to find the middle ground between LOUD, NOISY, BRIGHT, SCREAMING, CROWDED STREETS OF LOOKATME, LOOKATME, LOOKATME... and completely plain, unadorned gardens.

Now having a siesta before heading out to a baseball game tonight...