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The next day and again a whole lot of travelling, around 6 hours again today. Today we was heading off to Iga-Ueno a provincial castle town that is home to the Ninja the most inventive and feared spies of Japans feudal era.

As soon as we arrived we headed straight to the Iga ninja museum which was extraordinary, a clan farmhouse that served as the secret headquarters of the Iga sect of professional spies and assassins, the well restored building retains its hidden panels, spy holes, secret escape routes and trapdoors intended to repel night attacks from enemy warlords and rival ninja sects.

All of the Ninja methods were enthusiastically performed by local guides and we even got to throw real ninja throwing stars, I was the only one in the group to hit the bulls eye and got called a gaijin by some old man but this was in good spirits I think they couldn't believe we did it.

After playing in the Ninja headquarters and going through the museum, which had originals of pretty much everything we got an insight into what a being a ninja was actually like, some of the more important things I think I found out were that ninjas when not training were actually farmers, this was so they did not arose suspicion and would not come under any suspicion if stopped when they was carrying weapons like sickles etc that could be used on a farm, also Ninjas did not wear black! As portrayed in most films, they actually wore dark blue clothing and even though the most common image of a ninja is with his sword, they only used swords for a relatively small amount of time to other weapons!

So we headed back to Kyoto around tea time and it was a 3 hour journey back, so again we were pretty tired so just chilled out and got some tea from a local shop, I think that night I had udon noodles and dried squid, yum.