It is starting to feel like the trip is winding down, which is a good thing, because we've packed so much into the last 3 weeks, that we're all feeling a little exhausted. Almost ready for another holiday. Today we made our final city hop of the trip. We're finishing our holiday with 3 nights in our favourite city, Kyoto, before flying home on Wednesday night. We bid farewell to our final Tokoyo Inn for the trip this morning. Frustratingly, we've now stayed in e...

To anyone coming to Kobe in the future, and considering attending Kobe Luminarie, I won't tell you not to do it, but I'd advise you to be prepared for the worst when you do. It is the most popular event on the Kobe calendar, and people come from all over Japan (and the world, if you count tourists like us), so being able to see Luminarie is a marathon effort in itself. I'll get back to Luminarie a bit later. Firstly after a minor sleep in, we went down for bre...

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 ...