Day 12-14: Tsukiji Fish Market and Shopping

I'm going to wrap this little blog up for now - it's 2.30 am on the day that we fly home and we've just got in from a night of drinking at a bar on the 52nd floor at Roppongi Hills with great views over Tokyo. The last couple of days in Japan have been spent shopping for little things we wanted to take back with us. I've managed to collect together a pile of manga books, weird toys and cheap electronics and Gemma's picked up some traditional sweets.



The only sightseeing we've done was a trip to Tsukiji fish market - the biggest wholesale fish and seafood market in the world. The auctions are closed to the public nowadays but we showed up around 7.30am and got to see the buyers and wholesalers setting up stalls and preparing the fish for shipping.



So thats it for now! We're back in the UK over the weekend but I'll probably tidy up and complete the writing sometime after we get back to Holland and stick all of the photos up on Flickr.

Day 11: Back in Tokyo

Today we headed back to Tokyo to meet up with Kimiko and Anthony. It was a public holiday in Japan so Anthony had the day off work. We arrived early afternoon, grabbed a quick lunch in an Italian, and then spent most of the afternoon hanging out at their flat. In the evening we were still sick of raw fish so we went out to eat at a great Californian restuarant.

Day 10: Hakone

We were served the Japanese equivalent of a fry-up: raw fish, rice and several bowls of an unrecognisable gelatinous goo. I had a go at most of the dishes, but Gemma couldn't stomach Sushimi that early in the day so a lot of it went back uneaten.



After breakfast and an early visit to the bathes we headed out to see the mountains. We spent most of the morning at Hakone's open air art museum and then grabbed lunch at a restuarant called the Gyoza centre. Gyoza are one of my favourite foods and here they made them in 19 different ways!



Next we took a cable car up over to the sulphur mine at Owakudani. There are supposed to be good views of Mount Fuji from this area but the weather was so bad we couldn't spot it at all. We came back down the other side of the mountain and then took a boat trip across Lake Ashi, supposedly another good viewing point, but there was just too much cloud today.



We took a bus back to the Ryokan where we had another huge meal (this time of Shabu Shabu with tasty Wagyu beef) and then hired out a private bath over the river.

Day 9: Hakone

We've been in the mountains without internet for the last few days, so I'm posting Days 9 - 12 all at once...

Every day since we left Tokyo we've been travelling further and further to the west. Today we were going to travel most of the way back again. Unfortunately the bullet train was heavily delayed, perhaps due to the bad weather, so we spent most of the day sitting on the train.



We were staying in a traditional Japanese Ryokan high up in the mountains at Hakone, and we finally arrived by cable car just after the sun had gone down. On the first night they were serving us an 11 course (!) Kaiseki meal, so we just had time to change into our robes before the eating started.



After dinner a guy came in to take away the dining table and lay out the matresses for bed so we went to try the baths which are heated by a natural hot spring. Unfortunately they're completely segregated, so we couldn't help each other with the long list of bathing rules. When you enter you have to sit on one of the little wooden stools are wash yourself thoroughly using 3 soap dispensors and a little wooden bucket. Once you're clean you can climb into one of the rock pools, where the water is so hot you start cooking pretty much immediately, though they give you a little wash towel to soak in cold water and put on your forehead.

Day 8: Hiroshima and Miyajima

Most of the morning was spent travelling on the bullet train to our next stop, Hiroshima. We found the hotel and then headed to the Peace Memorial Park where there are a couple of very good museums and some monuments to the nuclear attack. Here's a picture of the children's memorial statue:



We found a boat on the river that took us on all the way to Miyajima, the Shrine Island. It's famous for the floating Torii, which is one of the most photographed sights in Japan.



The sea was shallow so I took a walk out to the foot of the Torii:

Day 7: Nara

We used our Japan Rail passes to make a day trip to Nara. It's famous for it's beautiful park filled with tame Sika deer.



The deer are regarded as sacred by the Japanese and they're no longer scared of humans.



There are a total of about 1200 deer in the park.



Also in the park we saw the world's largest Buddha statue housed inside the world's largest wooden building. Here's a photo that has absolutely no sense of scale!



One of the pillars in the temple has a hole cut in it and it's supposed to bring you good luck if you crawl through it. It's exactly the same size as the Buddha's nostril in the statue pictured above (not sure why exactly). I had a go at getting through, but it's a tight fit and I could only get through with my arms above my head and several Australian tourists and Japanese children pulling me. Unfortunately Gemma was so worried I'd got wedged in the hole she rushed forward to try and pull me through and forgot to take a picure. So here's one of a Japanese school kid instead:

Day 6: Manga Museum and Fushimi-Inari Taisha

We spent the morning at the Kyoto's Manga Museum which is just around the corner from the hotel we're staying at (The Hotel Monteray Kyoto). It has a huge library of manga books in Japanese and smaller collections in some other languages. The best part was the history of manga room but there wasn't a huge amount else to see for a non-Japanese speaker. Luckily it was only cost a few hundred yen to look round.

In the afternoon we took a short train ride to Inari to see the Fushimi-Inari Taisha temple. This was one of the places I'd most wanted to see. It has thousands of bright orange Torii (the distinctive Shinto gates) forming a 5km path up the mountainside. I don't remember it, but apparently it was used in the filming of Memoirs of a Geisha. The heat was too high to get all the way up the mountain but we spent an hour or so walking around.



It was pretty dark and overcast whilst we were there and I could only get handheld pictures with the ISO1600 setting, so there's a lot of noise in the photos taken inside the Torii. There were also plenty of these creepy fox statues all over the hillside:



There were several temples on the hills with pools for the cleansing ceremony: