Today. What a great day it is. I'm totally refreshed and I've gotten used to the time zone here. I started my day with breakfast. It was good. Fish and rice aren't really my thing though. But they had cereal also. I cleaned up and got ready to hit the town. I took a bus to the downtown Tokyo. I saw that there's free observatories. That's good fo...

Yokohama and Tokyo - a glimpse of modern Japan From Hiroshima our next stop was to be Yokohama, a metropolis just south of Tokyo. We went there to visit Mayumi whom I'd met in the Australian outback 4 years ago and still have regular contact with. It was great to visit her, her husband Junichi and her 2-month old son Kohta. It was great to catch...

We were glad to check out of this hostel and took the train to Tokyo Station. There we got rid of our luggage and went to eat something. Later on we went to Akihabara again to pass some time before we took the first train to Hachinohoe short before 6 PM. Three hours later we changed to a train bound for Aomori. Finally at 10:45 PM we got on boar...

A good thing we bought some new suitcases the other day because they were full by the time we finished packing! But then of course, our big backpacks took up a bunch of room. Somehow, we managed to save some space for our last shopping day in Bangkok. We went to a few places, picked up some last minute souvenirs and headed back to our guesthouse...

Richard Having managed to get an earlier non-stop flight from Hong Kong to Tokyo (our original flight would have stopped in Taiwan) we arrived at Narita airport in the early afternoon. While we were in Bangkok I had managed to acquire a nasty cold which meant that although I was on the ground, one of my ears was still up at 37,000 feet - not a p...

Tokyo. wow. totally overwhelming. 25 million people squeezed into a city the size of Auckland. mental. our two and a half days in tokyo were jam-packed with activities and we are forever grateful to our doji simon and beautiful minako for being such amazing tour guides and hosts. without you, we could never have guided ourselves through such a c...

Marina and I spent the day shopping today. Most of it was done in Asakusa. While there we also visited the Sensoji Shrine (aka Asakusa Kannon Temple). The Asakusa area is kind of cool, but a real tourist trap. It features a market walkway that sells more traditional Japanese goods. Originally Marina wanted to go here for the famous traditional b...

Hello everyone :-) Well here I am in Bangkok awaiting my connection to Vietnam to start my tour of Southeast Asia. Am really excited, but it was sad to leave Scott after five days in Tokyo! Tokyo was cool, really expensive (well for Scott.... now that I'm unemployed and all). It's really clean there but everything looks the same which was a litt...

Zachary and I and Lindsay have covered much of Tokyo. Look at the photos!