Japan - Day Five

Now I'm beginning to question exactly which days I did what, since I have left these posts for a little while, but the exact days isn't exactly that important. More important of course is what actually happened, regardless of the exact chronological order.

Hakone was a rather nice break from the city life, but there were only so many things to see there before moving on to some fresh new locations. To head to the next destination, we actually had to back track a little bit, possibly to Odawara. Which meant catching a bus back down the mountain, where luckily our side of the road was fairly empty as opposed to the opposite lane which was ridiculously packed with cars. Seems as though almost all the population of Tokyo was heading up to the mountains to finish off their week long holiday. Probably got out of there just in time.

Back at the train station we got to once again board the Shinkansen bullet train. Another 300 kilometers away was the city of Osaka, where we would stay for a couple of days. Osaka is convenient because it is close to quite a few places, including Kyoto, Hiroshima and Miyajima. Not surprisingly the train ride didn't take too long, roughly an hour. Heading further south revealed a lot more countryside, with the cities becoming more sparse and further between. There are quite a few farms in Japan, but they are small and very well organized. Most of them seemed to be only around half an acre, but they all had their expertly dug rows of vegetables and everything else they might have been growing.


Osaka was a nice city, not quite as busy as Tokyo but a big city nevertheless. One of the landmarks of Osaka is a huge ferris wheel that is built on top of a skyscraper. Being not especially fond of heights, I found it slightly scary taking a ride on the wheel at night. But it was a nice view, seeing the whole city lit up in the darkness. I guess its best to face fears like that and try to get over them.


The hotel in Osaka was an insanely small room. With the suitcases in there, it was hard to even move around as they took up the tiny amount of floorspace. Reminds me of what my room was like living in Christchurch. Well you can't expect much from a cheap room, and with a bit of effort I had to make it work. The hotel was right next to this gigantic deparment store, which was about 10 stories high. Each floor was designated to particular areas of interest, for example one floor had all the picture and video cameras, one floor had their musical instruments, and so on and so forth. The top two floors were restaurants and dessert places. Needless to say many interesting times were spent in that appartment store exploring the floors.