Tokyo was a riot.

On the first night, upon arrival we met up with Logan and his friend Nathan. Logan is a Kansai Gaidai friend of ours from South Carolina in America, greeeat guy! So much fun. We made our way to our hostel, checked in, dropped our 19837198371982kg’s of luggage and headed out for a bit of a night, some Japanese barbecue and a Wendy’s which didn’t have any meat left so we went to Maccas instead. Shunjuku was alive, lots of things to do and things to see, if we had the time and the energy.

Tokyo is an extremely and ridiculously large city, the likes of which I would claim that if you put every capital city in Australia together, it would STILL be smaller than Tokyo, my guess would be quite a bit smaller too. Tokyo is made up of various districts, districts such as Shinjuku, Shibuya, Harajuku, Ginza, Roppongi…. And the thing I love about Tokyo and its districts is that every district is famous for something different, such as Shinjuku’s nightlife, Shibuya’s shopping, Roppongi’s Nigerian infested nightlife (neutral comment, make of it what you will), Ginza’s the business district, Harajuku’s crazy fashion….

After the shinkansen (I love Shinkansens) ride from Nagoya to Shizuoka (south-west of Fuji) we grabbed some food (tortilini – yummmmmmm) and hopped on some local trains on our way to fuji station. Fuji snuck up on me whilst I was gazing out the train window at the ocean, it literally snuck up on me. I turned around for a second and it was there! They call fuji a “shy” mountain and I can definitely see why. Even on the train it kept ducking out of view behind buildings and the train itself… and when we finally got off the train and rushed to get a good look at it, it was hiding behind clouds. We saw a bit of the snow covered peak through little holes in the clouds but there wasn’t that much we could see.

But what we COULD see was most definitely breath-taking. It just looked as though the earth rose into the clouds, it was most impressive. We asked around at Fuji station for bus information, they said the next bus would rock up in about… 4 hours…. Yeah, not gonna do that.

So we caught a different bus that was supposed to apparently maybe possibly should kind of drop us off somewhere in Japan. Sounds good. We jumped on and it headed up the foothills of Fuji – awesome.

Our lodgement for Nagoya was Hostel Ann, located near Kanayama Station – so we weren’t in the heart of Nagoya but a short train ride away.  However, Kanayama was quite a built up little city, and it was really well lit up at night time with bright lights and columns of store signs.  Anyone who has ever visited Japan, or at least seen a picture of a city in Japan, will know that the buildings are lined vertically with signs advertising the stores inside the building, they’re usually colourful and so… i like them… coz they’re all shiny xD

We arrived late, so we had a quick dinner at a ramen place, and crashed pretty early.  The next day was eventful, we started out by looking for a temple that was supposed to be tucked away within the city… but as it turns out… the map we were given, lied.  Again and Again.  So we were lost… but then we found this awesome Panasonic guy who was both busy and VERY willing to find the temple for us.  Annie went and asked him where it was and he just did the whole “uh… eeto.. … … *RUN*” and away he went, with Annie in tow.  He found us the temple, then knicked off.  The temple was tiny, and pretty dodgy… and had a car parked in it. … … .. booo.

After Tennoji we began our journey to Nagoya, but we decided to take a brief stopover at Hikone to see Hikone Castle. Hikone Castle was supposed to be a little less refurbished than other castles like Osaka Castle (which was a little disappointing to be honest). However, we did overlook one thing: the fact that this was an all day STOPOVER.

Stopover meaning we didn’t make accommodation reservations anywhere in the area, meaning we didn’t have anywhere to drop our 50kg backpacks. This made for an extremely painful and tiring day, however, it was most definitely worth it as we got to see a couple great things.

First thing was of course Hikone Castle which was absolutely amazing. It was a LOT smaller than Osaka castle, however, it was also a LOT less untouched than Osaka Castle.