Japan

When we arrived in Japan we quickly realised that it was completely unlike anywhere that we had been before. In fact, just finding our way across town to the hostel that we had booked turned out to be a pretty confusing experience.

With most of the signs written in Japanese characters and a local transport network diagram that looked like a plate of spaghetti, getting to the correct metro station was a bit of a challenge. Once there we discovered that Tokyo addresses don`t include street names. Instead they have the name of an area and a number, which makes them pretty much impossible to find. Fortunately the Japanese are used to lost and confused foreigners, so the station guard quickly came up to us with a map showing the location of our hostel.

Seeing as it was a Saturday night we decided to go to Shinjuku, a lively area in central Tokyo. The whole area was lit up in bright neon and there were dozens of small streets packed with bars and restaurants. Lots of the restaurants didn't have English menus. In fact in the first place that we went in to our inability to communicate meant that we ended up having a beer and then making a swift exit.

Plastic food turned out to be the way to go. Many Japanese restaurants have incredibly realistic and detailed plastic models of the food and drinks that they sell. Picking one of these places is a good plan as if in doubt you can always take the waiter outside and order out of the window. Almost immediately we were judging restaurants based on the quality of their plastic food!

At the end of the evening we took the last train back to our hostel. Just like London it was absolutely packed with very drunk people. For some reason I had never thought of Japanese people as being binge drinkers. Still the evidence was all around, including a man in a suit lying in a pool of his own vomit who Steve bravely helped to his feet.

The next day we had to get up early and move to another hostel. Cheap accommodation gets booked up very quickly in Tokyo and we had not been organised enough to get things sorted out in time. Having mastered the public transport system we arrived near the hostel with out problems but clearly couldn't find it due to the crazy address system.

The area turned out to be full of homeless middle aged men, one of whom took us to the hostel. We later found out that nearly everybody is guided to the hostel by one of the large number of very polite homeless men in the area, some are even met at the station. Again I had`t thought of homelessness as being a big issue in Tokyo, it seemed a real shame especially as the city as a whole is clearly so prosperous.

After dumping our rucksacks we went to Harujuku. This is an area of Tokyo where people go on Sundays dressed up in strange costumes to have their photographs taken. We arrived at the station to find lots of teenage girls dressed either as Goths or Little Bo Peep having their photographs taken by middle aged men. When we came back later in the day after exploring the surrounding area things seemed a little less creepy. The teenage girls had been joined by a rock band and some middle aged transvestite Bo Peeps. Meanwhile lots of tourists and Japanese families had turned up to watch the spectacle.

Steve was taking lots of photos, so I decided to go and get a coffee. It was at this point that I had my first experience with a high tech Japanese toilet. Confusingly it had lots of buttons on it with signs in Japanese characters. I pressed one at random thinking that it might flush the toilet. Instead it started spraying hot water over the toilet floor. I got into a bit of a panic and pressed all buttons until eventually finding the stop button. By this point the toilet floor was completely covered in water. I opened the door to find a queue of people waiting and made a quick get away.

Near to Harujuku is the Meiji Shrine, a large Shinto shrine set in a peaceful park. The beautiful wooden temple and courtyard was our first sight of the traditional side of Japan. There was a wedding procession passing through the courtyard with both the bride and groom wearing elegant kimono. It was actually hard to believe that the Bo Peeps and Goths were from the same country, let alone only a few hundred meters away.

We decided to finish our first full day in Japan by eating some sushi in a traditional looking place near to our hostel. It was small and wooden lined with seats by the counter and also a Japanese style seating space with cushions on the floor, a low table and tatami (reed) mats. We sat by the counter and watched while the chef prepared the sushi in front of us. Soon we had got into a chat with the owner who was in there drinking with one of his friends. Before we knew it we were being offered sashimi, strange pickles, more sushi, beer and sake all on the house.

Japan is crazy about vending machines, which sell drinks and cigarettes on every street corner. At the hostel where we were staying you had to pay for a night`s stay or a clean towel at the vending machine in the corner of the lounge. It even sold pot noodles!

Staying at the hostel was a bit like participating in a non nasty version of Big Brother. The lounge was a time warp in which people surfed the net, chatted, drank beer and eat boxed sets of strange food stuffs from the nearby Seven Eleven. All sorts of plans were made in the lounge for everyone to go on big nights out together or visit early morning fish markets, but none of them ever came to anything.

In fact no matter what your intentions it was almost impossible to get around to going to bed before the early hours of the morning. Unfortunately the hostel had a rigorous program of morning cleaning so we ended up feeling pretty tired.

Tokyo is home to some really good modern architecture. Steve had marked lots of the interesting buildings on a map and we went on a bit of walking tour. We started with the Prada Store, a cool futuristic building with bubbly glass. We also saw a Toyo Ito building, pink with windows like holes in a cheese and the Hermes building which has a facade like one of those glass brick walls that people sometimes put in bathrooms. We finished up at the Tokyo Forum Building, a monumental and impressive space the size of a cathedral which didn't seem to serve any particular purpose.

Japanese people undoubtedly deserve their reputation for politeness. People bow and say thank you and go out of their way to be helpful. In fact in Japan even the machines are polite. Ticket machines say `Arigato gozaimasu` (thank you very much) out loud when issuing tickets. Shops have loudspeakers broadcasting `Irasshaimase` (welcome, how can I help) at their entrances. The bowing in particular is totally infectious, as I realised when Steve caught me bowing to a ticket machine.

The next day we went to Yokohama the port near Tokyo. Steve was interested in seeing the new Yokohama ferry terminal. Inside it was a bit dark with large empty spaces. The outside was however pretty cool. The roof is like a huge interestingly shaped park with lawns and benches and steps where you can sit and look out to sea. We also went to visit the brightly colored and immaculately clean Yokohama China town where we had some amazing Chinese food.

During the rest of our time in Tokyo we went on an out of town trip to a town full of temples called Nikko, visited the traditional district of Asakusa to see the shops and went back to Shinjuku to get some more of the bright lights.

On our second visit to Shinjuku we discovered the pachinko halls. These are halls full of machines where people obsessively play some sort of game where large quantities of ball bearings are poured away into strange looking slot machines. The noise is absolutely deafening, the lights are garish and the prizes are useless things like biscuits and cuddly toys. We were being driven mad after only a few minutes so it can`t be the most relaxing thing to do after a long day in the office!

From Tokyo we decided to go to the small mountain town of Takayama. This involved a short ride on a shinkansen, one of Japan`s super speedy and impressive bullet trains.

Takayama itself is a very pretty town with streets of traditional wooden buildings. There are also temples and sake breweries and we looked around an old town house that used to belong to a family of merchants. Seeing the traditional Japanese buildings and interiors was really fascinating.

We had opted to stay in a ryokan (a traditional Japanese inn) which was quite an experience in itself. At the door we had to take off our shoes and change into the slippers that were provided. The room had sliding doors and was covered in Tatami (reed) mats. It was divided into two sections. One had a low table and cushions where green tea had been laid out for us to drink. In the other, futons were spread out on the floor for us to sleep on. There were also cotton kimono for us to change into. Best of all downstairs there was a large tub filled with hot water for soaking in. The atmosphere was extremely calm and relaxing. It`s difficult to believe that the ryokan and the pachinko hall were both invented by the Japanese.

After Takayama we caught a bus to Kamikochi in the Japanese Alps. The scenery was picture postcard perfect with a bridge over a pretty river and snow capped peaks in the background. In fact it looked exactly like a typical Japanese painting of mountains, possibly because this is where many of them were painted.

Proving that it isn't challenging to get off the beaten track in Japan we were the only non Japanese people in Kamikochi. In fact as we pitched our tent we became a bit of a tourist attraction with people stopping to take a good look at us and say hello.

The paths around Kamikochi were filled with Japanese people visiting the area. Lots of them were drawing, painting or photographing the landscape. With all the impressive photographic equipment on display Steve began to develop lens envy. A stand had even been set up by the river bank for those all important group shots with a mountain backdrop.

Due to the large amount of snow still up in the mountains we decided to stick to the valley floor for our hike. A short way out of Kamikochi on a footpath we were practically alone in a beautiful and wild looking mountain landscape. For a country as populated as Japan it seemed surprisingly easy to get away from it all.

At night in our tent it was absolutely freezing, so much so that even Steve was cold. The large frozen blocks of snow lying around probably should have alerted us. I decided to warm up in the morning by going for a dip in an onsen (a bathhouse). I was the only person there so I got to swim round a hot pool by myself. They even had hairdryers. By the time I got out you would hardly have known that I had been camping at all.

Our next stop was Kyoto, Japan`s original capital and home to more temples than there are churches in Rome. Kyoto is quite a strange place where the old and the new the ugly and the sublimely beautiful all mix together. The area around the station for example is a terrible town planning disaster of nasty grey blocks and horrendous traffic. The downtown is a bustling area with lots of shops and restaurants and arcades. The outskirts are filled with temples set in beautiful parks. Then there is Gion, the traditional entertainment district where you can still see geishas walking around wearing their traditional kimonos and white face make up. Not to mention the tiny winding streets and wooden houses in the area around the Yasaka Pagoda.

It would probably take weeks to see Kyoto properly. We are giving it our best shot but there are only so many temples that it is possible to visit in one day. One of our favourites so far was the Nanzenji Temple in north east Kyoto. This temple has some stunningly beautiful Japanese moss and stone gardens. The stone gardens, although designed in the 17th century, look surprisingly like modern art, with stone boulders of different shapes and sizes placed in a sea of raked gravel. Inside the temple itself there are rooms with tatami mats and intricately painted screens showing tigers and bamboo shoots and other traditional Japanese designs. Overall it felt like a very calm and peaceful place.

We plan to stay in Kyoto for a few more days before going to Hiroshima. World Cup fever doesn't really seem to have struck in Japan but we have found an English pub that will be showing the England v Paraguay match tomorrow night. We have even bought ourselves English shirts so that we look the part!