1. Nara and Kyoto

8 May
Leaving NZ very early in the morning, 5.40 flight to Auckland, then not too much hanging around before the 11 hour flight to Tokyo. We land about 5pm, flying in over large expanses of water, paddy fields of course. There's only a 3 hour time difference as we're travelling north a lot more than west. Exchanging our vouchers for JR Passes is relatively easy, and we're off on the Narita Express to the heart of Tokyo. Our hotel for one night is just by Tokyo Station. We walk out to eat in one of the many restaurants nearby. Getting used to the menus is going to take time but we're OK if there are pictures or the plastic food models you see so much of.Not much English spoken.

9 May
Awake far too early so we wander around the station area trying to find breakfast. End up having Japanese-style coffee and croissant. Our train to Kyoto leaves at 9am. Timetable, finding right platform etc. all seem to be working out OK.
 

The trains are large and sleek, and go pretty fast, always leaving and arriving exactly on time

 We travel on the Shinkansen Super Express around the south coast of Japan then up to Kyoto. The country is all built up with paddy fields taking up the only only green space. We change to a local train from Kyoto to Nara. Lugging cases around is a bit of a pain, so we get a taxi to Sakuraya Guesthouse.

We get a wonderful welcome from Kayoko and we leave our cases there as it's too early to check in. Kayoko recommends a great restaurant just up the road for lunch. It's our first experience of dining Japanese style on tatami mats. Luckily this restaurant has a well below the table and we manage pretty well. We are in a little individual area separated by paper panels, and we leave our shoes outside. The food is beautifully presented, with lots of little dishes: vegetable tempura, steamed veg, rice, miso, pickle, prawns, all washed down with green tea.

Sakuraya guesthouse is a traditional Japanese house built around a tiny rock garden. It is a calm tranquil place in an old part of town, which is good to wander round. The rooms all have tatami mats on which you don't walk with either shoes or slippers. There are also special toilet slippers, all rather complicated till you get the hang of it.

Looking from our room across the garden to the corridor leading to the shower and toilet

After lunch we wandered up to the Temple complex where we were accosted by Japanese schoolgirls who wanted to ask us questions and take our photographs.

Kofukuji Temple and 5 story pagoda, the temple contains a huge golden Buddha statue. There are well over a thousand semi-wild deer wandering around the area, begging tourists for food

We walk back through the long shopping street and have dinner at another good restaurant in the evening. Here there are English translations on the menu. Mike has 'Spitchcock eel that I burnt without attaching the sauce'.

10 May
Kayoko serves us a traditional Japanese breakfast which is remarkably similar to lunch and dinner. They don't seem to have any specific breakfast food. We chat to a young American coouple about the English election results, Tory landslide, most unexpected. It's a beautiful warm, sunny day and we hire bikes and peddle around Nara. The bikes are designed for the Japanese and are far too short between handle bars and saddle so it's pretty much impossible to go uphill! A lot of fun though.

First stop is Isui-en Garden, a wonderful traditional Japanese style garden with ponds and streams, little tea-houses, and old mossy paths. There are dragonflies, large butterflies, and ravens overhead making a lot of noise.

 We bike back into the city and find a great little place for lunch. Basically it's tuna or tuna, cooked or raw. Really cheap and good and served by a very sweet little Japanese couple.

Our tuna lunch spot. Best not to look too closely at the cooking area

Our next stop is the Kasuga Taisha Shrine and we bike through the huge park trying to avoid running into tourists or deer. It's pretty busy and we move quickly onto 2 quiet shrines over-looking the city and recommended by Kayoko.

Kasuga is a Shinto Shrine and they're very keen on orange. There are masses of stone lanterns lining the pathway and it's very busy with lots of tourists. The ritual is to ring the bell at the front, clap and bow twice, make your offering and pray.

Our last stop is the Harushika Sake Brewery where we arrived in late afternoon.We were expecting to be shown around the brewery but in fact it was a tasting session. We were given six different sakes, from light and dry to rich and sweet. One was cloudy, still fermenting and very fizzy. We finished off with pickles and sake icecream, and felt pretty woozy as we biked back home. A lovely day's sight-seeing. In the evening we meet Tid, the tiny Buddhist lady from Laos/America/Thailand, also staying at Sakuraya, and go out in search of Ramen and green tea icecream.

11 May
Up early and off to Kyoto for the day after fish for breakfast again. We've just missed a train and don't get in till 10.15. A second train takes us, along with a load of other tourists, to the famous Arashiyama bamboo grove. You walk through a dusky matte green light with a bamboo forest towering on either side of you, leaves and branches meeting overhead.

Bamboo grows rather like asparagus with great big fat spears poking up through the soil

It was rather beautiful and much taller than we'd imagined

At the end of the grove we walked onto the Jojakko-ji Buddhist Temple. Beautiful mossy green paths and gardens on a hillside, with temple and graveyard, and no other tourists. Alovely place to cool down. It was midday and an old man was tolling the hour on a huge bell.

It was a bit of a struggle to find somewhere for lunch and took ages but we ended up in the perfect place by the bridge and sampled the silky tofu for which Kyoto is famous. It was fresh and fragrant and very refreshing on a hot day.

Then things began to go wrong: there'd been an accident on the train lines so we had to catch a bus back to Kyoto, followed by a taxi to take us where we wanted to go, and all this took rather a long time and wew ended up with much less time to look around Kyoto than we'd hoped.

We went striaght to Nishi Hongan-ji temple, the largest wooden structure in Japan.

Nishi Hongan-ji temple is huge and very impressive. Unfortunately the garden is now private, the pillars holding up the roofs are massive carved tree trunks

Kyoto train station is equally huge and impressive in a rather differnet way

That evening Kayoko recommended another restaurant which did set banquet type meals, known as kaiseki: various steamed veg, delicious pork steaks, rice, miso, pickles, and bracken dumplings, all washed down by beer and sake. Great dinner

12 May
We said goodby to Tid over breakfast, pack up, pay our bill, and leave our stuff with Kayoko, while we go for a wander round the old street of Naramachi. We visit a mechanical toy museum, some craft shops, and drink coffee in a cat cafe.

Lots of the shops in Naramachi had these red and white silk monkeys hanging outside as a lucky charm

We went back to order a taxi and found Kayoko had been dressing up two German girls who were staying. They looked fabulous but had trouble breathing because the obi's have to so tight. We were all served green tea and Kayoko showed us the hair tortoiseshell hair combs and decorations her mother used.

Kayoko explained that unmarried women traditionally have obi's tied in fantastical shapes like this butterfly tie. It was very stiff and must have been awful to wear but looked amazing and obviously very attractive to Japanese men

We took the taxi to the Nara Backpackers. Kayoko had been unable to give us the 4 nights we wanted. It was cheap and again a traditional Japanese house with tatami mat rooms but had nothing like the style of Sakuraya Guesthouse.

We leave out cases and hire bikes again for the day but it starts to rain quite heavily and I'm biking holding a brolly like lots of other Japanese ladies.

As it gets heavier we go into the first cafe we find where there's no English spoken and no picture menus but we soon work out what's available and for around £6 have miso, pickles, rice, a veg dish with pork and bonito flakes, and tofu with poctopus and squid. All polished off with a cup of coffe made in the strangest coffee machine we've ever seen. The very kind owner comes out and wipes down our bicycle seats before we set off again.


We go to the museum and Art Gallery which are hold only traditional stuff without much info in English but good to do on a wet day.


It's raining really hard when we go out to eat. The fab tuna place has just closed and we end up in a drunken locals bar eating stuffed chicken skin. An interesting night with very drunken Japanese.