Bye, yen.

On board the Narita Express, the conductor politely informed us we had bought the wrong tickets and owed him about $8. Unfortunately I had been diligently spending money all day with the express intention of having no yen left by the time I got to the airport. We both emptied our wallets and the remaining coins added up to THE EXACT AMOUNT WE OWED. Which was lucky. Cash machines in Japan are strangely hard to locate, and it would have been impossible to find one in time to catch the next train for our flight. So we were allowed to remain on the train, and made it back to Auckland around noon the following day.
(On a plane.)

Magic Monorail to Odaiba

Odaiba is a reclaimed island in Tokyo harbour. It's sometimes described as Tokyo's playground, and is full of malls, hotels, video games, exhibition centers and even a few beaches (swimming prohibited). You get there on a futuristic monorail which loops up over the Rainbow Bridge and through Odaiba's cityscape. The monorails are driverless and if you get in quick you can sit in the front seat and live out your fantasies as a monorail engineer of the future.

The atrium at the Miraikan science museum.

Our first stop was Miraikan - the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation. On the ground floor was 'It's a Tasty World', an exhibition focused around food science. The concept of umami or 'deliciousness' was explained in detail, as was the invention and production of ramen. The floors above held permanent exhibitions about various aspects of science and technology. Most of the exhibits were interactive and had good English signage. The most fun was an interactive table you could scribble on with virtual pens and watch as your drawings came to life.

Upstairs, in a transparent bubble, I found Paro. Paro is a therapeutic robot in the form of a seal pup. He was created as a companion for elderly people living alone, with the sole purpose of being cute. I'd seen him in a documentary last year where he genuinely did seem to enhance the quality of at least one lady's life, even when other rest home residents started to question her sanity for carrying a robotic baby seal everywhere. There were holes in the bubble you could poke your hands in and pick him up. Upon doing so, he blinked his huge lashed eyes, waggled his tail and emitted a noise no real baby seal has ever produced. Immediately about eight school girls ran up squealing "Ohh kawaii!". I had to agree.

After time well spent in the museum's gift shop, Hannah came away with a box of algae shortbread and a plastic apron emblazoned with anatomically placed internal organs.

We left the museum and walked through an unexpected green space to Venus Fort, a huge Venice-themed mall. The inside of the mall has an artificial sky projected onto the ceiling that cycles through day and night as you shop, which sounds tacky but is actually quite pretty. The shops themselves were great, ranging from international chains like Zara to shops specialising in uniquely Japanese products like tabi boots and tenugui. We even found an NHK character shop selling goods from Japan's national broadcaster, including a life-size cat bus! I bought stuff.

Finally, we couldn't leave Japan without going to a cat cafe. The one we visited downstairs from Venus Fort was less of a cafe and more of a cat home where you could also order drinks. There were about 20 different cats there, and while they  obviously hadn't been selected for their thrilling personalities, they all seemed fairly happy to be stroked and patted. Most of them were sleeping in cosy spots, some were negotiating platforms that ran around the walls. Any cat feeling shy (or bitey) had the option of retiring to behind-the-scenes areas away from the public.

Tsukiji Fish Market and Surrounds

International symbol for man-pushing-fish-in-a-trolley.

The Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo is the biggest seafood market in the world. It's also a tourist destination, but as a working market it's far less touristy than most of Tokyo's other attractions. Recently workers have complained of foreign tourists turning up 4am after a night drinking, joy riding on the fish-mobiles, interfering with the seafood and generally being annoying. Sadly we turned up too late to take part, but spent some time wandering around the small city of food stalls.

 

Winterised tree in Hamarikyu

Just down the road was Hamarikyu, a former duck hunting grounds and imperial garden. It is beautifully landscaped and many of the older trees have protective structures to support branches or prevent snow damage. Across a crooked bridge in the middle of a pond was a small tea house. We sat on tatami mats and looked out over the water. The frothy green tea came with a detailed instruction sheet outlining correct tea drinking etiquette. I lost track after step four but as we were the only people there I think it was ok.

Handsome Japanese ducks.

For hundreds of years the park was used by local shoguns as a sort of vast duck catching machine. The islands were originally created for ducks to safely nest and raise their young. Dozens of high-banked blind channels were dug leading off the ponds, and, using rice, tame decoy ducks were trained to swim up the channels on cue. The wild ducks that followed them were caught in nets by hunters hiding on the banks. So many ducks were caught this way, a stone memorial was erected to "comfort and console the spirits of the ducks". We found it down a dark path near the remnant channels. I felt sorry for the ducks but couldn't help but admire the ingenuity of the system that worked so effectively for 300 years.

The Sumida River borders one side of the gardens. This is the main river that runs through Tokyo, and is probably about the same size as the Thames. Unlike the Thames, it's not a particularly beautiful river, and there's not a lot to see once you are on it. The tourist boats that run up and down are a good way of getting from place to place, though. We caught one back to Asakusa.

A Selection of Hot and Cold Drinks

February is midwinter in Japan, and I quickly became a fan of the kafe moka, or Japanese mochaccino. Every one I had was hot, milky and delicious. In fact all the coffee in Japan was so good I started ordering outside of my usually mocha-centric coffee zone. The Tokyo-style milk coffee at Drip Mania at Nippori station was my favourite. I also really liked the photo-based menu and constantly smiling staff who were extremely tolerant of my useless Japanese language skills. And the fact it was called Drip Mania.

Nana's Green Tea is a national chain of specialty tea houses. Their extensive menu - also thankfully picture based - comprises a vast selection of hot and cold drinks and desserts based around traditional Japanese flavours. The towering parfait I ordered in a Kanda branch comprised layers of coffee jelly, vanilla ice cream, red bean paste, black seasame ice cream, nuts, green tea sponge cake and...cornflakes. More seasonally appropriate was Hannah's small bowl of sweet red bean soup, complete with three little mochi balls bobbing around on top.

In Shibuya, I was compelled to visit the Starbucks which overlooks the huge scramble crossing outside the station. Spring had officially started a few days ago, and this was heralded by the new seasonal range of sakura flavoured drinks and cakes. I admire Starbucks' effort to tailor their products to the local market, but the pale pink sakura frapuccino and macaron were much prettier than they were tasty. I'm still not convinced sakura is actually a flavour - are cherry blossoms even edible?

Also worth mentioning was the Hokkaido Milk shop at Sapporo station. It basically just sold small glass bottles of milk to drink on the train. It was a bit difficult to distinguish between the different types but mine turned out to be coffee flavoured, which was nice.

What is it?!

In the middle of a huge mall in Ikebukuro is Namjatown, a sort of indoor theme park based around food. Namja apparently means "What is it?", which pretty much sums up the three floors of food-related insanity. The park is split into several different areas comprising Ice Cream City, Gyoza Stadium and Tokyo Dessert Republic. Each area includes a number of shops, food stalls, carnival-style rides and general strangeness.

Namjatown's atmosphere is chaotic, noisy and frequently bizarre. Entering Ice Cream City, we encountered banks and banks of freezers containing small pottles of ice cream with flavours spanning the range of animal (beef), vegetable (wasabi) and mineral (charcoal).  I got a pumpkin flavoured one while Hannah had buttered potato. They genuinely did taste like sweet pumpkin and potato, and were delicious!

Next door, we sampled gyozas (dumplings) from different regions of Japan, and lined up for what was described on the map as the 'Pig Riding Shooting Game'. This involved riding along in a giant insect-repelling pig and shooting mosquitoes with lasers. I'm not sure how this related to gyozas, but it was specially marked as one of the few rides that is suitable for non-Japanese speakers. We ignored this at our peril when we tried to use the 'Cat Subway', which turned out to require high levels of Japanese-as-spoken-by-a-cat comprehension, and from which we escaped out the back door after several minutes of utter bafflement.

Namjatown is run by a video games company, so I felt obliged to play at least one of the ever-present machines. The best by far turned out to be the taiko drumming game, which was a bit like Guitar Hero but more violent.

Harvesting creme puffs from Namjatown's remnant creme puff forest.

Drawn by the photos of cat-shaped curry rice, we stopped at the Miracle Fruits Cafe. After some study of the menu and walls, Hannah surmised that the Miracle Fruit was an actual item on the menu that when chewed, made sour flavours taste sweet. This went a long way towards explaining the glass of what appeared to be straight lemon juice she had just been served. We ordered two of the small freeze-dried berries and ate them in the prescribed way. And amazingly, the previously undrinkable beverage became sweet and tasty! The effect was slightly unnerving, but wore off after a few minutes and did not affect my enjoyment of my cat-shaped curry rice.

The fourth area was the Healing Forest, a retreat for stressed parents and overstimulated children. Various sorts of massages and calming treatments were on offer, including an array of coin-operated machines. Inserting my feet into two cosy boots and a coin into the slot, I received a 'reflexology treatment' via several rows of blunt rods rhythmically poking into my feet. Slightly more alarming was the 'shiatsu chair', which appeared to have some sort of invisible knobbly roller incorporated into the back rest. I emerged grateful for the break from the constant noise, if not so much the mechanised relaxation experience.

Once we had found our way out of Namjatown, there was a bit of time to look around the surrounding mall, Sunshine City. One of the best shops was FrancFranc, a homeware/design store selling all sorts of pretty, funny and useful things. I purchased an assortment of treasures, including a tiny squishy pudding that, when squished, says 'pudding!' in a gleeful manner. Outside the mall we ducked into Tokyu Hands. Like all Japan's department stores, it would have been easy to spend half a day in there, but it was near closing time and we barely made it past the 'hilarious gadgets' aisle before being politely encouraged to leave.

Studio Ghibli Museum

Studio Ghibli is the company behind some of Japan's most popular and beloved animated films. The associated museum is so ridiculously popular I was advised to buy tickets several months before even arriving in the country.

When we got there it became apparent why this was necessary. We joined on to a mass of people at the entrance and crawled through the exhibitions with hundreds of other fans. The small building contained several beautifully crafted displays about the history of the studio and animation techniques, but the sheer number of people was frustrating and slightly alarming. Then everyone disappeared and we watched a short film about sumo mice. The highlight of the museum was a furry life-sized model of the cat-bus - a character from one of the studio's most famous films 'My Neighbour Totoro'. (It's a cat that's a bus.) Children were encouraged to climb inside and hurl plush anthropomorphised dust balls at each other. I wasn't allowed to. I found this mildly discriminatory.

(For more about the cat-bus, visit Studio Ghibli's official explanatory page, 'Poof, Boing! The Cat Bus!'.)

Ueno Park

While Hannah went to visit her former language students, I emerged from Ueno station with a one day Tokyo Metro ticket and a list of Tokyo shopping districts I wanted to visit. Ueono Park is a massive green space in the middle of Tokyo. It contains several museums and galleries, a temple, a zoo and a large wetland area. Swimming around the reed beds were lots of different species of handsome northern hemisphere duck. I also saw lots of sausage dogs going for their morning walks, each one kitted out in a doggy jumper.  It was too early for the galleries so I wandered around for a while before setting off on my shopping mission.

Benten temple rising from the reeds at Ueno Park

The Bemusing Shopping Districts of Tokyo

I found my way to Akihabara, Tokyo's electronics district. Every guidebook describes this as the place to buy the latest up-to-the-minute gadgets, but my poor understanding of Japanese and electronics in general made things difficult. Large portions of shop floor were dedicated to Japanese cell phones, a technology so far ahead of every other country, anything I bought would have been useless back in New Zealand (except maybe the sparkly keypad stickers). The biggest stores had 11 or 12 levels packed full of everything from GPS devices to kitchen appliances to gaming equipment. With no English signage it was pretty much impossible to locate the headphones I had come to shop for, and I left bewildered.

The book district was also quite confusing. I wanted to get reading material for the flight home, preferably in English. For such an international city as Tokyo, this proved surprisingly difficult. My Lonely Planet guide directed me to a several mega-stores, obviously Japanese equivalent of Borders, but I was utterly unsuccessful in finding any English language books that weren't tourist guides. The last shop I tried specialised in second hand non-fiction foreign language books, and was full of foreign tourists obviously on a similar mission to my own. In a dark corner I discovered the English fiction shelf and a disintegrating P G Wodehouse novel, which I quickly grabbed. If anyone is thinking about setting up shop in Tokyo, I would recommend starting an English language bookstore. It would be a thriving business.

Plastic meals in Kappabashi doori.

My final destination was Kappabashi doori, the kitchenware district. Many tourists come here just to visit the slightly bizarre 'plastic food' shops, of which there is an impressive number. Plastic food is used as a sort of visual menu in most Japanese cafes and restaurants, and everything from udon noodles from hamburgers to tikka masala is realistically represented. It's skillfully crafted and not cheap - I paid around NZ$60 for two circular tangles of soba noodles. Besides plastic food, there are countless shops selling everything you might need to run a restaurant except the (real) food. Any kitchen gadget you can imagine is available, as well as bulk quantities of takeaway containers, tableware, coffee roasting equipment, furniture, interior decor and endless shelves of Japanese lacquerware and porcelain. After a few hours the shops started closing but it was a truly interesting place.

Obligatory Asakusa trip

Sensoji in Asakusa is Tokyo's largest temple, and pretty much obligatory for all visitors. It is huge and crammed with worshippers, tourists and trinkets.  Last time I was there, I picked 'The Best Fortune' from a canister full of omikuji or fortune sticks inside the temple. Later, I was slightly disappointed to learn this wasn't actually the preferred fortune, as it implies that from that point things can only go downhill. This time I picked 'The Good Fortune', which contained a series of reassuring-sounding predictions such as 'The patient will get well. Marriage, employment and starting a trip are all right'. So, that's good to know. If you get a bad fortune, there's a rack full of other unwanted fortunes you can tie it to. By leaving it at the temple it apparently no longer applies to you, and the bad luck is dissipated by the resident deity.

Unless you are visiting shrines and temples with someone who knows what's going on, none of this is really obvious. For anyone going to Japan for the first time I would recommend reading a shrine guide before you go.

As a very old neighbourhood, Asakusa is filled with countless smaller shrines and historic places. Down a side street in a small walled courtyard we found Chingodo Shrine, dedicated to one of Japan's cutest native animals, the tanuki. Tanuki look a bit like a glossy, brown badger and play a surprisingly large role in Japanese folklore. We learnt that the shrine was built "to stop the escapades of tanukis which had started to bewitch the people of Asakusa". And that according to legend, "these creatures regretted all the tricks they had played on people and  twelve of them trained to become gankake-tanuki, or wish-granting raccoon dogs"!

Dominating the shrine was a statue of Jizo, guardian of unborn children. We saw Jizo-and-baby statues throughout Japan. Each one had a red knitted bib or small pot of water at its feet. According to Japanese mythology, when children die before their parents their souls are prevented from entering the afterlife. Instead, they are sentenced to pile stones eternally. Jizo protects them from this fate by hiding them in his robes. The gifts are put there by grieving parents in the hope that Jizo will look after their child's soul.

Down the road, we found lunch. Mos Burger is a Japanese hamburger chain with a slightly unappealing name. Although most of their products look like fairly standard western burgers, there is also a line of 'rice burgers' with fried rice patties instead of buns. Mine featured a tempura disc of vegetables and seafood, and was delicious!

Later in the day we relocated to a non-capsular hotel. Our new place was another ryokan in the suburbs near Ueno. The walk from the train station took us through a series of narrow, old-fashioned streets full of businessmen cycling home and tidy rows of pot plants lined up against the walls of houses. We looked out for friendly stump-tailed cats in the local graveyard and stocked up on essentials at a 100 yen shop. My purchase of the day was a smiley dish sponge.

Kamakura in a Rickshaw

Downtown Tokyo, especially Asakusa, is a little overwhelming. Wanting to make the most of our rail passes before they expired, we travelled outside of Tokyo for the day. Kamakura is a small pretty town and one of Japan's seemingly multitudinous former capitals. We made the last leg of the journey on the Enoshima Electric Railway, a historic railway that looks more like a 1930s streetcar than a train, and emerged into a busy shopping street.

Almost immediately we were approached by a friendly rickshaw driver. I mentioned we were looking for tempura and he offered to take us on a scenic tour ending up at a tempura restaurant. Although until that moment I had always thought the whole idea of tourist rickshaws was a bit silly, being hand-delivered to somewhere we might otherwise spend hours looking for seemed like a great idea. The vehicle itself was a thing of beauty: wooden framed with shiny leather tyres, a nifty retractable rain hood and inexplicably heated seats. Fuji, our driver, wore tall boots with separate toes. And a cape. Along the way he gave an interesting running commentary about the town's history. We zipped through the back streets, crossing railway lines and passing by temples, ending up at the promised tempura restaurant. The tempura was delicious.

Kamakura is famed for its Big Buddha statue. Hannah had been here on a previous occasion and was keen to revisit because 'you can see his brains'. On arrival, I found that you can indeed go right inside the enormous statue and view his hairstyle from the inside (somewhat resembling brains). From inside, you can also see the joins in the massive bronze plates used in the construction. I still can't quite get my head around the fact that such a huge, intricate and well-preserved structure was built over 700 years ago.

This picture utterly fails to convey the size of the Big Buddha.

I Sleep in a Capsule

By that evening we were in Tokyo. Having arrived a day early, we checked in to the 'ladies' floor of a capsule hotel in Asakusa, the central tourist district in Tokyo. You do this by feeding notes into a vending machine in the lobby in exchange for a coupon. You then give the coupon to the receptionist who is standing about two meters away from you behind the the front desk. The sleeping capsules are stacked one on top of the other, and were larger than I’d expected. Once inside, even an outsized foreigner has enough room to kneel or lie comfortably. There’s a small TV attached to the low ceiling and a blind you can pull at the one end for privacy. Most of the other capsules were unoccupied that night, and I slept better than I have in most backpacker dorms.

Enforced Sightseeing in Hakodate

Sapporo is a new town and not much of a tourist hotspot, and at the end of the festival we immediately ran out of things to do. We had meant to go and see the dancing cranes (of origami fame) in a national park north of Sapporo, but a national holiday disrupted our plans. After briefly considering a trip to Lake Akan - famed for its spherical, much anthropomorphised algae balls - we caught the train back towards Tokyo, stopping off for a night in the small fishing town of Hakodate.

Happy tram.

 

 On our way to the hotel, Hannah spotted a tram with her inexplicable hero, Commodore Perry, emblazoned on the side. It turns out Hakodate was the second place the American officer visited with his four black ships when Japan was ‘opened up’ to the outside world in the 1850s. The people of Hakodate have embraced this as a tourist focus, possibly because there is not a lot else to do there. This apparently necessitated us going on a bracing walk early the next morning to hunt out tourist destinations like ‘the original site of Commodore Perry’s meeting house’ and ‘foreigner’s gravestones’. It was freezing and I kept warm by making use of every hot drink machine we encountered. These appear every 100m or so along every street in Japan, and sell a variety of drinks – cold in summer and hot in winter. Apparently the most reliable way of judging when winter has started in Japan is the day the machines start stocking hot drinks. My constant favourite was hot coffee in a tin, but by the end of the walk I’d also consumed an 'Amino Acid Replacement' drink and something called ‘Tea-spresso’, which may or may not have been tea and coffee mixed together.

Hakodate railway bento.

Sapporo Snow Festival

We had come to see the annual snow festival, which was happening in several different locations around the city. Waku-Waku Tappy Land was at the top of my itinerary, mostly because of its ridiculously jolly sounding name, but also because my brochure claimed ice slides and hot drinks were involved. I pictured massive chutes wending their way through the streets, full of screaming riders whizzing past at speed. The reality was a little less thrilling, but fortunately by this stage I had already discovered how great the coffee in Japan is. I sipped my kafe-moka and watched small children slowly descending tiny ice slides into the arms of Waku-Waku staff members stationed at the end of each slope. The smallest children tended to run out of momentum halfway down the slide, and were gently shoved along for the remainder of the ride by the staff. Possibly the tamest snowsport ever, but one of the most charming.

The main part of the festival was a series of snow and ice sculptures in the middle of town, spanning seven or eight city blocks. In between the sculptures were vendors selling wintery festival food. I ate: toasted rice balls, seafood ramen, taiyaki (a custard-filled waffle in the shape of a fish), a tasty pork bun in the likeness of a piggy, oden (fish-based soup full of unidentifiable goodies) and an octopus leg on a stick. The last one was about as appealing as it sounds, but everything else was genuinely delicious.

The snow sculptures themselves were at their best at night time, when they were lit beautifully. The overriding theme seemed to be ‘German architecture’, of which there were several almost life-sized replicas. Further along was a series of smaller scale models, mostly comprising either cute Japanese cartoon characters (made by local groups) or mermaids/eagles/assorted mythological figures (made by foreigners). New Zealand’s entry depicted Maui wrestling desperately with a hideous serpent-like taniwha. Next door was a happy cartoon bento (lunchbox), each component smiling merrily as a snowy hand reached for the first riceball.

On a Sleeping Train to Hokkaido

The next day we caught a sleeping train to Sapporo in Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan. Although it’s a relatively new service, the train could easily pass as a recently restored Orient Express-style train from the 1920s. Our little compartment comprised two seats and two bunks, one of which descended from the ceiling at the push of a button. We watched as the scenery outside became whiter and whiter. Occasionally a staff member would come in and try to explain how to operate the heating system, or ask us about dinner reservations in the train’s ‘French Restaurant’ carriage. I fell asleep as soon as it got dark and woke the following day in Sapporo.

 

Kiyomizu Temple

Kiyomizu Temple is a much less Zen experience than the Silver Pavillion. A narrow street called Teapot Lane leads up to the temple’s gates and is lined with shops selling noodles, freshly-baked rice crackers and every sort of Kyoto souvenir you could imagine.  Down a sidestreet I posted ¥150 into a god-vending machine and received a small ceramic Jizo in the shape of a cartoon cat. (Jizo is a Buddhist god who protects children and travellers.)

The temple itself is set into the side of a hill and looks out over Kyoto city. The day we were there it was full of worshippers and sightseers. A quick walk down the hill took us to a place where people were catching water falling from above in long-handled dippers. Each stream is said to bestow different beneficial qualities on the drinkers. Hannah drank from the 'handsome' stream but was sadly not visibly improved by doing so. Maybe it's a delayed action thing.

A small shrine within the temple offers an astonishing array of methods for supplicating the gods.  Incense, wooden tablets and good luck charms are available for nearly any imaginable cause including road safety and good exam results. I was tempted by a boar-shaped road safety charm. The connection here is that if a car and boar collide (evidently a common occurrence in Japan), the car always comes off second best. Not being a driver, I wasn't sure of its efficacy on bicycles. Instead, I wrote my problems on a man-shaped piece of rice paper, dropped it into a bucket of water and watched happily as it dissolved into nothing.

Cha soba noodles from a noodle shop on Teapot Lane

Looking for Sloths in Osaka

The nearby city of Osaka is a sort of antithesis to Kyoto. It's a big, modern and fairly soulless place where we went hoping to see sloths. The sloths apparently lived in an aquarium on the waterfront. Sadly they were either feeling shy or off display, but we were amazed by the rest of the massive, multi-level aquarium. You enter slightly above street level and descend in a spiral around a series of enormous multi-story tanks. The display is divided into various geographical zones, and we were intriged to find ourselves passing through the 'Cook Strait Zone' at one stage (sadly, it had nothing on 'Jellyfish Land'). The prize for most unlikely cuteness goes to the aquarium's resident whale shark, apparently the world's largest fish species. Unexpectedly for a shark, it's a filter feeder, and was constantly on the move and vacuuming the water with its huge, toothless mouth. It is, without question, the least terrifying shark imaginable. My attempts at whale shark photography were foiled by low light levels but it was well-represented in the aquarium's gift shop, where I picked up a microfibre cloth bearings its likeness. Also present in the aquarium (and gift shop) were capybaras - who knew THEY were semi-aquatic?

Failed attempt at whale-shark photography.

The Philosopher's Path to Inexplicable Snacks

Kyoto is full of shrines, temples and tourists, even in midwinter. According to Hannah, Japanese people come here with the express intention of visiting as many shrines and temples as possible before shrine-fatigue sets in. It's an ancient city and there are pieces of history everywhere from small shrines on downtown corners to the many World Heritage sites in the area.

Raked gravel garden at the Silver Pavillion.

We set off for the Silver Pavillion, a Zen temple at the base of the foothills that surround the city. To get there, we followed the Philosopher's Path, a narrow canal-side walkway tucked away in Kyoto's backstreets. After the first 15 minutes or so, it became obvious this walk was probably best done in spring when the cherry trees that lined the path were in bloom. Even so, there were welcoming tea or noodle shops on nearly every corner. Every now and then we encountered a shop full of cat-related art or floating glass baubles. At the end of the path was a man selling what I can still only describe as 'hot food items'. Each looked tasty yet was utterly unidentifiable. I bought a sort of dark brown rectangular prism, which turned out to be a warm baked brick full of sweet potato, and was delicious.

The Silver Pavillion is an ancient Buddhist temple set in gardens of the type every sister-city Japanese garden in New Zealand is trying to imitate. Even in the middle of winter they are beautiful. I especially loved the glowing green moss gardens, which have been carefully cultivated by the resident monks for more than a thousand years. Every now and then you noticed a monk gathering fallen leaves with a bamboo rake or tending to one of the winterised trees, using the same techniques that have been used for centuries.

 Admiring the multi-level moss gardens at the Silver Pavillion.

Plane plane

We landed in Osaka just as it was getting dark. The tickets I’d booked with JetStar six months ago had been so cheap as to be mildly worrying, but the 11 hour flight was much more tolerable than I’d feared. It was no-frills flying, but a few extra dollars got us hand held ‘entertainment devices', which were like DVD players but with built-in, slightly random content. Unfortunately, our carry-on picnic ran out several hours into the flight. It’s surprising how much you can eat when there’s nothing else to distract you but the hilariously dated ‘Wonderwoman: The Motion Picture’ (1975).

Before we left Kansai airport we had to claim the JR rail passes I had organised months earlier in Auckland. These are a big deal in Japan, and allowed us almost unlimited access to the mighty Japanese rail system for the next week. It took nearly an hour and an extremely patient railway clerk, but we eventually emerged with our precious holographic passes. On the platform, waiting for the express train to Kyoto, it started snowing.

Hannah using every free amenity she can get her hands on at the ryokan.

We stayed at the Ryokan Shimizu in central Kyoto. It had the requisite futons, yukata and baths of a traditional Japanese inn. The staff were nice too - they gave us hand warmers when we went outside and brought warm lemon tea to our room when we returned.