Welcome 2006, Welcome The Post-Holiday Blues

After a whirlwind two week visit to Japan I return home to England feeling rather exhausted and rather disappointed to be back in England and at work.

Here’s a brief low-down about my trip. Landing at Narita airport on the 19 December, we managed through a painstaking process and broken Japanese and English to obtain our all important Japan Rail (JR) passes, our ticket to travel throughout Japan.

We spent four days in Tokyo in a hotel called the New Koyo, a cheap and un-cheerful place. We pre-booked four nights here prior to our departure in a “Japanese style room”. You have to be there to get a real feel of the place. You can’t complain due the princely sum of £12 per night however, but the ‘double’ room was literally 6x7ft and fitted with Japanese Tatami mats on the floor instead of a bed to give that authentic Japanese feel.

One of my highlights of the four day’s, was a day trip to see some temples in a town called Nikko. It was snowing heavily with a vicious wind that gave an Antarctic blizzard feel. We caught a taxi 400 metres with an American traveller we met at the train station. We couldn’t bear the thought of walking in the cold conditions to the temple, but then reluctantly got thrown out of the taxi in the snow after our short 3min drive. I did have the benefit of wearing gloves, but they were fingerless gloves, the type that you see hobo’s wearing in the films (imagine the regret I had when I realised how cold it was). I think that this would have been sufficient to keep me warm enough though until I decided that I wanted to offer a prayer at a temple. This required me to cleanse myself from a beautiful stone carved water feature, off came the gloves to wash my hands with ice cold water. Then to top this off I realised that we had to take off our shoes to enter the temple, and felt compelled to give a monetary donation for the privilege of risking my limbs to frostbite. However complaining aside the blanket of snow around us and on the temple roof top created an absolutely beautiful scene which I imagine I will hold in my memory for some time.

Emperors Palace in Tokyo is only open two days a year. We happened to be in Tokyo for his birthday so we decided to walk around the grounds – a total let-down. I recommend going to the Imperial Palace in Kyoto instead. In the main building they have this purpose built squeaky floorboards to notify the emperors’ guards of any intruders. I was walking around in my socks ninja style trying to avoid making noise…. I would have been slaughtered.

Next stop was Kawaguchi-ko, at the foot of Mt Fuji