My brief visit to Japan’s South Island over, it was time to hit the train tracks and take the Shinkansen up to Tokyo. This time, I got to travel on 3 different shinkansens.

The journey itself took about 5 hours.

The insides of the train are similar to a coach bus. The cushiony seats are reclinable, there’s plenty of leg room (even for me) and you can put stuff above you.  They have different configurations, 2-2seats and 2-3 seats.

The scenery and views on the journey was an interesting glimpse into Japan.

Within an hour, we were in snowfields, and I was sooo tempted to get off the train just to play around in it.

Japan is pretty mountainous, which makes for amazing scenes and contrasts.

The ‘scenery’ highlight on the train ride was definitely seeing this mountain.

Mount Fuji. Pretty slick eh.

Tokyo station was a seething mass of people, however it is under massive construction, due to be finished in 2010 or 2012, so wasn’t really that picture worthy. There are lots of random scultuptures and such around though.

This is the “Peace Clock”. Not sure what about it represents peace, but there you have it. It should also be noted that Tokyo is a candidate city for the 2016 Olympic Games.

After checking into our super-tiny hotel room, we decided to try something fun and go restaurant hopping for dinner.

The aim was for a round of drinks and small dishes at each one. Sake was at the first restaurant.

I guess it’s getting a bit old me showing all these photos of food, so I’ll “select” a few from the second restaurant. Scallops anyone?

Or how about a yoghurt-ish shaka shaka drink?

At a lot of restaurants (ones I saw anyway), after the 25th of December, they raise their prices in anticipation of New Years. So it wasn’t as cheap as it could have been. As a result, we decided to raid 7/11 and take the party back home.

My best friend Haagen-dazs was there as well. I’ve only ever had Haagen-Dazs when I was in China, and afaik, it’s not available in Sydney. Heaven knows why. I mean, we have TWO lindt cafes! Why not Haagen-Dazs.

This post is being cut a little short, in order to meet publishing deadlines, (and because I want to sleep now.) (And if you didn’t realise, that was my birthday dinner above =p)

So I’ll leave you with this little gem I found on the Tokyo subway.

Juicy Tokyo photos and more tomorrow!

Stay Tuned~

Prepare to scale heights, plunge into the anime world of Akihabara, view the awesome food I’ve eaten, and more. The picto-blog will take you on a journey to experience a slice of Japan.

The journey began on a clear, yet cold, Christmas Day, catching a Shinkansen to Mount Aso. This was the FIRST time I’ve been on a shinkansen, and it didn’t disappoint.

Smiling me. I went from Hiroshima to Hakata to Kumamoto to Mount Aso.

There are lots of different types of Shinkansens. Hikari, Kodama, Nozumi, Ariake. They use different trains and have different speeds (both train and number of stops wise). Kodama is the slowest, and Nozumi is the fastest. Ariake is specific to Kyushuu (I believe). This is the Ariake. Kind looks like a prison train to me.

The Ariake is a pretty funky train. It’s very compartmentalised, this is the compartment I was in. You can also see that the overhead storage is like that of a plane. Swanky eh.

On Japanese trains and buses, you’re not meant to talk on your mobile. You will see lots and lots of people sms-ing, playing games, reading ebooks etc, but if your phone rings, everyone will glare at you, and sometimes the conductor will even put an announcement asking you to switch your phone to silent and not talk on the train. On Shinkansen’s, you have to go into the corridor sections, or use special compartments like this one below.

I spent something like 5 hours travelling from Hiroshima to Mount Aso, by three Shinkansen’s, two trains and a bus. I won’t bore you with my scenery shots, but this shot was taken at 10x zoom, and I thought was pretty cool. Wind power ftw!

Now we come to the Mount Aso volcano caldera area.

It’s the largest active caldera in the world. The last major blast was in 1993, but there have been explosions over the past 300 000 years. The crater has a 128km circumference.

I actually didn’t go up to the crater (they run a cable car up to it), but stopped 5 minutes away at the Museum/Observatory. When I got there, I saw a neighbouring hill behind the complex, and spied a path at the top of it. I thought it would be a great place to get an awesome view of the crater.

Zoom on a camera ftw. This is a zoomed-in picture taken of the path from the mountain in the picture aove that I saw from the complex.

There were busloads of tourists, chinese, japanese and korean, but avoiding them, I struck out on a path heading in a likely direction. After a few ups and downs and lefts and rights, I came to a crossroad, and naturally, chose the road less travelled (or most weathered).

It wasn’t easy, both the path and the weather.

It was blowing a GALE the higher I got. I was almost knocked down several times, and when it got REALLY bad, I actually had to lie on the ground, to be shielded partially from the wind by the grass. ==” Did I mention it was COLD? There was no snow, but there was ice around.

Even though I was freezing, the view from the top was simply spectacular, and worth every step.

Pictures are worth a thousand words.

And this one is prob worth two thousand. The wind was SO strong, not to mention I was looking into the sun.

It was amazing. I called this post “peek climbing”, because I was climbing another mountain to “peek” at the Mount Aso volcano. After getting off the mountain, I made the trek back to Kumamoto, and went to defrost in the hotel bath.

Tomorrow’s blog post will cover my adventures in Kumamoto City, then following blogs will adventure to sushi train, Tokyo and my growing anime collection.

Stay tuned!

We took the “Setouchi Marine View” train, and paid extra to stay in the first class carriage. The train had two carriages, the normal and the first class. Everyone else was crammed in the normal carriage, and we had the first class to ourselves, which was fun. What was even more fun was the fact there was a glass door between the carriages, so they kept looking at us having fun.

The carriage had a very marine “cabin” feel to it, as the pictures can attest to.

We ate crunchie bars and onigiri for lunch on the train. Apparently there was meant to be a host-lady who served tea and offered biscuits and stuff, but she wasn’t in sight.

The train runs along the sealine, and some of the views are really amazing. I’m sure given some nice sun angles, some really spectacular photos could be gotten.

Being next to the water, there are a lot of ports and ships going in and out. This massive frame sticks out like…massively.

Travelling first class in the “cabin” had to merit some port window photos.

We slept in a traditional Japanese manner, which was actually pretty comfortable, and in a traditional japanese room. We normally sleep on beds at home (except for the brother who uses a tatami mat.)

We went to a Japanese Chinese restaurant, and that is something I’m not going to do again in a hurry. No offence, but the food wasn’t that great (or maybe it was the restaurant, but still…). I’ll stick to eating the oishii Japanese food =D

After that, I simply HAD to try the batting centre. We don’t have such places in Sydney (as far as I know), and baseball itself isn’t that popular in Australia. It was fun, and I’m sure with a few more pointers (and the machine getting recalibrated, quite a few shots either went wide or nearly took me out in the stomach) I’d be a lot better.

And now for the random toilet picture. This funky thing had the soap/water and drier all in one thing, in the three different steps you can see. It measured about 30cm long and saves a lot of space!

This place was next to the batting center and immediately I thought of the Simpsons and McDonalds. Word on the street is that Mo’s Burgers are pretty tasty, so I’ll have to try them out sometime.

It was only an overnight stay in Fukuyama, but the train ride, seeing Auntie and batting center were pretty awesome.