It's all over

We are leaving Tokyo tomorrow. Iﾕm quite excited about getting home but I donﾕt want to leave Japan! We are watching the Sumo wrestling on TV at the moment in our tiniest of tiny hostels. We are in a room about the size of an average bathroom with 8 other people. We are stacked three high on bunk beds (well, shelves) and there isnﾕt a whole lot of room on the floor! We have a tiny tiny common room between three rooms in which there is almost room for 5 people if 3 of you are standing up. However, it is the cheapest place in the whole of Tokyo and the owners are lovely. They make breakfast for everybody every morning (a kind of creamy delicious noodles with bacon and potato).

Sincewe have been in Tokyo we have explored a different area everyday. We have been to Akihabara where there are hundreds of electronics shops and also lots of manga and anime shops. It is fascinating in the evening with the bright lights and the people everywhere. On St. Patricks day, we tried to go to the off license with some people from the hostel to find some Shochu (a Japanese spirit) to celebrate. We found a shop and when we were in there, we met a drunk lady who made us try some ginger marinated in soy sauce. It wasnﾕt as bad as it sounds but then she started telling us off for not being able to speak Japanese. Oops.

We spent a day being cultural when we went to the Imperial Palace gardens and a big temple in Asakusa. The gardens were nice but as it is almost but not quite cherry blossom time, they werenﾕt at their peak. The temple in Asakusa was great fun. We got to the entrance and to get up to the main temple you walk down a street full to the brim of shops selling all sorts of food and souvenirs and hundreds of people walking down it. We heard some drumming so we followed the sound and came across a woman with a monkey on a string who was doing tricks and generally entertaining the crowd. It was slightly odd. After a while we heard some more drumming and found a dancing golden dragon in a procession. It started with small boys in male Kimonos followed by a cart of traditionally dressed ladies playing flutes followed by men drumming followed by the dragon. A lady told me to touch the dragon for good luck and when I went to do so, the man holding part of it up let me have a go. It was really really heavy and he grabbed it back because they were about to do a dance with it.

On Sunday we visited the trendy areas of town, Shubuya and Harajuku. Shibuyu is the busiest train station in the world apparently ﾐ 2 million people go through it every day. The road crossing outside the station is absolutely mental with so many people running all over the place and a load of people on bikes trying to get through as well. So many people ride bikes here- on the pavement and really fast. We havenﾕt been hit yet but have had a good few close calls. We did see a man on a bike get hit by a car though which wasnﾕt nice. He was OK though.

In Harajuku we went to the bridge where, on Sundays, lots of teenage girls dress up and go and sit and have their photos taken by gawking tourists. The outfits are mainly gothic costumes but also some really brightly coloured ones, some in French maids outfits, some adapted kimonos. We took loads of photos. We wandered down the main shopping street in Harakuku and is exactly what Camden ought to be like. Cooler clothes, better bits and bobs and no one trying to sell you drugs.

Yesterday we ventured further out of central Tokyo to a place called Nishi-Ogikubo. It is the antiques/arts and crafts area of Tokyo and although a lot of places didnﾕt open until after lunch, we managed to find a great Sake set for a good price. More of a junk shop than an antique shop but that suits us (and our budget) just fine.

We spent yesterday evening out in town with a guy from the hostel. We went to a bar called the 300yen bar. Surprisingly enough, all the drinks there are 300yen (about 1.50) and you can have all sorts of cocktails from a list of about 50 different ones. We tried a few and made lots of Japanese friends who thought we were exotic and wanted to come and talk to us! It was really good fun.

Today we have just wandered around a bit and not done too much as I have got a really sore throat. I managed to ask the woman in the chemist if I had the right medicine for a sore throat (with the help of the phrase book of course) so I was very proud. We walked around a big park in Ueno, Central Tokyo, and we went for a ride on the swan boats to celebrate the public holiday. Not sure what the public holiday is for but there are lots of families around taking photos of the cherry blossom.

See you all soon.

Kyoto

We got the Shinkansen (bullet train) from Osaka to Kyoto and it took a greand total of 17 minutes! The hostel we are staying in is ace. The guy who owns it had travelled all around the world on his motorbike and thought he would try and make it a bit easier for foreigners in Japan and it:s definately working.. Lots of tea and coffe and curtains around your bed and kimonos to try on and a beer machine! The fridge talks to you and tells you off if you leave the door open and the hot water pot sings a song when it:s boiled. I keep thinking I am used to this country but a good few times a day I spot something that makes me wonder why not every country works like this..

We visited a shrine to Inari, the Shinto goddess of Rice. People go there, pray to the gods and then go to the souvenir shops inside the temple to buy treats. Some of the shops have been there for generations! There is a walkway right up to the top of the hill behind the shrine which is lined with hundreds and hundreds of orange gates. People (often companies as they are quite expensive) pay for them in order to receive good luck in their trade. We didn:t even make it half way up the hill as there were so many!

The evening we got to Kyoto we met a few people in the hostel and we all decided to go out for a drink. We walked for miles and could hardly find anything.. We found one bar which was down some stairs and we all went in to find the smallest bar I:ve ever seen. We got our drinks (only Heineken or Sake available) and noticed a vending machine with 'Variety goods' inside so we asked what was in there and the barmaid told us "sexy goods!" Of course we wanted to know if you really could get knickers from a vending machine but 1000yen seemed like a lot of money to find out so we didn:t. The barmaid seemed to have formed an impression of us though because she proceeded to pull out some "sexy DVDS" and put them on. We left pretty soon after.

The best thing we have done in Japan so far is go to the Sumo! There happens to be a tournament on in Osaka at the moment and as it only takes (exactly) 17 minutes to get back there we decided to go. We got the cheapest tickets which mean you don:t have a seat but you can sit wherever you like until whoever the seat belongs to turns up and you have to move. We spent most of the afternoon sat right near the front where we had an excellent view of the Dohyu (the ring) and all the wrestlers. We were sitting next to a group of old ladies who kept smiling at us a lot and pointing out their favourite wrestlers and getting us to clap for the right ones. They gave us a bag of food (which you can order if you:ve paid for the posh seats) full of Japanese treats - rice balls, chestnuts, sesame pancake sticks, unidentifiable vegetables etc. It was great! They also gave us a programme so we could match up who was wrestling to who was in the book. Before each rank of wrestlers comes out, they have a ceremony where they all come out at once and have their huge aprons on, each one is worth a lot of money so only the highest paid wrestlers have them. We got kicked out of our seat just as the highest ranks were coming out and we happened to be in the aisle as the HUGE guys came past us. It was a little bit scary but really cool to see them so close. Lots of people were trying to touch them and things cos they are really really famous. The Yokozuna (top wrestler) came right by us with his huge heavy belt on for his ceremony. We stayed to watch every match right up to the Yokozuna (each match only takes about 5 minutes) and when he won it all the crowd went mental and started throwing their cushions at the loser. I never thought Sumo could be so much fun!

Yesterday we went to Hiroshima (only 2 hours on the Shinkansen, 6 hours on regular trains!) for the day. The A-bomb dome was very imposing. While we standing in the peace park looking at it an old lady came up to us and asked us (She had a piece of card with it written in all different languages) if she could pray for us. We said sure why not and she did, then she told us that our blood had been purified. Which was nice.

The Peace Memorial Museum was very interesting and really sad in places. It was quite draining seeing all the artifacts and pictures drawn by survivors. The main theme was that nuclear mustn:t be in existance at all. The mayor of Hiroshima writes to every country that conducts tests every single time and urges them not to continue. Outside of the museum, Hiroshima is a lovely city. It is a much more manageable size (about a million people) and has a really nice atmosphere.

We met a Japanese family at the hostel who asked us what Japanese food we liked and then told us that Ramen is actually Chinese not Japanese. Oh the shame.

Japan!

Well we finally made it to Osaka! It's amazing... and very tiring cos there is so much informationcoming at you all the time. Loads of people ride bikes and always on the pavement so it can be quite difficult to walk down the road. We are staying in a room in a tiny hostel where I think we are the first westerners to have stayed. The lady who runs it doesn't speak any English but she is very friendly and gives us peanut butter sandwiches for breakfast so it is all OK. She has a crazy kitten called Mimi who is really cute but quite quite mad. There are shops everywhere and malls that are underground and go on for so long that I don't know how the streets above don't fall in. The toilet seats are warmed for you and you can also play a flushing sound so no one can hear you having a wee. Then it washes your bottom for you as well. We have found whole shops dedicated to particular cartoon characters (gloomy bear is my favourite) and huge toy shops which say they are for kids but are full of adult men buying second hand toys in pristine condition. So far we haven't done anything cultural except eating food which we don't really understand and sleeping on tatami mats on the floor. We are moving to Kyoto tomorrow from where we can explore more of old Japan and of course more toy shops!

On to Japan!

On the morning of the 3rd, we left Kaikoura bright an early and drove to Picton to get our ferry over to Wellington. It was an 'exciting' journey... It ended up taking seven or eight hours instead of three as there was a huge storm and we had to take a long way around to avoid being hit too much. Some of the swells were 10-12m high so we still got bashed around a lot. Neither of us got seasick but there were people everywhere looking very green! At one point we heard a huge crash and looked up to see the cafe waitress being chased across the boat by a load of coffee cups! Apparently on the floor above, all the chairs and tables went flying, everyone ended up in a pile and one man was knocked unconcious. It was all in the newspaper the next day. We survived though and picked up our new hire car on the other side. Unfortunately, as we were so late, we then had to scour Wellington for some accomodation which took quite a while and was not fun in the wind and rain. We finally found the last two beds in town.

The next day was still rainy and windy so we went to the free museum of New Zealand - Te Papa. We learnt about earthquakes and New Zealand wildlife and about how possums are pests. Then we met an old friend of mine (that would be Anna West to those of you who know her!) and we went to an Irish pub for some lunch. She's been living in Wellington for the last 6 months so she knews where to take us. After lunch we walked up a very steep hill to look for the tree which the hobbits hide under in the Lord of the Rings. We didn't find the specific one but it was all very Middle Earth and when we got to the top we had a great view over Wellington. There was absolutely no accomodation in Wellington that night as the Fringe Festival and the WWF (or whatever it's called now) Wrestling were both in town. So we ended up moving on to a town called Palmerston North for the night. Lovely hostel - full of crazy people! There was a man there who had a gadget for absolutely everything including one for stopping him falling asleep on the sofa!

In the morning we drove on to Napier. It is an Art Deco town because after the earthquake in 1931, they rebuilt everything in the few years following so most of the buildings are beautifully Art Deco. We stayed in the Criterion Hotel which is now a hostel but used to be a beautiful old hotel and it still has the fireplaces and dining room and glasswork.

We left early the next day to get to Taupo from where we explored the Tongariro National Park. It was made into a national park in the 1880s when the Maori gifted it to the people of New Zealand to make sure no one would be able to log it. They filmed a lot of Lord of the Rings in this area and we found Mordor and MOUNT DOOM! It was really cool to walk around locations we recognised!

On our last day in New Zealand we left Taupo and first of all stopped off at a place called Craters of the Moon. It is a thermal area which sprung up when they put a geothermal power station in the area. The power station takes some of the hot water from under the earth so the rest boils much quicker and in place like Craters of the Moon it turns into steam as it nears the surface and comes out of vents in the earth. Sometimes if the vents get clogged there is an explosion. It was a very cool place to walk around, you have to stay on the board walks as some areas of the ground are really hot. We saw some mud pools where the earth gets all churned up from the steam and turns into bubbling mud. The vents were really hot and made whistling noises which made you think they were going to erupt in front of you.

On our way up to Auckland we stopped for lunch at a big pretend castle. We saw it from the roaad and went to have a look and it turned out to be a castle that this guy and his wife had built themselves to display their toy collection in. When we were eating, a train came round into the cafe every few minutes and tooted it's horn. Very odd but fun.

We got to Auckland and had a little time to wander around but we had to get up at 6am for our flight to Sydney. We are now in Sydney airport waiting for our flight to Osaka I'm very excited! Also a bit scared..

Sorry for the wait..

Ooops it's been a little while! Internet is way more expensive in New Zealand than on the East Coast of Oz.. We have been doing so much so I apologise if this post goes on a bit.

Our last activity in Australia was doing our Advanced Open Water diving course. To put you out of your suspense - we both passed :) Hooray! We did five speciality dives and six fun dives over three days. Our specialities were Peak Performance Buoyancy (very useful for not scraping yourself on coral like a certain Alice did), Deep Dive (we went to 29m and did a timed task that took longer underwater because being so deep makes you go funny), Navigation Dive (we could have done with this before we went on our first fun dive without a guide), Night Dive (which is basically a fun dive at night - cool!) and Underwater Naturalist where you take some info about the life down with you and try and work out what everything is. It was an amazing three days living on board and getting fed vast amounts of amazing food! Much better than we had been eating before!

A couple of days later we left Australia (sad face). We spent a good six hours entertaining ourselves in Sydney airport while waiting for our connecting flights and finally got to Christchurch at about 10pm. We spent the next day hiring a car, reading travel books and studying maps to work out what we were going to do. Two weeks is NOT enough time in NZ and if you are planning a holiday here, you need at least three weeks per island not two weeks for the both! We have decided to look into getting a working visa and coming back for a while to live (that's how good it is).

In Christchurch, we climbed the tower of the cathedral (quite claustrophobic but great at the top) and visited the art gallery which had some really interesting exhibitions. The best was a guy who had made a replica of his studio and painted it all black except for outlines in paint that shows up under UV light. It was really dark except for the outlines so it made all the 3D objects look like a line drawing.

In Oamaru we spent the evening hanging out with Yellow-eyed penguins and then Little Blue Penguins. The blue penguins come riding in on the waves and then come up a ramp and walk across the road to their nests right in front of you so that was pretty cool to see. In the evening we learnt that over here you have to ask for a 'handle' of beer. It is very confusing getting the right words for how much beer you want.

The next day we drove to Dunedin. We drove out to an Albatross colony at the end of the Otago Peninsula. It was a beautiful drive, half of it up on the hills and half of it right by the waters edge. We saw a lot of Albatrosses flying around above our heads. We alse spotted some baby seals lying on some rocks and a big fat juvenile male seal sunning himself on the beach right next to us!

In Wanaka, we stayed in a beautiful hostel called Wanaka Bakpaka which was more like a cosy homely b&b. In the lounge area there were sofas in front of a huge window with stunning views of Lake Wanaka. We went for a walk to try and find a waterfall which in the end we failed to find but it was a good walk anyway and the lake was pretty so we decided to come back to town and go to the pub.

The next day we moved on again, this time to Fox Glacier Village. Fox Glacier village is a bit smaller and less busy than neighbouring Franz Josef although the glacier is actually bigger. We parked the car and went for a walk along the track to the glacier terminal. After all that walking we decided we needed a handle! Drive, activity, pub! Drive, activity, pub! Sensing a routine here?

Ben should take over here as he went off on a half-day hike up the glacier the next day while I sat and drank lots of Mocha!

Hello everybody, recently I have been mostly eating spaghetti on toast and fesh and cheps! (that's for you Lex) On the 28th I booked onto a half-day hike up onto the glacier which was absolutely fantastic, I loved every minute of it. There was a lot of uphill climbing to get on top of the ice but it was worth every step. We put on our crampons and clambered over the ice for about an hour, crawling through little tunnels and in my case taking hundreds of photos! Once I got back to the village we headed off to Hokitika (there has been so much driving in NZ, we definately need more time). Here we checked into the most amazing hostel we have stayed in so far. It was wonderfully homely, clean, friendly etc... and it was all decorated with pictures painted by the lady that ran it. Then, when we were making our dinner her husband came out with a plate of choclate cake he had just cooked for us to help ourselves to, we had found heaven! We liked it too much it would seem because by the time we got to the swingbridge we wanted to visit that evening, it was pitch black. This scared Alice very much! I quite liked it though. So, to calm her down on the way back to the hostel we went to look at some Glow-worms! Awwwwww!

Yesterday morning we drove on to Hanmer Springs stopping on the way at Maruia for a soak in the thermal springs. They were grey!!! And, like all sulphuric geothermal springs, STANK OF EGG!!! They were lovely and warm though and it was cool sitting outside in warm water while the air temperature was so low. Then we had a quick (naked) dip in the Japanese Bath-houses. We had to split up into girls and boys but it turned out we were the only two there!

And to today! We got up extra early this morning to drive on to Kaikoura where we wanted to do some whale watching. Thankfully there were places left on the boat but it was one of the more expensive trips we have done. My God was it worth it though! It was amazing. We got to see 4 Giant Sperm Whales, Dusky Dolphins, Hectors Dolphins (rarest in the world) and lots of Wandering Albatrosses. Once again I took a million photos and need to back up the memory card very soon! I loved it!

Ben is right, it was amazing! The Dusky Dolphins were showing off and doing tricks and coming right up to the boat. In between sightings, we were shown some presentations about the whales and dolphins. The best fact we learnt was that Sperm Whales are called Sperm Whales because some American whalers (about 150 years agoish) caught one. They chopped it up to get the blubber and discovered a huge reservoir of oil in its head - about 2 tonnes of it. It was sticky and kind of off white and the whalers thought it must have something to do with the whales reproductive system... and so the name stuck even though pretty soon after, everyone realised that it was nothing to do with sperm. Nobody actually knows what it is for though - although it is very useful, NASA even used it as a lubricant in their first Apollo space missions! Shame you have to cave a whale's head in to get it...

I think we should have fish and chips for tea as the guide on the boat told us that the local Grouper is very tasty and fresh!

Whitsundays and more

We spent another day or two in Airlie Beach with Paul and Verity and generally recovering from our Fraser Island trip. Then on the 11th, we left on the 'Pride of Airlie' for our trip around the Whitsundays. We were staying in a resort on South Molle Island for the nights and spending the days on the boat. The resort was gorgeous, we were staying in dorms but they were basically nice family rooms just with loads of beds in so we had a proper bathroom and tea and coffee and towels. In the evening, we were filled with food at a special bar area just for our trip (too noisy for the rest of the island) and ordered to play drinking games. We played a few but I was a bit of a party pooper cos I didn't want to get beer on my nice dress... yeah, I know, I'm really fun. It was good though and I had my first flaming Sambuca lit in my mouth which was quite exciting especially as apparently my lip ring caught fire...

The morning after all the chaos, they made us get up at 6am to get on the boat! Some people spent most of the day lying inside feeling seasick but luckily Ben and I were fine. We went to Whitehaven beach where I fell asleep and Ben went turtle hunting with some guys from Dudley. They also saw some rays and lots of shadows that turned out to be nothing. Then we all sat in the water with our stinger suits on until we had to go back for lunch. In the afternoon we went snorkelling and saw lots more things including parrot fish that you could hear crunch on the coral with their big toothy beaks. At dinner that evening it turned out that Paul and Verity's boat trip were there too so we got to see them again. Being the fun party animals that we are, Ben and I sat out the drinking games... far too tired after a day in the hot sun.

A couple of days ago, we left Airlie Beach and got a bus up to Ayr. Ayr is really really small and usually the only people that stay in the hostel there are mango pickers who get horrible mango rash on their arms (did you know that the mango is related to poison ivy? No me neither). As it is not mango season right now, the place was EMPTY. There were a couple of locals who live there and a few people there for the same reason as us - to dive the Yongala.

The Yongala dive was amazing! It sunk in 1911 with the loss of all life (121 people) and not discovered until the 1950s. Now, you can hardly even see the ship a lot of the time as it has been completely colonised by all kinds of fish and marine life. It is the only thing in the water for miles around so everything congregates there. We saw some huge Queensland Groupers as long as Ben but a lot wider! Also we saw Giant Trevally, tiny Nemos, lots of seasnakes, a couple of Sea Turtles and lots and lots of fish that I haven't learnt the names of yet. Also, when we got back to the dive shop, they cooked us a bbq! So it was really really good :)

Yesterday morning we arrived in Cairns after a horrible cramped nighttime bus journey. we haven't really done anything yet as we are mainly recovering from being knackered and geting ready for our Advanced Open Water course which starts tomorrow at 7am. 11 dives in 3 days! If we don't update for a while it means we are sleeping until New Zealand.

Fraser Island mostly...

After leaving Byron Bay, we got a bus to Hervey Bay. We had to switch buses and then the second bus broke down but the third bus finally got us there :) It is so hot now we are quite far north but when we checked in they gave us a free cold beer which was greatly appreciated. Lots of hostels in the places we are going to have all sorts of little extras to make you want to stay there as there are literally hundreds of them on the east coast. We stayed a couple of nights in Hervey Bay, barely leaving the swimming pool during the day and sweating through the nights in a 12 dorm with one fan.. nice. The hostel had a bar which lots of locals come and drink at and they all had quite spectacularly bad haircuts.. I was thoroughly impressed!

On the Monday morning, we got up bright and early for our Fraser Island 4WD adventure. We met our group the night before (9 of us in all) and luckily they are all really really nice and we didn't get stuck with a load of lads who wanted to get pissed all the time. We were actually the youngest of the group. We met up in the morning and went shopping for food and beer then went off onto the ferry to Fraser Island!

Fraser Island is probably the most fun I've had on this whole trip so far. Despite how much I enjoyed my shower after 3 days camping in sand, I didn't want to come back.. We had the best three days, all our group got on really well. We walked up from the beach to a perched lake where the water was full of catfish that nibble your toes and there is a huge sand dune on one side which you can slide down and splosh into the lake at the bottom! We spent most of the afternoon up there, luckily we got there first so we had a bit of peaceful time before some other groups of people turned up. We set up camp and cooked our barbecue and played a few games but we all ended up being in bed by about 10pm.. rubbish! We had a really nice sheltered spot so we didn't get woken up by the sun in the morning.

The next day we drove all the way up the beach in our fabulous bright pink 4x4 named Dougie to a place called Indian Head. If you go right to the edge and up high, you can see Tiger Sharks, turtles, rays and lots of schools of fish. It was really fun but really hot so we came back down and went to a place called Eli creek (I bet you did all these things too Jess :)) which is a cold freshwater creek which you can wade up to the end and then lie on your back while it floats you back down to the beach. I did it a lot of times cos it was amazing but unfortunately Ben doesn't float cos he's a sinker so he spent most of the time hunting out eels and fish. We camped near the creek in another shady spot. It was really hard to get the 4x4 up there so we all had to push and dig and get covered in even more sand but it was worth it in the end!

On the last day we did part of a bush walk (we are all too hot and lazy to do the rest) and then made our way to Lake McKenzie. Lake McKenzie is probably one of the best places in the world! The sand is beautiful and white, the water is refreshing but not cold, there are lizards and kookaburras around you and there is plenty of room for you to relax. None of us wanted to leave but in the end we had to go back and get the ferry back to Hervey Bay. Boo Hiss. After our much wanted showers we met up with our group again to say goodbye and swap email addresses etc before hopping on the night bus to Airlie Beach.

Two of our group, Paul and Verity, are in Airlie Beach with us now so last night we went to the hostel bar and drank discount beer and ate amazing pizza for not a lot of money. Today we have been mostly down at the lagoon as you can't go in the water here without a stinger suit. The lagoon is fun though, the water's quite warm and you can sunbathe on the grass. Not that I want to do too much sunbathing as we have already spent a fortune on Sun products. Grrr.

Now we are off to our briefing for our Whitsundays trip which leaves tomorrow!