Japan 

Our arrival at Kansai airport meant getting a 45 minute train journey into Osaka itself which gave us an introduction to the built up monstrosity that Japan is.  On the flight in you could see all the valley's and mountains and anywhere at all that was flat seemed to have buildings on it.  On leaving Japan from Toyko, it took us 30 minutes of driving on motorways (about 30k's out) before we even saw a two storey house!

Our Osaka Hotel room was on the 16th floor and there were plenty of buildings around that were much bigger.  In the older areas, such as the train station, there was loads of hustle and bustle at ground level, but the way to our hotel was over walkways in the sky and if it wasn't them it was subways - entire shopping malls spread out 2kms underground from underneath the main Osaka train station.  The rail system around Osaka, Tokyo and all of Japan was massive with the underground seeming to have four times the number of lines that London has, and that was just Osaka. Our first day was spent just getting to the main station (four stations up the loop line), booking a tourist trip and getting back, which felt like a major achiement deserving of several (expensive) beers, though by the time we left we had it off pat, only to have to learn the Toyko system next ..... far more complex but made easier by the majority of signs being duplicated in English. 

Back to Osaka - the tourist trip we went on there was to Kyoto, about half an hour east by train and then around the city by bus.  It was mainly temples we were taken to, both Shinto and Buddist although I'm afraid the easiest way to remember which was which was whether we'd taken our shoes off or not.  As you'll see from the photos, here it was well worth it. The other historical bit we did was to Osaka castle which was within walking distance of the hotel (over many of the said walkways).  The castle was mainly about history, in particular the shoguns and shennigans that went on around 16th & 17th Century.  Very interesting but all inside with no photos allowed, the inside bit was just as well as it was raining outside - our first rain since we arrived in Asia so we couldn't complain.

Even from the train we saw very little agriculture, just loads of factories and industrial areas.  One other thing that was very clear cut, was that as soon as hills started at all, the building stopped and the lower hills seemed to be mostly scrub with conifers on the higher ground.

Tokyo gave us even more to look at in the vertical sense, our hotel reception was on 25th floor our hotel room was on 36th floor but even at that there were plenty bigger buildings around us.  Made for a lovely sunrise on the morning we left, see photos here.  Toyko was even odder when walking as everywhere you went in the area of the hotel was on walkways or subways.  Restaurants were everywhere, the first couple of floors (below ground too)of many of the buildings were various restaurants, mostly japanese but some more western ones too, like French, Italian & Steakhouses.  In one building beside us (via walkway or subway!) there were about eight skyview restaurants on the 41st ansd 42 floors. 

Down on the ground we spent several hours at Electric City which waswn't just Computers and Cameras but small back streets of electronic components, right down to stalls which had just resistors and capacitors or another one which had just Audio cables.  There were plenty people on these streets though the shops were rarely a single floor - mostly four or five floors of all the different types of electronics. 

Shopping in Japan is a rather calmer experience than other places as no one hassles you to buy - in fact very rarely will they approach you unless you ask a question first.  There is still plenty of bowing, much more so in Osaka than Tokyo.  In the hotel if you were walking out in the morning as the chambermaids were cleaning rooms, they would all stop work and bow until you had gone by, if you nodded "thanks" then you were stuck as they bowed back etc., etc.  Tokyo was much more westernised, much more english was spoken and the girls in the restaurants would speak to you and chat whereas in Osaka they had just bowed there way back out of any question.

We did one tour from Tokyo, to see Mount Fuji and I would like to say, 'see photos below' but the weather was so terrible that although there are some, see here, they don't show the beauty that must be there.  The lift station that we stopped at on Mt Fuji was probably worse than one of those days at Aviemore when it's started thawing, the fog is down and you decide you should have stayed at home!  After lunch they took us down for what should have been a beautiful 30 minute cruise down the lake with Mt Fuji in the background ..... when we arrived at the jetty it was more like getting on a ghost ship the fog was so bad - just as well they had GPS and Radar!  However on the way home on the Bullet train (300kph) we saw Mount Fuji at last, for about two minutes, before the train headed us off towards Toyko - sorry the photos aren't very good, my excuse is the speed we were travelling at! 

 From Japan it was on to Singapore and a rather different and more relaxed view on life.

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