Year: 2024

After a long overnight flight (midnight is not Rosie’s best time), we arrived in Phuket at 9am only to find ourselves at the back of a huge queue at immigration. It took an hour to get through this, despite our best efforts we were the very last people through. Taxi was waiting and we arrived […]

We have shifted from Hiroshima to Osaka on the bullet train and most of us are feeling a bit tired so the plan in Osaka is to take things at a more leisurely pace, get up late, long breakfast, one attraction then rest for afternoon. The first day, we visited Osaka Castle, which was quite […]

Bruce wanted to visit Hiroshima since he likes to see how people react to major events in our history. He watched “Oppenheimer” in the plane on the way to Japan and by coincidence happened to be reading a book based on the events of the Manhattan Project in the week leading up to us getting […]

It rained all day on Sunday so we didn’t do much. Went for a walk to Nishiki Market, which was really the same as every other market in Asia. Lots of fish products and knick-knack shops. On Monday, we went our separate ways with most of the group going to the Starbucks set up in […]

We left Hakuba on Friday, catching a taxi back to Nagano and then a train to Kyoto. The first part of the train trip was very scenic since it was on a slower train that travelled down the western side of Japan going through farmland and beautiful scenery. At Nagoya we transferred to the Shinkansen […]

The non-skiers in our group went on a tour to see the Snow Monkeys, we were supposed to see them when Merv and Bruce took Liam’s year group skiing in Japan, but there was too much snow to get into them. Merv and Bruce went skiing for the day and had a great time, we […]

Sunday morning and we walked up to Tokyo Station, with our luggage, looking all the other Japanese pushing around cases. Rosie and I booked the train tickets the day before to make sure we knew what we were doing, so the experience of finding our train was relatively painless. Once on the platform we were […]

Today Merv and Robyn went to the zoo to see Pandas and we took Sally and Shaun on a trip to Yoyogi Park, entering through a back exit, so that we could walk along the park ways and end up at the Meiji Shrine. I set Google for the wrong entrance, which came out quite […]

Today was a tourist day, starting out at the Tsukiji Fish Market. The fun actually starts before this trying to use Google Maps to get to a place. It is very confusing initially to get your starting direction, but once you start it isn’t too bad. It is also interesting when it sends you through […]