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Sofies on tour: Last day in Kyoto

Tori gates in Kyoto

It was our last full day in Kyoto, so we started off by writing a wish list of all the things that we still wanted to do. The aim was to try and achieve as many as possible before we left for Tokyo. We knew it would probably mean yet another long day, but given the following day was going to be mostly filled with sitting at stations or on trains we knew that we had plenty of recovery time up our sleeves.

Unfortunately Mario had come down with the early symptoms of a cold and had an extremely sore throat. Japan is fairly well known for their cultural protocol to wear masks, meaning that if you’re not well that you wear a face mask to prevent the spread of germs. Thus, first stop was to the local Family Mart to pick up a bag of them. He was worried about what people would think (especially since it’s not something that’s done in Australia, and probably should be) but all I could think was “photo opportunity”. I started teasing him and making him crack up, which resulted in the below photo. In all, no one seemed to even notice or treat him any differently! Except me of course, I stirred him up when I took this photo so he’s cracking up laughing: [...]  read more

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Sofies on tour: Hiroshima

After a mammoth day the day before, we had agreed on having a bit of a lazy morning. We “slept in”, meaning until just after 6am, and I spent the next hour in a blissful state of having a bath and reading my book. Even though the tub was tiny, it was deep, and I really enjoyed being immersed by the water. At home I can stretch my legs out but the water is nowhere near as high, so funnily enough I actually preferred the feeling of the Japanese tub! Afterwards I washed and dried my hair, then attempted to straightened it as an impatient Mario hopped from foot to foot. Apparently I was the only one who had wanted the lazy morning, or he’d forgotten about it. [...]  read more

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Sofies on tour: Kyoto

It was our first full day in Kyoto, and boy did we smash it. I hadn’t anticipated to do so much walking, but by the end of the day we had covered over 22km, and 31,000 steps. We were tired, exhausted, and our legs felt like they were going to drop off.

But we got to see a lot of great things, and that’s the point of travelling right?

We started off the day by walking the backstreets following my Apple Watch as it tried to lead us to the food markets we had researched. For future reference, the GPS quality in the back streets is not so great, so it did result in a couple of missed turns on our part while it was working out where we were. Running the GPS on the phone through to the watch also massively eats at the battery life, and so by just after lunch I was running at 50%. I opted to just go straight from the phone then and put my watch on aeroplane mode. [...]  read more

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Sofies on tour: Tokyo to Kyoto

Today was the first “real” day of our holiday so to speak, meaning that it was time for us to explore!

We started things off by having our last “western” breakfast at the restaurant downstairs and jumping on the hotel bus to Tokyo station. We had forgotten to exchange our rail pass the day before, so before we could jump in the train we needed to first find the rail office.

What…a….mission.

We thought it would be as simple as finding a Japan Rail office and swapping it. Not so. The first place we tried directed us to another, then the second sent us into some scary tunnels that looked like we were leaving the country. It turned out it was just a lot of renovation work they were doing, and thankfully we kept going to discover it popped us right out in front of the office we needed. Third time lucky we exchanged the passes, reserved a seat of the train and made our way to the platform. [...]  read more

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Sofies on tour: Australia to Japan

Well, we’ve made it! Today was all about the travel, and the process of getting here. Mario doesn’t fly too well so we booked into a hotel near the airport so that he could get to bed pretty early without fuss. Tomorrow we will be travelling by bullet train to Kyoto, so there will be lots of exciting news to report in!

To recap today’s events:

Booking our flights

The downside to booking flights with Qantas is that we couldn’t choose our seats until we had booked our flights, which I had found a bit annoying (unless I did it wrong). Unfortunately all the seats in the exit rows had already been taken, which meant that Mario would have to sit in one of the regular seats. The challenge with that is that he’s 6ft 4, which means for him flying is awkward at best due to the lack of leg room. [...]  read more