Flights
And after one day less than five months away, we landed back in Brisbane bright and early on Monday morning (30 degrees after last seeing 6 degrees in Narita was a bit of a shock)! Not being people to slack off, we had our container with boxes waiting for us
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...because we're heading home (via the Wild West). On Sunday morning we packed up all of our worldly possessions (one bag and many books more than we started with) to head back to Tokyo for our flight home. After breakfast and an important meeting with the local fauna,
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On Saturday, the boys and I headed back to the snow by ourselves. If anything, the conditions were even better than on Thursday. We'd had at least a metre of fresh snow overnight (as evidenced by the pile-of-snow-on-top-of-the-car-metre). After a warm-up run down from the gondola, we headed
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After visiting the snow monkeys, we drove on to head to the snow proper, and our final stop for the whole trip (not counting the drive back to Tokyo and flight home to come). On our way to Ishiuchi, we stopped for a lovely lunch in a random snowy town
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The main reason we stayed in Shibu Onsen (other than to get closer to our final destination), was because A reeeaaallly wanted to see SNOW MONKEYS. These are actually the same Japanese macaques we saw earlier in the trip – but these ones live in snowy mountain areas and swim in
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On Monday morning (because it was closed most of the time we were in Nikko), we walked up the road to Tobu World Square. This local attraction is full of 1/25 scale models of locations and buildings (all populated with miniatures) from all over the world. Divided into a
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On Saturday afternoon we headed into the middle of Nikko for a quick look around and some lunch. While there we took a drive along (most of – a section the middle is closed to cars) the longest tree-lined avenue in the world – the Nikko Avenue of Cedars. A and I
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On Saturday morning we headed over to the Grand Maze Palladium, just down the road from us in Nikko. The maze is made up of wooden panels and fences, sets of crisscrossing stairs and four towers in each of the corners. To complete the maze you need to get stamps
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On Thursday morning we headed back to Tokyo from Kyoto to pick up our hire car for the 3-hour drive to Nikko. We went on the Shinkansen again, but this time we did it properly... that is, with an on-time departure, almost no stops (total travel time 2 hours and
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For our last proper day in Kyoto (Wednesday), we decided to spend some time at the aquarium before we caught up with some friends in the afternoon. It was only a shortish bus ride from where we were staying, but when we arrived we were a little concerned by a
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We had a bit of a slow start on Saturday for our first day in Kyoto... but for me it also included three trips to three different konbinis in the morning before anyone else got moving much (one to top up our breakfast supplies at the Lawson across the corner,
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On Friday we said goodbye to Tokyo to head to Kyoto on the Shinkansen (bullet train – technically "new trunk line", but that's pretty boring). These fast trains (about 2.5 hours for our trip) join lots of major cities (and other areas) of Japan and are