We have spent the last few days in Tokyo getting ready for the trip.

We did this by buying food. Doing some map shopping with Cliff’s Dad, we managed to get an Atlas of Japan in english and a bilingual map.

This and google maps allowed us to do some route planning. We plotted a rough route up the north west coast of Japan, hopefully to the northern most tip.

The few days we spent in Tokyo were good, and I am looking forward to exploring more when we get back there. Cycling started today in the rain which got heavier and then stop and ended with a bright afternoon, which allowed everything to dry out.

There are so many traffic lights in Japan it leads to a lot of stop start cycling, we made it out of the city and with the aid of google maps, Cliffs navigation and good road signs navigation on day one went well.

I am amazed at how built up Japan is and how every inch of space is put to some use be it a footpath, very small field or housing.

I was surprised when we found a small wood with some flat ground that we have chosen to camp in tonight. It is fairly close to a restaurant, houses and road, but it will make a good first nights stop. Now its time to eat some rice before putting the tents up and getting an early night.

So far as expected Japan is very different to Australia.

I think this post has been fairly boring, I will try and write a better one tomorrow.

 

Our time in Australia has come to an end. We awoke very early at 3:30 and got taken to the airport in the most for appropriate vehicle for the job a Toyota Land Cruiser.

We had a great week or so exploring the Sydney area and we have to say a big thank you to our friends and their family for letting us stay and driving us to the airport so early on a sunday morning. We arrived in good time and went to the check in desk no queues, when we did check in we got told that we had to have a flight booked out of Japan. This was a little awkies as we didn’t know when we would be leaving. This was no time to be chillbanging. We were very tired a confused. We looked online for flights etc this was just very confusing at 5am. In the end we ended up booking some expensive flights out of Japan. We got given a scrap of paper with a hard to read reference number on it. It wasn’t until our stop over in Cairns that we found out when the flight was booked for. We are hoping that we can easily ring jetstar from Japan and arrange a quick refund this is what we got told. If not we will be back in this fair land again! Cairns stop over area offers quite a lot of shops, but the food shops were fairly limited. We are now flying to Japan.

I really enjoyed my time in Australia, it is a great country with friendly generous people. I think it will take a few days to get back into the cycling routine, hopefully it will come back quickly! We also need to decided on a route in Japan.