II have spent the last few days in Tokyo. Doing admin and looking around. I found a good English book shop called Good Day Books. Here I trading in a book I brought for a dollar in the boarders closing down sale in Sydney and got 350 yen towards the other books I brought.

We have also booked our flights to the USA now. The original plan was to go to Portland but due to the flight pricing we have settled for Seattle as it was a lot cheaper and is far close. We plan to do the American Adventure Cycle route the Northern Tier, and end up in New York. Due to time we are going to have to use alternative maybe slightly faster than bikes transport to cover part of the distance in the time we have available.

I am currently on a bullet train (Shinkansen). The only way the front of the bullet train can be describe is ‘Kick Ass’ if trains had fights I am pretty sure this one would beat all the other trains hands down. The ticket system is fairly strange but the ticket barriers are very good. I needed to put two tickets in at the same time and you can just place them on top of each other. The subway ticket machines are equally good and you can put the ticket it anyway and it seems to work.

I am going to Kyoto then heading to a small town called Uno so I can get the ferry to Naoshima which is known as an art island.

I am not sure what I am going to do in Kyoto but I hear there is lots to do.

This afternoon i went to the Manga Museum not because I like Manga I have never really looked at it before but mainly because i have not looked at it before! I also went to a design museum.

Last night we arrived in Tokyo. It was hot and very sunny on the ride we must have drunk a lot of water and sports drinks. There was also a nice head wind which really hit when you went over any bridges.

On the way we stopped at a space museum. Which had a lot of information on the Japanese space program.

I forgot to mention that the last night in the tent was so hot that I tried to sleep outside which was a lot cooler but then the insects attached so it was inside the hot and airless tent for me!

We met up with Cliff’s father when we arrived parked the bikes showered and had dinner.

Yesterday was Cliff’s birthday and we went to Disneyworld. It was a good day, with the highlights being getting evacuated from the run away mine train, when it broke down. We had to cross over the track and go out of a back entrance. The buffet lunch was also good.

Today I am doing a bit of admin, washing research into the next leg of the trip and what to do for the next week or so in Tokyo.

The film was entertaining enough and had a few good shots of trains etc, and it was free to watch on the ferry. The plot was basic to say the least somebody was moving a train around in a yard jumped off it to chance a point but didn’t make it back on train picked up speed on the mainline and then after a while a new train driver and an old one played by Denzel reversed a train into the back of it, and tried to stop it didn’t really work then the new train driver jumped on a truck made it to the front of the train climbed on and stopped the train, so the name of the film was a lie.

The room we were sleeping in was not that full so it was an alright nights sleep.

The morning film was Knight and Day it was pretty bad so I am not going to review it.

Then it was bath time again before getting off the ferry after an all you can eat buffet curry lunch and salad. You couldn’t complain at the cost of the lunch and the amount of food but it was nothing to write home about, (which I guess in someway I am doing here).

We cycled about 15kms away from the ferry port and found a nice camping spot in a park near a lake this will leave about 100kms in Tokyo tomorrow. This is the last night camping in Japan. Our time cycling here has flown by.

After coffee we left our hosts house and went on our way back to the 7-11 for another bready breakfast.

We now headed on our way to the ferry port. It was very sunny and fairly hot but there was no wind until a head wind came from nowhere.

We found a supermarket to get provisions for the ferry journey it was over night and we wanted to buy some dinner and breakfast. The supermarket was in a shopping mall and there were a lot of people with what looked like small traffic cones shouting things into them. I think they were trying to get people to buy stuff. We brought nothing but food and then paid a visit to Mr doughnut or donut and had a doughnut or donut before heading to the ferry terminal. This was fairly well signed, although there was ferry port east, west and a few wharfs but it was fairly easy.

We got our ferry tickets with easy Cliff’s father kindly booked these for us and we wait for a tiny bit in a line of motorbikes and then we got ushered to the front of the line and wheeled our bikes onto the ferry.

We are sleeping in an economy room, this means that all the futons touch each other and there is not much room to move about, but it will do us fine.

Before the ferry left we had a Grand Bath, this is basically an Onsen on board the ship, it was pretty good and had windows out to sea, well the female one would, we looked back over the port.

After getting clean and changing out of our cycling clothes we started, on our dinner which was a bento box and some greasy treats!

We are going to go to the cinema soon to watch a film with Denzel Washinton and a train, the poster is in Japanese but Cliff thinks it is unstoppable. I might write a little review on my blog tomorrow.

We left the riders house for a second and final time and some other riders waved us off and wished us well.

Todays cycle was fairly flat with a nice tail wind mean that we made good progress. As we are couchsurfing tonight and our host is working till 5 this meant that we could have an after lunch nap. We did this and it was good, although starting off in the afternoon heat but we made good progress, arriving a little early allowing us to eat a ice cream or 2 at the 7-Eleven.

It was a sunny day. We met our host at her house following some very good directions before watching some TV, showering and having a good dinner.