This Is A Lake - A travel blog

Today we left our apartment in Tokyo and took the shinkansen to Kyoto! It wasn't one of the really fast ones though, it felt like it had a lot of stops on the way... This time I managed to look out the window and see the scenery change. The landscape began very urban while we were leaving Tokyo and then Yokohama, then turned suburban, and at one point all I could see were ghastly factories surrounded by small houses spewing white smoke onto the sky. It made me think of a daytime version of FF7's Midgar. I think it wasn't until we were past Nagoya and getting close to Kyoto that the industrial areas gave way to forested mountains in beautiful autumn colours. We arrived in Kyoto at around 14:00, so we headed up to Kyoto Station's 11th floor to have a great tonkatsu lunch in one of the many restaurants there. Yeah, the 11th floor: like many Japanese stations, Kyoto's is a behemoth of a building that houses an entire department store and a score of restaurants inside. I...

Our last day in Tokyo! After walking up and down the city for about five days, two and a half hours sitting down tomorrow in the shinkansen sound pretty good right now! We decided to start the day with a good dose of culture and hopped on the Yamanote line to go to Ueno, on the north side of Tokyo. It was sunny and clear today but every once in a while freezing winds would sweep through. We walked across the park square, surrounded by more schoolkids than tourists, looking at the odd red tree in an otherwise very green landscape. An old man appeared out of thin air, handed me a map of the park, and vanished as musteriously as he arrived -if this is going to embark me on a vision quest I think I haven't the time! (But a very kind gesture). Our goal was to go to the Tokyo National Museum, the Louvre of Japan, which occupies four or five buildings inside a compound. I had been here on my last visit, but I was so exhausted by then that I only took a very cursory tour of the main exhibi...

There was nothing I wanted for today than to spend the day blissfully walking from one ancient temple with breathtaking landscapes to another, and that's exactly what I got! It was overcast and noticeably cooler than yesterday, but it was still very nice to walk around. We went to Tokyo Station and took the train there to Kita-Kamakura, the station just before Kamakura proper. The most common itinerary is to go to Kamakura Station, see the Great Buddha and Hasedera, then walk across town to see the temples, but I decided to mix it up a bit and do the visit the other way round. The train ride takes about 55 min. Actually, the train ride takes 54 minutes exactly, because Japanese trains are as punctual as you expect. Several times I've done the exercise of looking at my watch as a train's arrival time approaches, and every time when the watch is about to strike the given minute you can start to see the train coming in the distance. As you leave Kita-Kamakura station, the firs...

So our plan to spend this beautiful, sunny day in Kamakura went out the window when the airline failed to deliver our luggage yesterday, after we spent all afternoon stuck in the apartment. After two excruciating phone calls with customer service, in Japanese as well as English, we discovered that the deliverymen had actually visited... An hour before the 16:00-20:00 window we had been given, while we were out. So today we managed to get them to commit to come by at 14:00 on the dot (they came at 12:00; good thing that we had wised up and mom stayed in the apartment). After my experience with Japanese customer service, I made a quick foray into Akihabara, to browse in a couple of manga/anime/game/geeky stuff stores. It was even more colourful, loud and maddening than I remembered it. I love the place! In some stores even each individual bookcase had its own unique soundtrack, contributing to a sensory overload that builds up over time and only becomes evident when you walk away and not...

Save for a couple of jetlagged awakenings, I had a good night's sleep and woke up to blue skies, the shining sun, and a glorious 17°C. Back to the suitcase with the winter clothes! Today's plan was to do a tour of Tokyo's fashion hub around Harajuku. We had a very early start because I wanted to beat the crowds, which we did, to a fault: we arrived just as they were beginning to open the stores (most open between 10:00 and 11:00). We had to loiter a bit because there has to be some madness in Harajuku for the full experience! We took the JR line to Harajuku station and began our walk with Takeshita-dori, the crazy loli/goth street where every other store sells platform shoes, ruffled skirts, or crepes. It was as deliciously mad as I remembered it, with many stores playing sickeningly sweet jingles outside. Some of the passersby looked even more garish than the mannequins. Even the food offerings here are sugary and cute, with every corner housing a Japanese creperie. Crepes...

I'm on the road again! As you probably know, ever since I first came to Japan three years ago I've been looking for an excuse to come back. When my mom said she wanted to go, I took the chance to volunteer my services as a guide and here we go! Last time I came here in the spring; it was shortly before the cherry blossoms, but plum trees were in full bloom and I enjoyed beautiful vistas of the springtime, so I thought this time around I should visit in the fall hoping to see autumn colours. It is currently 17°C at 9PM, so I don't think cold weather will be a problem (look for my Koya-san entries in the category list and you'll see that one fountain that froze solid) but it is true that it starts to get dark before 17:00. I had tried to account for that when planning but I forgot about daylight saving time!! The flight from Paris was smooth enough, but when we landed in Narita at 09:45 we learned that my mom's luggage had not made the transfer and would have to follo...

When I opened the curtains this morning, I found the sun was staring me in the face. I was picked up at the hotel at 07:15 for my tour of the Cu Chi tunnels, around 50 km out of HCMC. We were driven to a pier nearby and boarded a speedboat on the Saigon river. It was a pleasant ride -the weather was nice, we were shielded from the sun, and the wind on our faces was a nice way to wake up! I was surprised to find that only another tourist boat and we were in the river at the time, I expected more traffic. Every once in a while we'd cross a barge with locals who were having breakfast or working and would wave at us as we passed by. It took a good hour's time to cover the distance between the pier at HCMC and our arrival in Cu Chi. The river has entire sections completely covered by floating plants, fairly big, green plants that look like bushes on solid ground but are really just floating on the water's surface. Our boat seemed to part them with ease, and o...