Blake's First Post - Week 1

I think the excitement of travelling only really hit me for the first time on this trip today, one week into our trip, while on a bus going through the Japanese highland (although mountains in general do tend to excite me at any time). I'm not sure if it sunk in during our time in Tokyo that we were actually IN Tokyo (!!!).

Tokyo was a fun time though. We visited 9-10 different neighbourhoods, some multiple times, and found that everywhere we went felt super fast paced. It didn't seem like there was much time to relax in Tokyo. For anyone.

We quickly discovered that it was somewhat of a shopping mecca and felt the need to restrain ourselves (looking at the aussie dollar now, I wish I had restrained myself even more). We had decided to allocate ourselves each a shopping budget for Tokyo and New York, being the two cities we thought we might go a bit shopping nuts in, so we had the whole week to decide what we wanted to buy.

Despite keeping ourselves busy, balancing out the neon lights and shopping centres with time spent in quiet parks and Japanese gardens, I managed to get through 3 books and am onto a fourth. I may however have jumped into the reading a bit quickly though as it looks like I won't have anything left to read on some of the longer, more boring journeys ahead.

The journey from Tokyo to Takayama was extremely pretty and somewhat unexpected. I had this image in my head of Japan being a mostly flat land with scattered mountain ranges throughout. I think this stemmed from seeing those pictures of Mount Fuji looking like it's Japan's one and only big hill. Turned out that 95% of the 6 hour trip was through mountain terrain. These made all the more spectacular by the bright red, orange and yellows autumn colours of the trees which covered them. It was a very nice surprise.