I’m lucky enough that I’ve never been subjected to the UK rail network for more than a couple of hours, but still, I try to avoid it where possible!
The Japanese rail network is totally different! It’s spotlessly clean (even the Tokyo underground!) and runs to the minute. If the timetable gives a 14:03 departure, the train is leaving the station at 14:03:01.
Today I travelled to Kyoto on the Hikari high-speed train. The interior was set out more like an aircraft cabin than a train car, with everyone given an assigned seat in forward-facing rows. One very cool thing about that: The seats all face forward. What happens at the end of the line? Does the entire train turn around? Do the passengers just have to travel backwards instead? No. A team of cleaners rushes on board between services, and as part of their duty, spins each row of seats through 180-degrees! It’s brilliant!
Akihabara is Tokyo’s “Electric Town”, and as a self-confessed electronics geek, this is somewhere I wanted to spend a good bit of time.
Akihabara is the sort of place that could easily take up an entire day. I wandered around the 9-story Yodobashi Camera store for a couple of hours yesterday afternoon, but wanted to check out the rest of the area and see the place light up once the sun had gone down.
I found Akihabara a little difficult to get around, but mostly due to Tokyo stations having similar but slightly different names! The station to aim for is JR Akihabara, rather than the Hibya line Akihabara subway station. If you have plenty of time to explore the area it might not matter, but the JR station exits directly into the “Electric Town”, simplifying things a bit.
Once in Akihabara things are a little easier. The best thing to do in my opinion is just to walk around the side streets. Those who are interested in Anime and the like will probably find something of interest, but for me the best part was the variety of electronic component stalls. Until now I was completely unaware of the vast number of different brands of copper wire, insulation and solder, but Maplin will never seem quite the same again.
Today we went to Miraikan (Japan’s National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation) and were just in time to see ASIMO come out of his* cupboard and run around for a bit!
ASIMO was only out for about 15 minutes, but he was pretty impressive. He did a bit of running in a straight line and managed to kick a football across the stage to one of the museum staff. He didn’t attempt any stairs though!
*ASIMO is so awesome that I often think of it as a tiny person in a suit. A kind of Turing test I suppose.
I’m currently sitting in the airport at Cairns waiting on my flight to Tokyo. I’ve still got about an hour before boarding, but that’s alright, there’s free wireless here!
It’s a little strange to be leaving the country I’ve been travelling through for the last 7 months or so. It seems I’ve been here long enough that other travellers look at me and think I must have some idea what I’m doing with this travel lark! I ended up helping a couple of people plan trips down the East coast to Melbourne while I was sitting on Magnetic Island! I don’t mind it all. I asked the same questions 6-months ago. It’s just a little strange being “that guy” now!
Anyway. Today I’m travelling from a country I know quite a bit about, to one that I’m relatively clueless about. I can’t wait to see it though! Lots of raw fish and robots everywhere! Awesome! That, and I’m meeting my parents and brother there. That should be good too!
I’ve been in Sydney since returning from New Zealand. To be honest, apart from catching up with some of the people I met in New Zealand, I haven’t been doing very much and it feels like I’m just killing time before my flight to Tokyo.
I think I’ve done everything I’d planned on doing in Australia, and seeing as I’m departing from Cairns and have to travel up the coast again anyway, I’ve decided to go back to Magnetic Island for a while.
I’m hoping to do an Advanced Open Water diving course while I’m there, but even if it doesn’t go ahead, I think I’d prefer to kill time on a small island than in Australia’s biggest city!
I’ve been back in Sydney for a couple of weeks now, mostly trying to sort out what I’m going to do for the next few months. I was pretty much set until a few days ago when I tried to confirm new dates for my flights back to Aberdeen (via Tokyo).
It seems that my travel agent has sold me an open ticket that isn’t all that open. I can make changes to my flights, but not the changes I actually want to make! For example, Qantas tell me that the Sydney to Tokyo flight on the date I requested is full, but their website tells me that there are plenty of economy seats still available. Aparently these seats are part of a sale, and not available to customers who have already booked, the end result being that I had to cancel the remaining portion of my ticket, and book new flights myself. To say I’m not very happy about that is an understatement.
I’m thinking my travel agent is mostly at fault here, but I can’t help think that Qantas are being a little unreasonable too.
Anyway, I’m now flying to Tokyo from Cairns, which isn’t so bad as I’d planned to head up that way again to do some diving. Hopefully the weather will have cooled a little by the end of March! As a result of all these changes, I’m planning on heading over to New Zealand next week until the beginning of March.
New Zealand was always a bit of an after-thought on this trip. It was somewhere I really wanted to visit, but dependent on whether I had the time and money to do it. I’ve got a rough idea of what I’d like to see, but no real idea about how long it will take to get around. I travelled from Cairns to Sydney in around seven weeks, so hopefully five will be enough for New Zealand.
After almost 3-months, I’m leaving Geelong this afternoon and flying back up to Sydney. I’m not entirely sure what I’ll do once I get there yet, but getting a job is pretty low on the list of priorities at the moment.
I’m flying out to Tokyo at the end of March, and I want to spend some time in New Zealand before I leave, so that only really leaves me with 6-8 weeks in Australia. Even if I found a job tomorrow, I don’t think there would be much point in it!
Instead, I’m planning on heading back up to Magnetic Island to get my SSI Advanced diving certificate, then maybe up to Cairns to dive at the Great Barrier Reef, if I can stand the tropical heat, that is!
Other than that, I’ll most likely just be catching up with the guys that stayed in Sydney. Possibly fly out to Perth to see Martin.
If I can do all that, I’ll have seen more of Australia than a lot of Australians!
