Skip to main content

Japan in 2006


Our 2006 trip to Japan remains as one of our favourites. Three years before we had made the first of what is now many visits to Japan, but hot and humid September weather and the dreary grey urban expanses had left us largely unimpressed.

Then in 2005, at the end of a big holiday in Singapore and Europe, we stopped by Tokyo for a few days. It was during a day trip out to rural Nikko that I suddenly learned how to look at Japan properly and fallen in love.

Near the end of that stay B gave me permission to purchase a Japanese computer. I struggled to decide between a Sony Vaio M entertainment PC or a tiny, but equally attractive looking Sharp Mebius Muramasa CV mini notebook PC, a progenitor to netbooks.

The orange Vaio M is still my music player in my home office a decade later, plugged into a special transformer to cope with a 240 volt power supply rather than Japan's 100 volts.

But I couldn't get the Muramasa out of my head. A perfect travel computer (for the time). I'll let you in on a little secret. This what drove me to use our frequent flyer points to return us to Japan in 2006.

So in April 2006 we found ourselves on our first and only bright orange Australian Airlines (version 2) flight to Osaka.

We experienced so many wonders on our travels. Cherry blossoms in some of Japan's best gardens, the horrors of Hiroshima and the huge floats of the Takayama festival, not to mention its wonderful Hida beef. Castles in Matsumoto and Osaka, bowing deer in Nara, serene temples and magnificent mountain scenery. And so much more accompanied by John Williams' soundtrack to Memoirs of a Geisha.

And yes, I got my Muramasa. Second hand and now faulty, but for a while a very handy travel tool for a very mobile user.

I blogged the trip elsewhere, but have finally transferred them here with photos from the trip. Read the posts here and enjoy!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

My first overseas trip: Singapore and Malaysia

I've always loved to travel. My first memory is of sitting in a an aircraft, aged 18 months or so. Yet I never believed that I could travel overseas. To me, it seemed like something you did when you retired, or if you were rich. That all changed when I met B. She had not only travelled overseas, she was from overseas . B was born in Malaysia and arrived in Australia, with her family, in 1988. She still had relatives and friends in Malaysia and Singapore and she, along with the remainder of her family, planned to return for a visit during the Australian summer of 1995. At the time I was staying in B's mother's house while we were studying at university. After B's father passed away the year before I was the nominal "man" of the house and its high maintenance garden; her brother Michael was studying up in Queensland. B and I were quite inseparable and her mother kindly offered to pay for me to join them on their vacation. So it was that I obtained my very firs...

Down the Oito Line

Riding the length of the Oito Line from Itoigawa to Shinjuku (well, Matsumoto, really, but you might as well go the whole way) has long been a dream of mine. It suddenly gained urgency when I read that the last length of it between Itoigawa to Minami-Otari would be closed once the Hokuriku Shinkansen to Kanazawa and Toyama opens by next year. Now, as mentioned last time, B and Alex are among those that would much rather catch the very fast Shinkansen, but in the end she decided to follow me, despite the very early morning. We rode the Hokuetsu Express from Toyama to Itoigawa, completing a little more of that West Coast for me. Though the coastal stretch was short there were some nice views at times. I should like to see more of Itoigawa one day, explore its geology. But now we had to quickly cross over the platform bridge to catch our train to Minami-Otari. To my great delight it was a KiHa 120 railcar, my favourite. I felt a degree of sadness standing up at the front...