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!
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

One night in Canberra

It's the April school holidays and we are too busy to have a break but need one because of that. And because it's the Easter weekend the options are limited, so we just drive down to Canberra for the night. No, this isn't our first trip for 2023. I wrote about Japan on another site .  I refuse to wake up early so we depart after 8.30 AM. There is not much to say about the drive except that the clouds seem so low and Lake George is very full. We stop at a rest area and at the lookout up the hill to take it all in. Everyone is hungry so we first stop in Dickson and then can't think of anything to eat, so I drive us to Civic, where we can't decide and end up eating at the Singaporean Killiney Kopitiam branch.  The Canberra Centre has nice shops. I dream of getting an iPad from the Apple Store, we buy a blanket and toothbrushes from Muji and wish that Lego wasn't so expensive. Nothing we can't get in Sydney, but then we rarely go out shopping in the city. It...
Post a Comment
Read more