Cruising with Princess

Travel and Leisure

If you follow my FB page, you'll have noticed that we went on our third cruise recently, this time on an amazing itinerary through the Scandinavian and Baltic countries. We chose Princess this time (previously Celebrity and Virgin Voyages) solely because the cruise started/ended in Copenhagen. If you look at most other cruises for this region, they'll often use Southampton or Amsterdam, forcing you to spend 1.5 to 2 days at sea just getting to the area. So with no other rationale other than convenience, we looked it up on Costco Travel and booked it.

Booking value

The "obstructions" to our view

I learned from our Alaska cruise experience, that using a travel agent sometimes gives you perks that you may not get if booking directly. I then checked with Costco, and noted that they not only had access to some room types that the direct site didn't list, but they also offered significant kickbacks to members. We didn't purchase additional premium packages, as the value is typically used for big drinkers; since she doesn't drink at all, it is cost prohibitive for me, as I'd need to buy the upgrade for both of us. Through some research, I noted that this ship lacked extensive dining options, which were accompanied by mediocre reviews. We felt that the weather in the region would not be conducive to sitting out on a balcony, so we opted for the "obstructed ocean view" stateroom. So with a bare bones booking, we were in at about CDN$250/night per person, not including the CDN$350 Costco gift card and USD$80 onboard credit. To that, we needed to add tips and any excursions or spa services we wanted; overall a deal hard to pass up.

Low expectations = hard to be disappointed

We knew that these traditional operators couldn't hold a candle to new-kid-on-the-block Virgin Voyages, so we didn't even try to consider comparing to that cruise. But with our Celebrity experience as a baseline, we had set a pretty low bar for Princess. I had also done some research on the Sapphire Princess, and noted that the rooms looked dated, as the ship is a little over 20 years old. While the room matched the photos and videos I had seen, it was very clean and functional; our room steward was amazing too. There were a few of niggly little things; shower curtain vs. glass door, an irritating motion light in the closet area, and the fact that the music channels on the TV never worked for the entire cruise.

Four dining rooms with the same menu options

Desserts were too good to pass up

A curious thing about the Sapphire Princess, is that there is no one single main dining room. Instead, there are four separate dining rooms that have slightly different decor and reservation policies, but serve exactly the same menu in each. I found the entrées to be good to pretty good, but lacked unique flavour. e.g. the pepper steak was well cooked (medium rare), but the sauce lacked oomph. Other diners noted that the chicken meal was virtually identical from evening to evening, with just subtle differences in preparation/sauce. Service was very good everywhere, with some hiccups in the main dining room (e.g. claims that they were unable to seat our group of 8 despite a table for 8 being available).

Buffet offered more choice and variety

Being serenaded by one of the servers

After a few days, we realised that the Horizon Court buffet was usually a better option for our mixed group of diners. Each night was a different theme and they offered a number of menu items for that evening. French night was a particularly good dinner, and I'd have to rate it at very good - high praise for a buffet meal. It's a strangely cramped buffet area, and the food is duplicated on each side of the Horizon Court, with no access through the middle. We didn't have many lunches on board, as we were usually in the towns exploring, but breakfasts were pretty good (3.5/5) provided that you weren't trying to grab food at peak rush hour. i.e. you could waltz right up and grab a fresh waffle if you timed it right. And then there was the server, John, who had a great voice, and would wander through the tables, belting out tunes from a portable speaker.

Other food and beverage on board

RFID token access to room

We didn't sample any of the paid, premium restaurants, and we only had the pizza by the pool a couple if times, which was decent enough. We didn't try the burger bar, but the soft serve ice cream bar got visited more times than it should have. Drinks were not ridiculously priced, but it seemed odd to me that a 222 ml can of soda was priced the same as a 355 ml one. Wine by the glass that I ordered with meals was good enough for my palate; we didn't try any by the bottle. One couple in our party had upgraded their package, and they usually made a point of coming back from the bar with both hands full. Similar to Virgin Voyages, a small RFID medallion was used to buy drinks, access your stateroom, and identify you when coming and going from the ship during the day.

Ship spaces

Cornhole games in the atrium

Unlike our Celebrity ship, the Sapphire Princess did not have a massive, open air atrium in the centre. There was an open space that spanned three floors, where the main shops and a few lounges were connected, but not nearly as grand as Celebrity Solstice class ships. However, these spaces were still in good nick, despite the age of the ship, whereas our experience on Celebrity showed lots of needed maintenance. At over 20 years old, the ship was a little more traditionally decorated, but it wasn't a deterrent to the experience on board. We spent a fair bit of time in the Explorer’s Lounge, where they held daily trivia and other entertainment, but we called it the "Freezer Lounge", due to the extreme level of air conditioning.

The Princess Theatre

The last visitor on the tour

Speaking of entertainment, we only went to the main theatre a couple of times, where we found the performances lacklustre, even to the Celebrity experience. Shows didn't have the polish or zazz that we'd seen on our Alaskan trip, and couldn't come close to the Virgin experience. The magician was a cheesy version of David Copperfield, if that's even possible, and I didn't last more than 15 minutes before ducking out the back. They also held some port talks in the theatre, but one guy just stood in front of his Powerpoint presentation and read the bullets from his slides. With some amazing port cities and old town areas, some cruisers likely missed great things to see and do if they relied solely on that guy's presentations for content. The best "show" in the theatre was the cooking demonstration on our last at-sea day, where the head chef and restaurant manager put on a comical display, followed by a tour of one of the galleys.

Overall impressions

In summary, this was an excellent itinerary and aside from a couple of rushed stops, it was a pretty good balance of ports/cities and at sea days. Given that Princess was one of the few operators that had this region but used Copenhagen as their home port, we have to give credit for that. While our Celebrity Alaskan cruise had a far less interesting itinerary, the one thing that it did better than Princess was entertainment. Looking back at my review of that cruise, the dining room meals were barely passable and rated the food between a 3 and 3.5; I'd have to give Princess a leg up from that, so maybe almost a 4 for most meals, with a few disappointments here and there. I preferred the room layout on Celebrity, but still have to give the overall win between the two to Princess. If only Virgin Voyages had an itinerary like the Princess one!

Travelling in Japan

Travel and Leisure

Well, for our first trip to the Orient together, I would call it a moderate success. We did and saw amazing things, but also endured challenges and frustration along the way. Not enough to ward off others from going, but sufficient that I would offer a number of cautions before sending friends or family to Japan.

The downsides

In a nutshell, it was too hot, crowded and difficult to work around the language issues for us. Additionally, we found the cuisine not to our liking, which I know is a specific issue to us. Let's review each of these.

Too hot even for this local

The heat: We had picked the first two weeks of October primarily because we had pivoted away from another trip that we were going to take to South America around the same time, so we had this gap in our travel schedule. And we managed to get good prices for air for this window, vs. any time later, where the price jumped up significantly. Daytime highs were always above 28º C, but mornings started out in the low 20s, with 85% humidity. We'd literally be sweating at 7 pm at night, even after the sun had gone down. This made for abbreviated days; by early afternoon, the oppressive heat had sapped our energy such that we'd head back to the air-conditioned haven of our Airbnb. In retrospect, we should have gone in late October/November; we would have caught the autumn colours too. You can/could travel in the spring to avoid the heat, when you'll get to see the cherry blossoms, but you'd get even more of the associated...

Of course it's busy at the Shibuya Scramble

Crowds: I knew it would be busy there, but still was not really prepared for just how crazy it was. We'd been to the big attractions in Paris, Rome and other major European cities... how bad could it really get? Bad. Aside from a couple of times where we got to the temple early or went a lesser known site, the masses of people around us was astounding. I had told her that since they drive on the left there, that they walk on that side as well; that turned out not to be true, and often there'd be signage to walk on the right side of the stairs instead of left! We did find a few oases of calm here and there, but for the most part, were surrounded by a sea of people.

Wait... is this a bear warning?

Language barrier: In Europe, most people in the service industry have some level of English proficiency; not so in Japan. We'd have to use our phones with Google Translate to decipher signs or instructions multiple times each day. And despite being a popular 1st-world tourist destination, not all attractions were well-equipped with English information or summary descriptions. Sometimes, even Google Maps would give you directions to turn right at "外苑東通り/都道319号". Wha? Thank goodness I managed to recalibrate my iPhone's GPS to actually point me in the direction we needed to go, as many times we would have been lost.

Typical Japanese-only menu

The cuisine: I thought I would love Japanese food... after all, I like sushi, teriyaki anything, tempura, and noodles. Unfortunately, she doesn't really eat any seafood, but I still thought we'd be ok, knowing that there's lots of chicken on rice, bbq etc. to get us by. However, what I didn't realise, is that many dishes use a fish sauce base or broth, which threw even me off. So almost every afternoon, we'd be on Google, searching for meal options that we thought we'd like. We defaulted to some non-Japanese restaurants a couple of times (Indian and a kebab joint), and went to the same beef restaurant twice (Japanese beef is excellent). And I'm not ashamed to say that we had hamburgers a few times as well; they were some of the best burgers we've ever had!

Getting around

I wouldn't say it was easy navigating around Japan, but if you know what you're doing, it's relatively fast and efficient, most using the prepaid IC card (Icoca, Suica). But since we were Japanese travel rookies, we made quite a few mistakes. Our first was trying to use the bus; since they are usually quite full, they actually open the doors before the actual stop to let out passengers, and then pull up to let new passengers in. We did not know this of course, so ran back 20 metres or so when our bus pulled up, pressing the button on the rear door for access (noobs!). Finding the stop for a particular bus at larger transfer station also proved to be a challenge, and we missed more than one bus while trying to find the right place to stand and wait.

The Icoca card we used is worth discussing for a moment. These IC (integrated circuit) cards are used for pretty much all your public transit needs. Confusingly, they are called different names based on the region in Japan where you purchased it, but they all operate the same and are interchangeable. For us foreigners, you can't use your smartphone, as the app isn't built to accept our VISA cards for some reason, so you have to go and buy a physical card from a station. The other annoying thing is that you need cash to re-charge your IC card, as we found out when trying to exit a station once, and her card had run low on funds. You can use your IC card to pay for things at 7-11, Lawsons and Family Mart, but it's not really a benefit, as you can tap your VISA or smartphone there anyways.

We struggled with the metro a number of times, where the name of the end stop was not listed on the signage for the subway platform we were waiting on (or couldn't find the right platform since the end destination we wanted was not shown). Sometimes we just gambled that Google Maps had the right time and platform was correct, and got on the train that was loading at that specific time. And even if it was listed correctly, you'd have to wait for the English version to come up on the overhead sign.

Some fare gates are IC card only!

Then there's some of the "Limited Express" trains where you pay for reserved seating on top of the fare subtracted from your IC card. This got us when we were trying to go to Nikko, as we thought we had become Japan train veterans by this time. Nope. Since we had not pre-purchased the reserved seating leg of our trip, we had to wait almost 2 hours for a train with available seating. You end up tapping in/out with your IC card and inserting your paper ticket for the Express portion. Confused yet?

Standing in-between cars to Osaka

The final gotcha was booking our Shinkansen ride from Odwara to Osaka. We used the "Easy for Foreigners" ticket machine in Kyoto, and we were successful on that trip, but this time we screwed up royally. It seemed we had found the train that was leaving around the desired departure time, but no Green Car (first class) or Ordinary Car reserved seats were available. We thought, we'll just buy the non-reserved tickets, and do the festival seating when the train shows up. Well, when our train arrived at the station, it was coming from Tokyo and all of the seats were taken already, so we ended up having to stand for over an hour and a half!

Stranger things

In no particular order, here are a number of things that seemed odd to us, as Canadians who are relatively well travelled.

You need cash here: I was surprised at how often we needed to use up our Japanese yen, especially at restaurants. Many/most of the food vendors on the street and smaller establishments were cash-only, so it was something that you need to verify before you sit down with only your VISA. Also, in most/all of the cultural attractions, cash was the only way to pay, specifically at the temples in Kyoto. And then there's the aforementioned IC card recharging; I'd say that in general you need 2-3 times more cash in Japan than you'd bring on a European trip. Oh and for you Americans using your credit card, make sure you know your PIN, as almost 1/2 the places we went did not accept tap to pay.

A small park where we ate in Nikko

There's not many places to sit: When we were walking around the public spaces in towns and attractions, we found that there was not a lot of seating. Apparently this is by design, to eliminate loitering and their cultural emphasis on order. Nonetheless, it does make things somewhat annoying for foreigners, as it is also a no-no to eat or drink on the street. So what do you do? For street vendors, you stand and eat/drink right in front of the place you bought it, then move on. If you've bought some take-away, you either take it back to your hotel/Airbnb, or as we did a couple if times, go to a nearby park where there's benches to eat.

Restaurants: Aside from the issues we had trying to find places we wanted to eat, there are some other curiosities to be aware of. When you sit down, wet towels, called oshibori, are provided for cleaning hands before eating; this is not to be used to clean your face or wipe food from your mouth. However, often we'd find that either no napkins/serviettes were provided, or if they did, they would be small waxy things that were almost useless. We ended up buying a pack of paper towels to bring with us to restaurants for this purpose. Finally, the idea of having a separate dessert course after a meal is not traditional in Japan, so once you're done with your meal, you simply get up and pay at the till. A few times, a bill was presented after delivering our food, and you brought that up to pay on exit.

Minor hotel differences: As with other countries we've visited, it was not common to get wash/face cloths in Japan, nor was there any bar soap provided. We bring our own for both, but just something to be aware of for those who prefer these. There was always shampoo and conditioner, but those with brand preference might want their own products. We booked Airbnbs because we wanted to be able to do our own laundry, and at each place they provided the necessary washing detergent pods. One unique feature of their shower/bath rooms, was the integrated heating system, where you could hang your laundry, and dry your clothes overnight. It was very effective, and we used it a number of times. Lastly, all properties we visited had automatic bidet toilet seats!

All things cute: We both knew about Hello Kitty, anime and other cute icons that are popular in Japan, but we didn't realise the extent of it. It's referred to as "kawaii", a cultural phenomenon which emphasizes cuteness, childlike innocence, charm, and simplicity. Hello Kitty traffic barriers? Why not? They were also embroidered into the headrests on one of our trains! There's even these shops, where you buy nothing but cute little keychains and things from rows and rows of vending machines. We didn't get it.

Clean streets, but where are the trash bins?

It's very clean and orderly: Everything is very clean and you're safe pretty much anywhere. Unlike major European destinations where pickpockets abound, you don't need to worry about that here, even in crowded areas. The people are courteous, but since many/most don't speak any English, they do not engage with foreigners whatsoever. Despite sometimes questionable signage, everyone was very orderly (even tourists) and queued up properly for transit or other busy places. 

A rarely found recycling container

Trash talk: Speaking of clean, there's virtually no trash anywhere to be seen, despite the lack of rubbish bins. You heard that right... they don't have garbage cans in public areas. Apparently this was as a result of the 1995 Sarin gas attack, and cultural norms to keep things clean. So you end up packing your trash around with you, and then dispose of it at the hotel or Airbnb. However, we did find the amount of plastic waste to be astounding, considering that there is no soft plastics recycling, and it ends up in the garbage incinerators. Even in the free public washrooms (which are almost everywhere), there's no trash bin, so you don't get paper towels to dry your hands (most did not have the air dryers either).

The conclusion

Japan was definitely an interesting country to visit, and it is certainly a unique place to travel. While I think the above may deter first-timers from going, that is not my intent. You will experience a country rich in history and culture that is far different than anything we've ever seen before. At 16 nights, I feel as though we did a pretty decent job of seeing a variety of things and places; if I had to trim a couple of nights, we could have dropped our "decompression stop" day in Kyoto, and another on departure from Osaka. I would also suggest that maybe, just maybe, an organised tour (vs. self-guided) would take out much of the angst that we experienced with missed opportunities and transit mishaps.

In summary, the obvious question is, "would I go again?", to which the answer is "no". Not because I didn't like it, but because I've seen enough to satisfy my needs. Even if the handful of negative issues could have been overcome, I'd still say that I don't need to go back. Sorry Japan.

Japan Act III: mountains, onsen and Osaka

Travel and Leisure

Day 12/13: Nikko

After the hubub of Tokyo, I knew we would need a break. While you can do Nikko as a day-trip from Tokyo, it's a pretty long day. And being the newbies to Japan rail that we are, we screwed up by not pre-booking the "Limited Express" seats, so we had to wait for availability and only got to Nikko around 2 pm. After a whirlwind experience with the woman at the tourist information centre, we mapped our visit into two blocks; afternoon at the Kanmangafuchi Abyss and Tamozawa Imperial Villa, then next morning around the historic temple sites. And it’s cooler here… thank goodness!

The abyss was a short bus ride and 15 minute walk from where we dropped our bags at the Nikko Station Hotel II. It is an easy riverside stroll along this relatively short length of gorge but the dramatic term "abyss" seemed a bit overstated. Sure there's some small waterfalls and swirling rapids, but the area was also used as, you guessed it, a place of worship. There are about 70 stone statues of Jizo, a Bodhisattva who cares for the deceased. The red hats and bibs have something to do with protecting children or just reverence and kindness for the dead - it's not really well defined on western websites.

Another short walk from the entrance to the abyss, was the Imperial Villa. With almost no tourists, this was another great find for us to explore. The original core of the complex was actually used by the emperor in Tokyo around 1872, but was moved to Nikko in 1899. The rest of the complex was built around this, and used as a summer house for crown prince Taisho. I imagined the scenes from the Vancouver-shot Shōgun tv show, taking place in and around this extravagant villa.

The next morning, since we were already up early (we never really adjusted to the timezone), we hit the temples. Armed with the info from the tourist information, we hit ‎⁨Rin’nōji Taiyū-in Temple while the rest of the tourists were waking up/taking the train in from Tokyo. Since we were told that our next temple stop would be very busy, we made our way over there just after opening at 9 am.

Toshogu Shrine was already getting slammed with visitors upon our arrival (I use Google Photos to remove people from our pics). With over a dozen structures scattered over the shrine site, the crowd was spread out a bit, but it was still very busy. You end up following a stream of tourists up a lengthy set of stairs to the tomb of Ieyasu, which after a lot of huffing and puffing, was really underwhelming. Back to our hotel to grab our bags and get on our reserved seats back to Tokyo then onward for...

Days 13 and 14: Hakone

Hotel photo of the open-air onsen

Hakone is known as an onsen (hot spring) town, where dozens of springs provide hot water for the town's spas and ryokan. We stayed at Hotel Senkei, in a traditional room, where the property's hot water and spas are fed by a local spring, as we found out our first evening, when a tree fell and disrupted both services!

The town itself is small and spread out, so with a supper-time arrival, we really only had time to grab dinner and settle in. The next day, we did the big loop of Hakone, using train, cable-car (funicular), ropeway (gondola), pirate ship (?!?) and bus. It is pretty touristy, but you get nice vantage points over the valley and on clear days, views of Mt. Fuji. We pretty much followed the Hakone Round Course outlined on the website, but did not stop at the museums or Gora Park. With a stop at a lakeside restaurant for some schnitzel, this took most of a leisurely day.

Back in town, the feed pipe for the hot springs had been repaired, so we both took in the spas (hers outside on the 5th floor overlooking the valley, mine inside). The thing about these towns, is that they are really catering to the daytrippers, and so restaurant selection is limited at night (same with Nikko). Still trying to avoid the fishy-taste of the Japanese food, we settled on a small (and pricey) burger joint called Box Burger, but we were not disappointed! Down a series of tiny streets and alleyways, this little place served up a meal as good as or better than our Wagyu burgers back in Kyoto.

Days 15-17: On to Osaka

We made a mistake on booking the Shinkansen high-speed train (more on the next post) but managed to to make the ~4 hour journey to our Airbnb in Osaka, located in the Namba area. I knew we'd be getting pretty exhausted from our journey thus far, so I had chosen one that was really in the heart of the action, and we definitely were! We didn't need to use the metro to get around, as we were located only a block from Kuromon Market and a few blocks from bustling Dotonbori; we certainly did not lack for Osaka atmosphere.

Our first night there, we took in the action on the brightly lit Dotonbori street, where there are thousands of tourists taking pictures and sampling the food along the way. There's a little historical street that runs parallel to this, Hozenji Yokocho, with narrow alleys that are lined by traditional restaurants and izakaya, and are reminiscent of the atmosphere of past eras. We had our dinner there, at a neat little spot called Dotonbori Terrace, where we had our last Okonomiyaki.

We'd pretty much urban-Japan'ed out by this point, so we spent a leisurely morning poking around the Namba Parks & City shopping complex, adjacent to the Namba station. During our trip planning, we searched for festivals that would be taking place in Japan during our trip. We found in a suburb of Osaka, there would be the Kishiwada Danjiri Festival taking place while we were there, and so we made this our last afternoon/evening event.

During the day, a hundred or more men pull elaborately crafted wooden Danjiri floats perilously fast around street corners, while riders "surf" on the rooftops, egging their teams on. We didn't see any crashes, but apparently it does happen! After an evening break where the respective teams split off for their bbq dinners, they decorate the floats with lanterns, and parade them back through the streets at night.

It was a fitting way to end our Japanese trip, if a little frustrating, as I'll detail next in...

The trials and tribulations of travelling in Japan

Japan Act II: Tokyo

Travel and Leisure

Part II of our Japanese adventure took us to Tokyo for 5 nights. Using the Shinkansen high-speed train, the total journey was only about 4 hours, end-to-end. Tip for first time users of this service, is that you want to make sure you buy reserved seats, preferably in the Green (1st class) cars, or at least the ordinary cars. We didn't get reserved seats on our 2nd Shinkansen journey, and that was a big mistake (more on that in the next episode).

Day 7: travel to Tokyo and settle in

Anyhow, we managed to find our Airbnb without much fuss, and used the rest of Day 7 of the trip to settle in, grab a bite to eat and hit the local supermarket. Getting a little tired of the Japanese cuisine, she found an Indian restaurant a few blocks away down a neat restaurant street; the place was called Dipmahal Yotsuya, and it was great! We're normally leery of having meals that don't match the ethnicity of the countries we are visiting, but this was as good as we'd had locally, and great value to boot. Look at the size of that naan!

Day 8: Asakusa area and Shinjuku at night

We were about due for some more temple time, so we hit the big one in Tokyo: Sensō-ji. The lead-up to the actual temple grounds is pretty neat, as you follow a long shopping street for over 200 meters, called Nakamise, which has been around for several centuries. Today, it sells a combination of street food and touristy items, but it is a lively pedestrian-only area; we got there just as they were opening up the shops, but it was packed by the time we walked out. 

Admission to this temple and the grounds was free, and understandably, this was a popular tourist spot. We wandered around for a bit, and even went across the street from the Thunder Gate entrance, to the Asakusa Culture Tourist Information Center observation deck; it gives you a great view down the shopping street and temple area. Since we saw that there might actually be some cooler weather coming (did I mention how hot it is here?), we headed to the local Uniqlo for some shopping.

That evening, I had mapped out a brief tour of the Shinjuku area, starting with The Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, for it's two free observation decks, at 202 metres above street level. Unfortunately, this was one of the only drizzly weather evenings we'd experience, so daytime views were not great. However, arriving just before dusk, we were able to take in the nighttime lights, and as a bonus, found out that they run an evening light show. projected onto the outside of the towers!

After taking in the brief light show, we walked the short distance to Omoide Yokocho (Memory Lane); this network of narrow alleys and streets hosts many tiny bars and restaurants serving yakitori. If you've ever seen the original Blade Runner, this area is reminiscent of that first scene where Deckard sits down for some street food. With tourists and diners packing the area, we were lucky enough to find to available bar seats right away, and took in the experience with cold beverages and skewers barbecued right in front of us!

Day 9: teamLab light exhibit and Shibuya at night

Recommended to us by more than a few people, the teamLab Borderless is a must-see exhibition that is difficult to describe. Part art show, part immersive experience, it is described as a world of artworks without boundaries, a museum without a map. Indeed, you walked through the dark passages of the facility with art and light moving around you, and the light often interacted with your actual movements. It is necessary to book reservations, so we had set up for the earliest (9-9:30 am) slot for the day. As such, it wasn't too busy, and we spent around 90 minutes wandering the ever-changing lightscape around us.

It was a Sunday, but the shopping mall that teamLabs is attached to was open, so we did a little bit of window-shopping before taking in some of the views of the Tokyo Tower. If you think that it looks a little bit too similar to the Eiffel Tower, you'd be correct, as it was directly modelled after the iconic French version. Just as the Paris version is used for radio communications, Tokyo Tower was designed specifically for that purpose - and a tourist attraction as a secondary intent.

That evening, we had to go see the other iconic Tokyo experience - Shibuya Scramble Crossing. Located in the centre of the Shibuya district, seven streets come together in this one intersection, and when the walk lights turn green, chaos ensues! We went up to the 2nd floor of the Starbucks on one of the corners to capture this image, and it is definitely a spectacle to behold. We continued walking around the busy area, taking in the energy and sights of the brightly lit streets.

Day 10: Enoshima & Kamakura day trip

Two days is really enough for us in Tokyo, so we planned the rest of our time based there to day-trip; first was the seaside towns of Enoshima and Kamakura. Enoshima is mostly known as a touristy island that offers variety of attractions, including a shrine, park, observation tower and caves. Mount Fuji can be seen when the conditions are just right, but it was hazy enough to prohibit that view for us. We still hiked to the top, and then back down to see the caves that had been carved by the ocean, then converted to shrines. It was a tough morning of many stairs as, you guessed it, it's really hot here.

A streetcar ride took us to Kamakura, where the principal attraction is another giant Buddha; this one a little smaller than the one in Nara, but since the temple hall that housed it was destroyed in a typhoon, this one sits out in the open. There are a number of temples to see in this town, but at this point we were pretty templed-out. So we strolled the pedestrian shopping street for a bit, then caught the train back to Tokyo.

Day 11: Kawagoe (Little Edo) day trip

We used our last day in the Tokyo area to do another day trip, this time to Kawagoe, known as Little Edo because the main street is still lined with Kurazukuri (clay-walled warehouse-styled) buildings that retain an ambience reminiscent of an old town from the Edo Period (1603-1867). It's a relatively easy day trip, that is, if you can figure out where the right bus stop is that takes you to the old town.

There's other temples and Kawagoe Castle there, but we decided to pass on those, but did find the interesting Kawagoe Festival Museum. Since we were going to similar festival in Osaka, this was a great warm-up visit, and at only ¥200 to get in, a great bargain. This festival takes place in the third weekend of October, the same way it has for 370 years. Huge wooden floats are dressed up and paraded through the streets, then face each other in performance “battles” of the hayashi music played by the onboard participants.

Back in Tokyo, we had a relatively quiet night, but did discover a great restaurant, Teppan Dining SAYA. It was a little more high-end than what we had experienced so far, but we were just happy to have something close by for us to try. We discovered that we both liked the signature dish, Okonomiyaki, which is a savory Japanese pancake dish made from a batter of flour, eggs, dashi stock, and your choice of other toppings. We tried the "Osaka-style", pictured here. 

We returned to the Airbnb to pack up for the last five nights of our trip, to be continued... Click here for Act III.