Our trip to see Mount Fuji was not planned. Much like the rest of our trip, we decided what to do each day, while eating breakfast. By the time we had decided we were going to go to Mount Fuji it was around midday and we quickly hoped on a train from Tokyo to Hakone-Yumoto.
Tokyo is big. Very big. Unlike other cities it doesn’t have a clear bounds of either the CBD or the city itself. It’s simply a sprawling metropolis with many different areas to explore.
We began our second day in Tokyo by walking along the shopping strip of Omotesandō, and then exploring the grounds of Meiji Jingū.
In the middle of 2021 I saw a simple cartoon which was two calendar’s talking to each other. The first calendar, 2020, says “I’m the worst year ever”, the second calendar, 2021, says “Hold my beer”.
In reality it is hard to tell if 2021 was really worse than 2020. In many ways it was the same, in some ways it was better and in others it certainly was worse.
To start with the good, in Australia, we had a decent run from February to May of near normal lifestyles. Early in the year I moved house and, for the first time in over ten years, I have a backyard where I can spend a lot of time gardening and talking to the birds, lizards and spiders. Furthermore, in the later half of the year, we were all able to get vaccines and to travel interstate again.
In December 2019 I went for a two week trip to Japan. At the time I had no idea it would be the last overseas trip I would take for more than two years and just how much things would begin to change only a month later.
On the morning of my first day in Tokyo I explored the area around Ginza, the Tsukiji Fish Market and the Hama-rikyū Gardens.
The final leg of my trip was to visit Lisbon. Getting to Lisbon was meant to be a “quick” train ride from Porto. Unfortunately, the train drivers decided to go on strike, so I ended up in a very long queue, for a very long bus trip for the 300km+ journey. When I arrived in Lisbon it was night instead of the originally planned mid-Afternoon
To wrap up this European Trip I spent the last few days in Portugal.
My first stop was Porto, and to get there from Mannheim, Germany I caught a train to Frankfurt Airport and then a flight directly to Porto. This flight was the first of two rather eventful travel events in the last few days of the trip.