3RD - 6TH JANUARY

Wow Tokyo! The largest city in the world and we were here, only for a brief but non-stop time and we had a lot to cram into our 2 full days!

We touched down right on time and it wasn’t long before we felt the Tokyo chill in the air! We knew which train we needed to get us to Asakusa, the district where our hostel was, but first we needed to stop at the cash point to get another batch of foreign money! The cash point was a breeze to us and thankfully the man in front of us had kindly left about a fiver’s worth of coins in the money dispenser - (he had long gone by the time we spotted it!) - RESULT! So after our little windfall we made our way to the train station which was located underneath the airport. Now finding the train station and train information was easy enough but when it came to using the ticket machine, well that was another matter! You could only buy

tickets via the vending machine and yeap you guessed it, the machine only had instructions in Japanese. We were stood there looking at it in a rather bewildered manner when a lady came over and took our money and operated the machine for us! They obviously employ people to help the tourists use these very complicated looking ticket machines. In fact the whole train system was looking particularly complicated at this point. The underground maps were a maze of colours and there were three very distinctly different rail operators so it was going to be a matter of pot luck and Robs great map reading skills to ensure we reached our destination!!!

You kind of have a certain image of what to expect from a Japanese railway, well I suppose I did, as it is a well known fact that the Japanese have the most efficient railway system in the world. So I had an image of a very modern and high tech operation