at the platform so in true train spotter style (hee he) Rob was out with the camera taking photos!!! We got to our seats and were pretty amazed to see that these trains are loads wider than normal ones, they have a block of 2 seats on one side and 3 on the other and the carriages are really long. We ended up taking up more than our fair share of storage room as they don’t allow for much luggage space in Japan. It wasn’t long before we started off and once it really got going boy was it fast! The scenery was just a blur and you could hardly feel the carriage tilt at all. It was incredibly hot though and very difficult not to nod off, which inevitably we both did. Before we knew it were had travelled up most of Northern Japan in less than 3 hours, pretty impressive. Although having said that it was 15 minutes late!!! I think they have reduced a lot of the speeds of the trains due to the bad weather and large amounts of snow and a recent train crash which killed around 5 p

eople.

We really did feel the cold when we got outside especially as it was so hot on the train. There was a definite icy northern wind blowing, and it was pretty hard going walking through loads of snow and ice with our backpacks on! Thankfully it was only around 10 minutes walk to the hotel and on first impressions it seemed OK. Unfortunately in Japan you have to book in and pay for your room before you see it and take your bags off, bit of a pain really. The room was OK, not brilliant for the money but it was clean and we had free laptop internet, the only problem was that it was freezing. We couldn’t work out if it had heating or not, there wasn’t an obvious heater and the air con was definitely blowing out cold air! So we went down to reception to ask, which proved a little difficult due to my lack of Japanese and the hotel ladys lack of English, but we got there in the end. After much confusion and us being given a small gas heater we still