Day 11 - Koya to Tokyo

Not much to report today, but we shall start with the start. Quite literally. As we were staying in the temple lodgings, we were invited to observe the morning prayer ceremony, which meant that we were up with the sun.

It was quite bizarre - there were only 4 monks, kneeling in front of quite an impressive shrine and chanting. There was a LOT of chanting. And not particularly tuneful either. There seemed to be one guy who was leading, but for the most part they were "harmonising"... You could tell which guy was the boss because every now and then he would hit a singing bowl. And of course, there was a lot of incense. Because who doesn't love the smell of incense in the morning?

This may sound quite negative, but once we'd got our heads around how it worked it was quite mesmerising and hypnotic. But also, 40 minutes long and starting at the crack of dawn.

After the service we were shown through to breakfast which was strikingly similar to dinner last night. Which mostly meant pickled things, warm rice and tofu. This was the first meal we'd had that we just didn't want to eat. Bit of a shame, but, at least there was rice.

Once we had got showered and checked out it was 8:20 and time to get on the move back to the big city. Pretty smooth journey - we are clearly transport experts now... We even worked out we could get off at a random station before Tokyo to get to our hotel earlier than planned! Which meant we arrived at 3:40. So. 7 hours and 20 minutes of trains. Ant did some sleeping, I did some reading. We were hoping for a good view of Fuji, but the weather was pretty bad, so no joy. Still, a nice journey though and the super fast trains are super fast.

After we had settled into the hotel, we headed out to Shibuya to visit a few shops - Uniqlo and Muji are both ridiculously cheap here, so we wanted to refill our wardrobes. Bit of a dead end clothes wise, although I am now the proud owner of some snazzy new glasses. Woohoo.

Dinner, swim in the pool, bedtime.

Still a nice day but too heavy on the travel. Given how much we wanted to see, it had to happen. We had just been avoiding thinking about it.

Penultimate day tomorrow and we have exciting things planned.