We anticipate that our itinerary will keep changing as we find our personal right balance between spending too little time in a place (don’t want to leave a place with regrets!) and saving a place for another trip all together e.g. we will go to Croatia as part of a Greece trip sometime in the future.
The original plan is an anti-clockwise circle from London then around Western Europe. The only fixed dates were our pre-booked flight from London getting to Barcelona and to be around Cote D’Azur in time for the Cannes Film Festival (near the opening ceremony on the 16th of May). Our general approach is to touch on most countries, their capitals and also some of their out of town locations to get a broader ‘feel’ for the place.
We will also be doing our best to catch up with friends and family who either live there or are also travelling (Rosie, Paul & Billy and Cara in London, Marion & Bill in London, Sarah in Barcelona, Roby, Claudio & Danny in Turin, Marion & Bill (again in Venice), Mike & Margaret in Florence and Rosie, Paul & Billy (again in London). Unfortunately whilst Maryke & Steve will be in Europe at the same time we don’t come close enough to catch up over there (good thing they live in Perth!).
Our itinerary will be found here soon and we’ll update it when we can to what actually happened.
To follow are some of our favourite photos and a few brief comments on the trip so far.
This is Shinjuku, where we stayed in Tokyo. It is beautiful at night with the abundance of fluoro lights on most of the buildings in this (supposed) nightlife suburb. We found the nightlife to be fairly tame and quiet.
Shibuya is another nightlife district and is a shopping central with the most people that we have seen anywhere in Japan.
The first night in Tokyo. Cam eating mystery food ordered from a vending machine (menu shown only kunji/Japanese) in a restaurant.
Harajuku is the home of weird and wacky Japanese ‘fashion’ – such as Lolita/little bo peep and gothic style.
Mel in the manicured Imperial Palace East Gardens. It was very peaceful and serene in this Japanese garden and we were lucky enough to be here for the week that the cherry blossoms bloom.
Fruit salad anyone? Fruit can be very expensive in Tokyo – these melons cost AUD$31.50 each. We had heard of this and had brought some apples with us for our time here.
Cam found a friend at Akihabara Electric town (electronics heaven in Tokyo).