BulleToKyoto [written 7th May]

[[I'm a little behind on my blogs for various reasons. I'm in NZ now - but here are the blogs as I wrote them at the time. It's 4am so please excuse bad grammar]]:

I am sat in the Tokyo Shinkasen [Bullet Train] station and about to get on my first Bullet Train - the Hikari super-express.

The Bullet train is incredible and they look how trains from the future are supposed to look. Ever since I was little I`ve wanted to go on one and I can`t honestly remember ever being this exited about getting on a train.

I'm off to Kyoto today and I've booked 2 nights to stay. Having a rail pass is bringing back memories of inter-railing round Europe - but these trains are incredible. After an airport-like check-in you just flash your pass and you can get on any train [except the fastest - Nozomi] and go anywhere without booking. If you want a guaranteed seat, you just turn up and say so, it
's free and you can be on a train within 5 min and at your destination 300 miles away in under 2 hours. The trains are so long and the carriages themselves so long that most stations have about 6 different escalators along the platform so that you can emerge near your carriage. The whole system works amazingly well. In comparison - in France if you want to go on a TGV you have to book at least half a day in advance and you have to pay about 10 euros for the privilege, whist enduring the endlessly tedious French customer 'relations'. The Japanese courtesy and efficiency is a real breath of fresh air, and as a European you can't help get the feeling that our rail system was supposed to be like this...

The whole Shinkansen system is typically Japanese - especially in that it is hyper-modern, yet also has very traditional elements of Japanese culture. For example, all the staff are very formal. Trolley wheelers and ticket collectors bow before entering the carriage and turn around and bow to the carriage before leaving it for the next. And there are 'Western Style' toilets, 'Japanese style' and even urinals for those who can't decide. There is a room in one carriage for noisey children to to isolated and people who feel 'unwell'. And yet mixed with this modernity and forward thinking, there are smoking carriages, 3 in fact. I will return to the issue of Japanese and smoking later in the later blog.

So everyone is very polite to each other [a little like a giant first class lounge] which in a way it is. The Shinkansen is very expensive if you are Japanese. Tourists only can buy a rail-pass and you have to show your passport at each gate. It is wonderful to be treated to the best trains in Japan, where as places like Turkey and Italy seem to resent your presence on their trains.

Inside, the carriages are bright white, ten feet wide [3 seats then 2 seats] and each seat placed about 3 feet from the next, so even fully reclined it doesn't disturb your rear neighbor.
On the trains they serve delicious [and expensive] box lunches - wooden boxes full of yaki udon and sushi - all served with beer. There are even whole carriages you can sit in which don't have any announcements at all - unlike East Midlands trains who can't seem fight the urge to read out the entire ingredients of a packet of pringles before telling you they've kindly reduced the price to 8 pounds. It's pretty much a rolling heaven.

I'd like to say that it's beautiful rolling by all the Japanese scenery on the faultless rollingstock - but it's not. Granted it's raining, which never helps, but each town runs into another. [In my whole two weeks in Japan and 1000 miles of rail travel I never went more than 3 seconds without passing a house - that's passing not seeing!]. The view is intersected with green stabs of watery rice fields or huge hills and mountains. Japan has the most tunnelled mountains in the world and the Japanese population perches in between them using every square mile there is. So even at a basic level, it's a very differant view from the train in England and totally different from France.

I have a GPS gadget with me on my phone which measures speed and the fastest I clocked at a train going was 177mph. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it FELT faster than the groundspeed an airbus 330 needs to take off. And the faster you go the more amazing Japan seems. Though, anything looks good at 177 MPH! I'll be fair though - there are glimpses [and I mean glimpses!] of outstanding beauty. Be it a clouded mountain top, an ancient shrine or a view of a small figure clinging to a terraced mountain with a terrifying incline up a hand built stone path winding its way to an ancestral shack at the top before you slam into another mountain tunnel at a huge speed. Emerging you might see sights like vines, car garages or concrete clad mountain sides. And you wouldn't even know if you passed through a National Park, as Japan is almost unique in it's policy of not letting Natural Park status affect construction of habitation in anyway.

With a population closer in size to the USA rather than the UK, it's little wonder Japan looks as it does and a small miracle it's not more spoiled.

So I'm well out of Tokyo and the size of buildings begins to increase again - I'm reaching Kyoto. Kyoto has a much more relaxed vibe than Tokyo [once your're outside the immence station/shopping complex]. It is very traditional and is the only city that wasn't carpet bombed or A-bombed by the Allies during the Second World War [although if the weather was differant it would have been nuked instead of Hiroshima]. As a result, there is a wealth of temples and shrines in the area - mixed of course with the modern insance Japanese culture of gambling, food and flashing signs.

I was staying in the Geisha area and couldn't wait to explore the city...