To The Mysterious East.

Barbara and Colin, the senior travellers, of the now very previous episode (it's still floating around, just replace Japan with France in the URL), spent four weeks in England after their return from France. Finally (boo hoo), it was time to return to Australia, via Japan (hurray).
Why they went this way is as follows. (And for ease of expression, I'm changing to the first person, Colin.)

Our second daughter, Lynne, had been an English conversation teacher in Japan in 1998-1999. We visited Lynne there, in May of 1999, and the three of us travelled by sight-seeing stages on the Bullet Train from Tokyo to Hiroshima and back again. Japan is a fascinating country, another world. Three weeks is not a long enough time to spend there.
Near Hiroshima, during a day trip to Miyajima Island (which you can see below left), we met a Japanese couple, Akihiro and Masako Nakanishi. They are in the photo below right which shows the Miyajima Island expedition in an eatery on top of what is actually the centre mountain in the first picture. From left you can see an American student, Warren Kim; Akihiro; Colin; Lynne; Barbara; and Masako.

Warren Kim was staying in the same Ryokan and by co-incidence was visiting the island the same day. Akihiro and Masako were making a day trip from Sakai, near Osaka. The day spent exploring Miyajima Island together made us firm friends, and after we returned to Australia, a correspondence continued by e and snail mail.

Soon, we decided to learn Japanese in order to share the burden of correspondence more equably. At night school classes in Geelong we became friendly with a Japanese university student (Yuki Iwasaki) who was helping the night school teacher.
One day we had a visit from Yuki at 68 Learmonth Street. She asked us if her best friend from Sendai University (not the big Sendai in north east Honshu, but the smaller Sendai near Kagoshima in southern Kyushu) could stay with us for a month to practise English. So, a couple of weeks later we received Ritsuko Shimizu, still conscious after thirty six hours of travel. She began her journey by car from her home town, Kanoya, in south Kyushu. After a two hour drive along windy roads skirting the wild coastline of Kagoshima Bay, she reached Kagoshima Airport. Then there was a flight to Fukuoka in north Kyushu, a wait, then an international flight to Kuala Lumpur. Another plane put her on the way to Melbourne. From Melbourne, Yuki brought her by car to Queenscliff.
In a few days, Ritsuko (pictured left) became a part of our family.
So we chose to return through Japan to visit Akihiro and Masako near Osaka, and to visit the Shimizu family in the "wilds" of southern Kyushu.

This story comes from Barbara's travel diary, but it has been re-written by Colin. Barbara was also expedition photographer and took an enormous number of mostly excellent photographs. Unfortunately, due to the demise of our scanner, we can't show any of the 2001 photographs on this page. Colin typed these pages, adding bits of his own ideas and is responsible for everything that is wrong with these pages. Barbara is the first person.

Tuesday 2/10/01. Day 68. Wet, AGAIN.

I spent all morning feeling jittery and sorting things out. We have to leave Margaret's by 3-00pm.
Take-off time is 6-55pm so we must be at Heathrow by 5-00pm. Margaret and Sacha accompanied us to Dulwich North Railway Station.
I said a sad farewell.
Sacha was asleep.

We caught the 3-15 pm train. Travelled above ground to London Bridge Station; then down the escalators into the bowels of the Underground. The Jubilee Line to Green Park; then the Piccadilly Line to Heathrow Terminal 3. We came in at 4-55pm.
Margaret had predicted 1.5 hours for the journey; so this was good time. We checked our big bags and went to customs.

Customs took a fair while because their inspection was thorough; this was a fortnight after the destruction of the World Trade Centre in New York.
Everybody had to place their carry on/suspicious articles on a conveyor, and then, unencumbered, pass through a gateway. Sometimes the gateway said, "Buzz!". People whose passage caused the gateway to buzz were frisked and sent through again. Perhaps metal buttons alarmed whatever it was in the screening system, because Colin made the gate buzz when he walked through, but he had nothing in his pockets at all. (Colin remarks gloomily, "This is normal."). Anyway, some girl near us with obvious metal buttons set the buzzer going as she walked through; that's what led me to this conclusion.
Meanwhile Colin's hand luggage was buzzing sympathetically on the conveyor belt that took inanimate objects past whatever it was that was supposed to nip terrorist plots in the bud. The buzz-triggering bags were unpacked, one by one, by a squad of aged female spooks: probably (Colin thought) some retired headmistresses had rushed to volunteer for this task. Once the offending item was found, it was confiscated. Despite the warning signs displayed everywhere to alert literate would be terrorists, Colin had been equipped to hold the world to ransom with a pair of rusty nail scissors.
His dreams of world conquest tumbled to ruin as his scissors joined the other WMD in a plastic bin, to go where all the others have gone maybe, never to be seen again, by us anyway.

This baggage inspection took quite a while: I was able to make a telephone call to Margaret to tell her we'd got this far: I wasn't able to tell her much more, probably because I only put 20p in the machine: maybe I should have put in 30p or 40p.
But, by the time I'd realised this, Colin was through Customs and it was time to board the aeroplane. We made some hurried purchases (whisky and gin), and walked down the ramp onto JAL 422.

About one hour after take off it was dinner-time. We had a printed menu with a choice of cuisines. After a Bombay Sapphire gin and tonic, I ate "Western". It was
Entree, Sole Meuniere.
Main, Turkey en Croute with potatoes and spinach, three bean salad, bread roll with butter.
Dessert, Strawberry Oval - a sort of trifle I would say.

Colin ate "Japanese". What it was I didn't write down, and he of course, having helped me with my gin and tonic and my bottle of red, can't remember. But he says, whatever it was, it was delicious.
Afterwards we drank coffee as the aeroplane flew over or near Hamburg, Copenhagen, St.Petersburg, and Lake Ladoga on its way to the Far East.
Colin recalled that he'd heard, one winter (1942) a temporary railway was laid across the ice covering Lake Lagoda to get supplies past the German blockade of Leningrad (well it's St. Petersburg, now) And while St.Petersburg was still Leningrad, about a million Russians perished there, of injury, disease, or starvation, during the nine hundred day siege of that city in World War Two. And Hamburg? destroyed by fire and high explosive bombing in 1943.
High above the horrors of that not so long ago time, I watched "Brigitte Jones' Diary" on my personal television screen.
The food had been excellent and we were offered bottled water during the flight.
I went to sleep at some stage and awoke over the Sea Of Japan. It was daylight and there were only about two hours of the flight to go.

We were about to start our first day in Osaka.