Rick is Away

A Final Top Ten

2010-03-14T10:46:00.000-07:00

Whenever we found ourselves enjoying something during the holiday we'd ask each other "Sure, but is it a top ten?" Ultimately we had about two dozen in our top ten, but here's our final list, all in a scientifically calculated order of preference:

1. Our First Day in Akaroa (Day 37) - after three weeks in cold, urban Japan we landed at Christchurch and drove two hours through spectacular and sunny countryside to Akaroa, the most picturesque place on earth. We topped it off with the best meal of the holiday, in the most beautiful location.

2. The Primeval Forest of Yakushima (Day 31) - we didn't allow nearly enough time to get to Yakushima Island and look around it, but we loved hiking through its dark and otherwordly forests of twisted trees during the three hours we scraped together. We'll be back.

3. The Tokyo Morning Fish Market (Day 16) - I wouldn't have predicted a fish market would make the top ten, but the vast range of seafood was visually stunning and watching the market come to life as the sun rose was a great introduction to Japan. Plus: fresh sushi breakfast.

4. Mount Doom and the Tongariro Alpine Crossing (Day 53) - not only was this walk a bit more of a challenge than most of our other treks, it also took us through landscapes we'd never seen before. The absolute highlight was the glorious Red Crater and its rumbling sister, Mount Doom.

5. A Helihike Up The Fox Glacier (Day 47) - our first helicopter ride was exciting enough, but then we got to clamber around a completely alien landscape, exploring ice hole and other beautiful formations which had never been seen before, and wouldn't be there tomorrow.

6. Wine Tasting In Marlborough (Day 50) - what could beat a lovely sunny day cycling in the countryside? Tasting ten superb wines, perhaps, and meeting with some of the friendliest wine makers in the world. A slow, relaxing and incredibly pleasant day.

7. The Temple of Ta Prohm (Day 68) - this jungle-infested temple was visually stunning and a great place to spend an afternoon clambering across rubble, exploring dark corridors and imagining the thrill of discovering our own, long-lost temple in the jungle.

8. The Penguins of Oamaru (Day 39) - we'd been told we might not see any yellow eyed penguins in Oamaru as they're totally wild, and so our expectations were set low. When a family of penguins waddled up the clifftop to stand a couple of feet away we felt like David Attenborough on a good day.

9. Frolicking On Ocean Beach (Day 59) - we somehow didn't get round to swimming in the sea until we reached Ocean Beach in week four of New Zealand, and we'd initially only stopped the car to have a look. The beach was soft and sandy, the waves were huge and warm, and we laughed throughout.

10. Carrie Fisher at Studio 54 (Day 5) - we came across Studio 54 completely by accident, booked on an impulse and had one of the best afternoons of laughter on the holiday. A very New York diversion on a cold, Christmassy afternoon in December.

So now you know! Thanks for reading.

x

Days 79, 80 and 81, the end

2010-03-14T10:38:00.000-07:00

Since getting back to London we've been spending a lot of time getting used to the time difference. This is more than just an academic exercise in my case as I'm due back at work tomorrow, yet still I'm collapsing with exhaution at around 6pm and then waking up again at 2am.

On Saturday we felt up to a spot of socialising, and had brunch with Terrie in Crouch End and then later invited Julie round for a roast chicken supper. Today I wanted a proper lazy Sunday in London, and for once the weather complied with a crisp and sunny spring afternoon. We had a pleasant stroll across the heath to Hampstead, watched the superb The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo from a big red sofa at the Hampstead Everyman cinema, then strolled back across the heath to the Bull & Last for dinner. Alas, we fell at the final hurdle as the Bull & Last had stopped serving food, but then we never did need much of an excuse to retreat home and order delivery from the Tiffin Tin.

And that, I suppose, is that.

Days 77 and 78, in which we go home

2010-03-11T19:31:00.001-08:00

After breakfast in our room and a spot of pottering, we left The Quay at 1pm and didn't stop travelling until we arrived home 25 hours later. This was in part due to a massive margin of error we'd been given for our transfer at Bangkok, allowing a total of eight hours to go from one plane to the next. We were kicking ourselves at our extreme risk aversion until we realised, ultimately, that if we'd gone for anything less we wouldn't have made it as our flight out of Phnom Penh was delayed by several hours, and then once at Bangkok we had to go through the lengthy immigration process just to get out to pick up our suitcases, then back through the seperate and lengthy check-in, security and immigration processes again to catch our flight to London.

We'd grown manic about Cambodian food hygiene after I suffered seven straight days of major tummy upset from my mango salad in Siem Reap. After that, I didn't tolerate salad on the side of my plate, ice in my drinks or even cutlery which might have been sitting on the table since the night before. In Bangkok airport we loosened the leash a little and tucked into chicken satay and a giant sushi platter, washed down with white wine, and finally knew we were on the way back to normality.

The flight home seemed to go quite quickly, and we soon found ourselves motoring through the streets of London. It was wonderful to come home and realise how beautiful London is: the buildings are largely fabulous, Regent's Park was sheathed in a low mist and there wasn't an ounce of litter on the streets. It felt great to be back. It may be thirty eight degrees colder here, but I can definitely live with that if it means living in such a superb city. In this sense the holiday was very well planned, as I doubt I would be so sanguine about my return if we were coming straight from the glories of New Zealand.

Entering our flat felt like seeing it for the first time, and we went from room to room cooing like we were viewing it on the market. As a child I called this the Carpet Effect - whenever we got home from holiday, I was always shocked by how gaudy the living room carpet seemed - but today the Carpet Effect was entirely positive. We couldn't believe how lovely everything seemed. "This kitchen is really nice," I enthused, running through the flat. "And the living room is so cozy." Things were helped by our A-class housitter, spimcoot, who'd cleaned the flat from top to bottom and stocked the fridge with welcome eggs, smoked salmon and prosecco. We need to go on holiday more often.

The afternoon was filled with opening mail and processing paperwork. Around 5pm I started to flag and fell asleep on the sofa. I've grown so used to waking up having no idea where I am, it took me literally 30 seconds to realise I was finally at home. "Those curtains look like the ones at home," I thought groggily, "but I'm thousands of miles away, so it can't be home." When I finally realised I was in London I felt quite dejected and it took a while to realise the Big Trip really hadn't all been a dream.

Day 76, in which we go to see the king

2010-03-09T15:31:00.000-08:00

After a stroll along the river - which close-to turned out to be little more than a giant concrete gutter seasoned in garbage - we started the day with lunch at the FCC (Foreign Correspondents Club) bar, a long-standing institution of Phnom Penh which – during our visit at least – saw large numbers of western tourists pass through its doors in search of a bubble of civility away from the noisy streets outside. The restaurant bar sits on the second floor of a charmingly ramshackle colonial building, the terrace to the east overlooking the river and to the west looking out across a park to the lovely red National Museum. It's one of those extremely rare spots in the city where everything looks really quite fabulous, and we reclined in big leather arm chairs and ate fish and chips to celebrate.

Topped up with energy we were finally ready again to face the challenges of being a tourist in Phnom Penh. The capital goes one better than Siem Reap as there are four things for tourists to do here. Having already been to the National Museum – and having taken a tactical decision not to tour the Killing Fields or visit the army base in order to fire a machine gun – we were left today with visiting the Royal Palace.

It was, unsurprisingly, baking hot and queueing for tickets just to enter was a trial in itself, with sweating tourists taking it in turns to step out of the queue into the shadows for some brief respite. It's only five degrees hotter here than Bangkok, but it's five degrees which pushes you from 'slightly cooler than core body temperature' to 'significantly more' and for this reason, I think we got less out of our visit to the Royal Palace than we have many other sights during our trip. But still, it was interesting to see the long Throne Room where King Cambodian gets to sit, and the treasury where he keeps what appeared to be a series of old pots and plates, and the so-called Silver Pagoda, which isn't silver at all but which does have a floor made entirely from silver tiles (an expensive affectation in such a poor country, and not a practical one either. The tiles were held together with the wider kind of cellotape).

Our favourite part of the visit was the tower above the Throne Room, which has four faces around the top and looked like a palatial version of Thomas the Tank Engine. I also really liked a cast iron building which apparently Napoleon III had posted over to Cambodia as a gift, but it was currently undergoing renovation and sheathed in green tarpaulin. We otherwise took polite photos and enjoyed the scenery, but didn't hang about in getting home to the air conditioning.

During dinner in the super little Italian Pop Café the weather finally changed and the skies opened, drenching the streets in rain. The sewers here are non-fabulous, and the gutters quickly flooded, lifting rubbish from the ground to form rather jolly flotillas of disease.

Day 75, in which we visit the source of Pol Pot's inspiration

2010-03-08T02:02:00.000-08:00

Today we visited Cambodia's National Museum, an institution with a dubious history as it is said that Pol Pot grew up nearby and was so inspired by tales of the great Khmer Empire that he grew up and tried to emulate its success – admittedly by marching the middle classes out of the cities for execution, rather than planting rice in the alluvial waters of the Tonle Sap lake as the Khmers had done. The guide book reports however that the National Museum was not rewarded for its role in Cambodian history. Under the Khmer Rouge, treasures were looted, the roof collapsed and a colony of bats colonised the rafters, their guano destroying much of what was left.

Given this dark past, it's perhaps not surprising that the museum is still dragging itself to its feet and contains only durable stonework The main complex is a square of corridors around a single courtyard, and the galleries within contain a seemingly endless parade of statues looted from the Angkor temples in the north. Dozens of identical Buddha statues jostle for space among a score of statues of Rama, with elephant gods, monkeys and horseheaded young men filling the gaps in between. It was less a museum, more a holding bay for artefacts. There was no real explanation of how these items fitted together, nor any examination of their historical context or variances across the region. The tour guides we overheard spend most of their time simply introducing each deity and explaining how they fit into the country's current religion, and it was rather surprising to come across several active shrines in the museum, with incense burning and flowers for sale to make as offerings. I guess I'm just used to the gods in museums being long dead.

Having studied archaeology for three years I suppose I've had quite enough of understanding historical context anyway, and even in a good museum I don't really spend much time reading the footnotes. The museum made for a pleasant afternoon's diversion, and it was nice to see the sort of statues which had once graced the long empty temples we saw in the north.

It is currently too hot to do anything for more than a few hours at a time, so we returned to the hotel for cold water and air conditioning.

Day 74, in which return to Phnom Penh

2010-03-07T19:59:00.000-08:00

After a bracing dip in the Indepdence Hotel's pool, followed by a swim in the bath-warm waters of the ocean, we loaded our luggage into yet another taxi and set off for our last destination of our entire Big Trip: Phnom Penh. I'd expected to be sad to have reached this stage, with 74 days behind us and only a few more to go, but Cambodia doesn't reward the tourist who stays too long and I'm quite looking forward to getting home.

Driving back north was the usual hair raising experience. There don't appear to be many traffic laws in Cambodia, and it is left to the driver's discretion which side of the road he should drive on. Most choose the right, but this doesn't stop them switching to left when taking a left turn. Overtaking is also more an art than a science, and it is not at all unusual for a car overtaking a truck to find itself being simultaneously being overtaken by another car, while another truck comes the other way. Almost half of the attempted overtakes our driver made were abandoned halfway through, and of the remainder half ended with oncoming traffic blaring their horns and flashing their lights as they got dangerously close.

The road from Sihanoukville to Phnom Penh is only single carriageway, with the lane in each direction being about the width of an average car, but this does not stop the enterprising Cambodians acting as though the other lane is simulatenously their fast lane, crisscrossing between oncoming vehicles and out onto the opposite hard shoulder just to get another car ahead, forcing cyclists and smaller cars off the road and simultaneously dodging the other cars as they do the precise same thing in the other direction. At several points so many people were overtaking that all of the vehicles found themselves travelling on the wrong side of the road. It would all be hilarious if we hadn't seen a crash scene on today's journey, a car smashed into a ditch and a startled woman with blood on her face climbing out with her baby in her arms.

And among all of this chaos are meandering herds of cows and clouds of mopeds and scooters, the latter serving as transport for the whole family: father driving, toddler in front of him holding onto the handles, the wife perched on the back of the pillion, one arm around the husband and another carrying a newborn baby, and a second toddler squeezed between her legs. Behind them might be another moto dragging a large plastic storage box on a makeshift trolley of recovered pram wheels, a man perched on the lid to protect their cargo. Other oddities zoomed by as we made our way to the capital, including a bride in full make-up and a strapless white sequinned dress driving herself to her wedding on a rusty scooter.

Phnom Penh is the only real city we've seen in Cambodia, and as Sihanoukville and Siem Reap are among the only other major settlements I would guess this is the only city in the country. It's sprawling and noisy and, while the guidebook claims it retains its colonial air, I have struggled to see it. I suppose bits of it look like an Arndale Centre, quite modern for these parts, but as your eyes drift upwards you can see shanty towns built on the rooftops: houses of bamboo, straw and plastic sheeting built three or four storeys above the capital's streets.

Thankfully we're staying in an elegant boutique hotel on the waterfront, The Quay. Our top floor room has fabulous views out across Mekong River, air conditioning and fully filtered tap water so it almost feels like we're not in Phnom Penh at all.

When we venture outside for a mooch around, tuktuk drivers flock around us like flies. "Tuktuk sir?", "Tuktuk sir?", "You want tuktuk?" ... it's baffling so many of them try even when they've seen others fail two seconds earlier. At 40 degrees centigrade (falling to 36 at night) it's simply too hot to waste any energy, yet still they seem to hope we turned down the first dozen tuktuk drivers on a whim. It makes me realise how desperate they are, and how utterly broken the economy is. You wonder what the government's economic policy actually is, beyond crossing their fingers and diverting development aid to their private accounts (corruption is a serious issue here and, although anti-corruption legislation is currently pending in the Cambodian parliament, the bill was drafted by the incumbent party and the opposition has been given just 48 hours to review it).

As we strolled back to the hotel this evening, a driver leaned over and shouted "Hey! You want I put you in a tuktuk and take you to the Killing Fields tomorrow?" I think that's the best pick-up line I ever heard.

Days 72 and 73, in which we sleep in the company of ghosts

2010-03-06T00:07:00.000-08:00

We took the taxi another 300km south this morning and checked into the towering white edifice of the Independence Hotel, in the beach town of Sihanoukville. At first glance it seems that there's not much history to Sihanoukville - the city is not yet 50 years old, carved out of the jungle by the French as Cambodia's first industrial port - but it soon transpired we were staying in the heart of the town's history.

The Independence Hotel was apparently Cambodia's first luxury hotel - attracting guests as fabulous as Catherine Deneuve and Jackie Onasis - but the current owners aren't quite honest in stating it has been a "luxury spa resort since 1963" on three counts: i) construction wasn't finished until 1964; ii) it doesn't have a spa; and iii) it was taken over by the Khmer Rouge in 1975, who used it as a local base for four years after which it became a base for bandits and criminals.

The hotel doesn't go into this aspect of its past - its 'History Hall' literally only contains a photograph of a road and an old piece of wood whose provenence is unattributed, and the large sequence of photos in reception stopped at 1969 - but it seems it only reopened in its current form in 2004 after Canadia Bank invested $35 million to turn it from a broken, bullet-hole riddled shell into the lovely place it is now. Among their original plans was to convert the existing pool into a 'floating spa', however I cannot imagine this would be a relaxing experience as apparently the clover-leaf pool was once used as a prison, roofed over with bamboo. Thankfully the pool is now out of use, hidden on the far side of reception, but there are still local rumours of ghosts haunting the hotel proper, including a woman who killed herself in one of the rooms and four smugglers who were executed in another.

We tried not to think about this history as we enjoyed a slap-up lunch in the restored ballroom - a circular glass dining room with views out onto the terrace - nor while down at the private beach, sitting on the soft sand watching the sun set spectacularly across the ocean and preparing ourselves for a slap-up dinner. Unfortunately it was hard not to think about it, especially as we seemed to be the only people staying in the hotel and so whenever we left the room to walk through echoing corridors or sit in vast empty dining rooms it felt we were in a remake of The Shining. Several times I jumped with surprise when we came across another human being.

We had quite a large dinner, but alas the Immodium was beginning to wear off and Day 73 was mostly a write-off, spent in the hotel.

Day 71, in which we drive south

2010-03-04T16:23:00.000-08:00

Knotted gun statue in the centre of Phnom Penh

Knowing we were due to travel 300km south to Phnom Penh today, I bunged my digestive tract up with Immodium and we had a thankfully uneventful journey. You can take a bus to Phnom Penh for less than £10, but we paid rather more for a private car which we figured would be quicker, more comfortable and contain fewer idiots. Even still, the driver took a few liberties – taking an elderly Cambodian man as a third passenger, pulling into cafés and roadside stalls trying to get us to buy things, and making claims about five minutes before we were due to arrive that his wife had recently given birth to a baby boy. Our previous driver also had this habit of becoming a father just before we were due to pay and it didn't particularly warm me to him.

Being sick, I spent most of the five hour journey with my eyes closed, but when I did look at the countryside strolling by I was not impressed by what I saw. Huge drifts of litter line the roads, and while no one seemed to be making any effort to clean it up, plenty of locals were throwing cans into the road, emptying rubbish out and even in one case pouring a bucket of what appeared to be raw sewage into the street. We later saw a herd of cows wandering around their field trying to get at the grass hidden beneath a thick carpet of litter, with one particularly enterprising cow chewing at a blue plastic carrier bag in the apparent hope it might contain hay. I tell myself not to be too shocked, to remember that this is a developing country and they're despertately poor, but then recall from my archaeological training that even in the bronze age Britons were burying their refuse in deep middens behind their homes. The feeling seems to be more that the locals have just given up. It is really no surprise the flat and filthy landscape has not inspired a Cambodian Wordsworth.

Personal hygiene also seems to be a major issue, and I read in the newspaper that several villages have been decimated from dysentry and their solution has been to erect scarecrows to scare away the evil spirits. It seems to me that boiling drinking water and thoroughly washing hands after going to the toilet might be a better start. Our driver would appear to be an educated man, but when I mentioned to him how odd it is that there is never a sink to wash your hands in the public (non Western) restrooms he just grinned indulgently as though washing the hands was a Western decadence. I wonder whether the locals are even aware of the correlation between their poor hygiene and the high infant mortality rate. A development priority should probably be a non-scarecrow based programme of hygiene awareness.

In Phnom Penh we checked into the Pacific Hotel, a clean and air conditioned bolt-hole for the night while we wait for the second leg of our journey to Sihanoukville tomorrow. Having napped the whole way in the car, I fell asleep at 8pm, slept straight through into morning and woke feeling fresh as a whistle.

Day 70, which is lost to sickness

2010-03-03T16:17:00.000-08:00

Our bodies did not appreciate the Cambodian food we ate last night, some unwelcome news which was expressed through our bowels. I have been worse hit than Paul, and when we put on our CSI: Cambodia hats we concluded that the culprit was the mango salad, which I had ordered and Paul only sampled.

Oy vey. The NHS website reports that 30-50% of travellers to the developing world get diarrhoea, and that the main cause is faecal matter contaminating food through poor hygiene. How delightful, the Cambodian Soup Kichen should really mention their special seasoning on the menu. We're unable to eat much at the moment, but when we do eat we eschew anything that isn't sealed in a packet and manufactured overseas. Dorito crisps, Laughing Cow cheese and M&Ms might not sound like the healthiest meal, but faced with either figuratively or literally eating crap I know what my choice is.

We had planned for today to be a day of rest anyway, having exhausted two of the three main tourist attractions in Siem Reap (the floating villages and the temples). We don't plan to partake in the third main attraction – sex tourism – which is just as well as our hotel strictly forbids it. They even have a special sign forbidding it on the fridge, next to the “No Smoking” sign and the sign advising you not to bring grenades into the room. The hotel welcome book goes even further, advising (in among information on room service, breakfast and the mini-bar), “4. Sexually exploiting a child is a criminal offence in this country. Therefore only your own child who has checked in and travelled with you is allowed inside your room”. Healthy country.

Day 69, in which the sun rises after we do

2010-03-02T01:47:00.000-08:00

At 5am this morning Panha drove us north to the temple of Angkor Wat – perhaps the most famous of Cambodia's temples – where rumour had it the sun was due to rise. Although the rest of the temples in the area face east, symbolising new life by catching the rising sun, Angkor Wat was built as a mausoleum for some god-king and so faces west, making it the only temple in Cambodia where you can watch the sun rise behind it. It also claims to be the largest religious structure on the planet, although they cheat by including the perimeter walls which run around a mile or so away from the temple itself.

It turned out we weren't the only ones to read about the sunrise in the guide book, with three or four hundred other people clumped around a small lily pond two hundred feet in front of the temple, trying to get the same photo of the sun rising behind temple, reflected in the pond. Figuring we could probably see plenty of pictures of that through Google, we went a bit closer and so were the only ones standing in its shadow as it rose, which was a lot more atmospheric.

We were also the first ones into the temple once the sun was up, and for a brief moment I was able to race around the deserted corridors in search of chambers, sunken pools, grassy clearings and eroded towers. Alas, as the tourists started filing in and the security attendants took their places to enforce a one-way route around the temple it turned out to be a rather symmetrical and dull place. While it's easy to get carried away and see the temple as a mysterious accomplishment of the ancients, it's informative to note that it was built at pretty much the same time as Notre Dame in Paris, which I would consider a more beautiful and enduring building.

We wandered back to the taxi – taking the obligatory lily pond shot as we passed – and had some special eggs and pancakes for breakfast before pressing on to our next sight: Angkor Thom.

When we visited Angkor Thom I didn't know anything about its history, but we've since learned that it was once the capital city of the Khmer empire – apparently once the greatest power in South East Asia – but was abandoned in the sixteenth century when the king moved his seat south. Although most of the city has now been lost to the jungle, everything built from stone remains, including the city gates, a number of temples and a series of raised terraces. We entered the city over a bridge flanked with dozens of ancient statues to reach the South Gate, on top of which are carved gigantic heads facing in the four directions of the compass.

We then drove through to the main temple of Bayon, which from a distance appeared to be no more than piles of stones but, as we got closer, turned out to have yet more huge heads carved into each tower. Bayon was great fun to clamber around, although in my excitement I did stumble across a dark recess high up in the central tower which the security guards clearly used as a urinal.

Less exciting was Bayon's neighbour, the temple of Baphuon, which you can only view from a single raised platform. Built on tiers of sand, Baphuon finally collapsed fifty years ago and is now undergoing reconstruction. As restoration goes, it looked like a bit of a dog's dinner. The central tower – which in a Victorian etching looks sleek and elegant – is built from random stones piled up higgledy-piggledy, some bearing carvings that don't even match up with their neighbours. We later learned that the ruins of the temple were entirely dismantled and catalogued by Cambodian archaeologists in the early 1970s, and then Pol Pot waded in and had them all executed and their records destroyed. The result is a giant 3D jigsaw, and it would appear the Cambodian's solution has been to take whichever stones they came across first – scooping them up from the ground with tractors– without applying any archaeological insight at all.

We were by this point suffering from the heat. Even before the sun had risen the air was hot and muggy, and by 9am the temperature was approaching 36 degrees (as attested by the dog pictured above, resting in the shade of its stone brother). We popped around the corner to take a look at the temple of Phimeanakas which – along with Baphuon – predates the founding of Angkor Thom and was incorporated into the new city. While Phimeanakas might have been exciting to see at the start of our visit – you know, when ancient temples in the jungle were still new to us – we were hot and tired and, apart from an odd looking sheep statue, it was really nothing special. We dutifully clambered up, stopped to catch our breath in the shade and then clambered down again without pausing to take in the view.

We walked down to the Terrace of the Elephants – a raised walkway with lots of elephants carved on the side, some faded or rudimentary and others detailed and pretty amazing – and then straight past the Terrace of the Leper King into Panha's air conditioned car. It was by this point only 10:30am and, since we'd hired Panha for the day, we figured we should see one more thing. As I couldn't bear the idea of going straight back out into the heat we decided to check out the temple of Banteay Srey, which is 15km north of Angkor Thom and so required a long and comfortable ride in the air conditioned cab. Banteay Srey is a small but elegant temple dating back over a thousand years and carved from a particularly cheerful shade of red sandstone. They have lots of monkey statues there, which I suppose is because it's dedicated to Rama, but really it was too hot to take much notice.

Only just midday, we returned to our hotel for a well-earned nap which saw us through to dinnertime. We ate summer rolls, green mango salad, Khmer soup and a chicken thing at the Cambodia Soup Restaurant on Pub Street, with explosive consequences for our bowels.

Day 68, in which we follow in Lara Croft's footsteps

2010-03-01T03:42:00.000-08:00

The hotel served us breakfast at 9:45am sharp this morning, although we were not as sharp and we turned up to find a plate of fried eggs and toast sitting unattended on the roof terrace, drawing the attention of some resident ants. Still it was very delicious, and thankfully it was only after we had eaten that we checked out the view from the rooftop. The yard nextdoor is strewn with rubble and used toilet paper, with a direct line of vision into an open-air toilet beside a water pump where a lady was filling her washing bucket.

Panha picked us up and drove us out to Phnom Krom, where in the dry season one can catch a narrow motor boat along a canal and out into Tonle Sap, the largest freshwater lake in South East Asia. We drove along a raised road through paddy fields filled with rice and lotus plantations, which in the rainy season are completly submerged by the swollen lake and their soils refertilised with alluvial soils. Leading off the road into the fields was a long series of wooden platforms standing on giant wooden stilts, which during times of highwater are popular picnic haunts for the locals, who come here to fish.

The process for hiring a motor boat was somewhat complex. Although there was a row of neat glass-fronted booths, tickets were purchased from a fat man sitting behind a makeshift trestle table who was in the process of eating red gunk from a plastic bag. Once we had the tickets in our hands another man rushed over and snatched them from us, belched in my face, enthused "Let's go!", then climbed onto a scooter and drove off into the distance without us.

I figured we'd been duped and our tickets stolen, but we wandered down to the docks anyway and it seemed all was in order as a couple of guys invited us onto their boat and we soon found ourselves motoring down the canal, passing little fishing huts, boat construction yards and children variously fishing, swimming and pootling in their canoes to school. The boat itself seemed quite makeshift - the hull knocked together with planks of wood between which I could see the surface of the water, the steering wheel salvaged from an automobile and the speed controlled by a piece of string around a pulley which the driver pressed with his foot. We were sat in rattan garden chairs which were lashed to the hull, and every so often the boat would roll over a wave and lean dangerously to one side, splashing us with water. As the water here is a yellow-brown colour and smells of sewerage we learned to keep our mouths shut.

We powered out of the canal and into the Tonle Sap proper, which stretched off into the horizon and looked more like a fully-fledged sea. Almost immediately we came across the floating village: dozens of individual homes built on floating rafts of bamboo which are moved every two months or so according to the seasons to take advantage of the best fishing. Other amenities floated alongside them, including floating churches, floating schools and a floating fishfarm. Children as young as three or four were pottering around in their tiny homes, half a kilometer from dry land, and children only slightly older were swimming around fishing and clambering around on tiny platforms made from bamboo poles. Panha had explained that most of the villagers are ethnic Vietnamese, who are impoverished and own no land in Cambodia and so are forced to live offshore in common waters.

We felt a little uncomfortable peering into strangers' houses - however unusual their houses might be - but our next stop was more tourist friendly, being a combined catfish farm, crocodile farm, restaurant, gift shop and begging spot. We were hounded by two tragic little girls with snakes wrapped around their necks, who kept shouting "One dollar!" after I had taken a photograph and, although I quickly agreed to their terms in the name of charity, it sadly took more time to find the dollar than the girls seemed to think reasonable and their screams for "One dollar!" only grew more hysterical. A boy also joined in - who I hadn't even photographed, thank you very much - and we realised they wouldn't stop until we handed them the moon, so we headed further into the floating market to look at the crocodiles to get away from them. Even then, children with various reptiles wrapped around their necks swam under the floorboards shouting "One dollar!" up through the cracks.

I can see their logic - here are two westerners who earn thousands of dollars a month just to sit in an air conditioned office browsing the internet and chatting with their friends, so why can't they spare just one dollar - but it was loud, hysterical and interminable and you simply can't give out a dollar to everyone who asks or, eventually, everyone asks. I would have much preferred them to adopt the approach of those African children who ask for pens, or they could even try to sell us something (I might at a push have bought a postcard). Anyway, the guide later asked if we wanted to visit the floating school and we both immediately said no. The idea of the whole of Class 2a chasing after us in rowing boats screaming for money was too much, so we simply returned to the mainland. Here a boy did try to sell us something - two plates with pictures of our faces glued to them - but this was a somewhat doomed attempt to make money. The primary error had been forgetting to mention that they were taking our photograph, which appeared to have happened as we were boarding the boat and - since neither of us was looking at the camera, and the heat was unbearable and the water smelt like sewage – the end result was two ugly-ass plates of us scowling into the distance.

We returned to the cool, air conditioned interior of Panha's car and drove back to Siem Reap for beer and a burrito.

Our next destination was Ta Prohm. a twelfth century Buddhist monastery which – thank goodness – was abandoned to the jungle in the fifteenth century when the king moved his capital south and was not seen again until Victorian explorers stumbled across it among the trees and vines hundreds of years later. Ta Prohm is one of the most iconic of the Siem Reap temples because of a strategic decision not to clear away the vegetation which has colonised it, and so huge and twisted trees remain there today, their roots entwined into the stonework, several towers destroyed by the vegetation and several others only held together by it.

The approach through the jungle to the temple gates was relatively sedate – the only highlight was meeting a hen and her chickens on route – but once inside the structure things became very exciting. Tourists are given free reign to clamber where you wish, climbing over collapsed stone work, crawling through doorways and windows, racing up and down corridors, and when we got far enough away from the clouds of Japanese tourists it felt like we might almost be living out a game of Tomb Raider. It's difficult to describe the temple without overusing the same set of words - stuff about entwined roots, crumbling edifices, eroded carvings and dimly lit chambers - so I'll let the pictures do the talking:

The main compound inside the temple (Lara Croft in foreground)

Paul poses in front of a collapsed tower.
Does a dark opening behind portend disaster to follow? (A: No.)

Happily strolling through the ruins...

I done found a tree!

Broken remains of an Apsara, one of the temple's many 'celestial nymphs'

We went home to clean up and, although we had intended to go out for dinner, it had been a long and hot day and by 5pm I was unable to keep my eyes open. We stayed in to watch several episodes of HBO's superb Bored To Death with Ted Danson instead, and ordered room service,which comprised a delightful collection of noodles, chicken & lemongrass soup and red beef curry. Cambodian food is yet to let us down.

Day 67, in which we decide we love Cambodia

2010-02-28T03:04:00.000-08:00

After yet another session of fattening ourselves up at the Lebua's breakfast buffet, we gathered up our luggage and ran our final gauntlet past the hotel's beaming serving staff and out into a taxi for the airport.

Bangkok airport is one of the largest I have ever been in, and after checking in we walked for 15 or 20 minutes through the shopping mall looking for our gate. After our short flight over the border to Cambodia, we discovered a significant contrast at Siem Reap airport, where sheer walls of glass, concrete floors and thick steel frames were utterly eschewed in favour of the more traditional Khmer architecture, with a single-storey wooden framed building topped with a chirpy red tile roof and surrounded by flowers and ferns. It is absolutely the nicest airport I've ever seen.

Sadly, the entry process was less refreshing, and Cambodia proved again the rule that the poorer the country the more complex the bureaucracy. Cambodia is clearly very poor: we were handed four separate forms to fill out before arrival, and at the airport there were two men to process the application, a man to take payment, a row of five or six officials in military uniforms to process our visas, two men to hand back our passports at the other end, a man at passport control to ink five separate stamps on the visa, and three bored looking officials to wave us through customs. This was actually a great way to spend the time waiting for the luggage to be unloaded, and our bags were waiting for us as we left.

We soon found ourselves heading into Siem Reap city in an air conditioned taxi, passing seemingly endless rice fields and lush green palm tree plantations. We got chatting with our driver Panha, a chirpy young man with superb English, and decided we were unlikely to find a better prospect and hired him at a very reasonable rate to be our guide around the area for the next few days.

Siem Reap is far more impoverished than Bangkok, but I found myself liking it immediately. So far the people have all been extremely friendly and yet completely honest and pleasingly reserved, which makes them much more easy to like than the average Thai. We are staying in the Kazna Hotel in the centre of the city (well, village really), one road over from the high street, yet the moment we stepped out of our hotel we found ourselves effectively on a partially-paved dirt track lined with a combination of modern hotels and lean-to sheds verging on the shanty town. The streets are occupied concurrently by sleek SUVs, goats, stray dogs and – we saw recently – children urinating. However, oddly, it's all the more charming for it. Walking to dinner, I really felt affection for the place.

For dinner we walked to Cafe Indochine on the high street, which specialises in traditional Khmer cuisine. We ordered a range of dishes including caramelised pork, a sort of coconut chicken curry called Amok and a traditional Cambodian-spiced fish dish, all of which was very delicious washed down with a super bottle of South African sauv-blanc. The meal was extremely well priced, once you discounted the absurd cost of the wine.

Day 66, in which we are beleaguered by confidence tricksters

2010-02-27T18:19:00.000-08:00

After stuffing ourselves silly at the breakfast buffet to ensure we wouldn't need to eat again until the evening, we finally waddled out of the hotel and into the streets of Bangkok proper. The difference was striking, not least as we accidentally went out through the back. Suddenly gone was the army of smiling Thai attendants in their smart white jackets who were paid to open doors, press lift buttons, carry bags and issue warnings as you approached steps, and in their place were people crouched in the street eking out a living peeling potatoes, frying chicken or just sprawled on the pavement asleep. In the street directly behind our hotel each lamppost had a bird cage swinging on it, and the sky was virtually invisible behind a thick matting of overhead cables and wires. The tumbledown buildings were all no more than two or three storeys high, and it was rather sobering to realise these people were literally living their lives in the shadow of our hotel.

As we walked through the streets towards the river, legions of tuk-tuk drivers fought over themselves to attract our business, and they didn't seem to like taking no for an answer. Even when we could see our destination – the ferry pier outside the Oriental Hotel – tuk-tuk and taxi drivers were eager to drive us there. We waved them away and struggled through the thirty feet trek on our own.

The Express riverboats ploughing along the Chao Phraya river are the quickest and cheapest way of getting around the city, costing just 25p each for the long journey up the river to the main attractions. Getting onto the right boat was more of a challenge however as we were beleaguered by tricksters trying to persuade us to spend £10 on tourist boat cruises. Even as we walked down the pier we met official-looking locals who advised us there wouldn't be another Express riverboat for an hour and we were better off going with them. We had been prewarned however and waved them all away, and of course the riverboats turned out to be very frequent, offering a somewhat scary Hop-On-Hop-Off Express service where the boat barely stopped at each pier for you to leap on before it powered off again up the river.

Our first destination was the Grand Palace, and we had been warned by almost everyone who had even heard of Thailand that this was where we would come across the greatest concentration of conmen, whose apparent aim was to persuade you that the Grand Palace is shut and that you should take a tuk-tuk to their brother's gemstone shop instead. We got past the first wave of attack quite successfully, only to almost fall to a very convincing young man who actually operated from the main gates of the Grand Palace itself – in full view of the guards – and carried a fairly convincing identity card. This man informed us that the palace was closed while the monks had their lunch (we later discovered there are no monks in the Grand Palace), and we were better off visiting some temple in the obscure northern suburbs for a couple of hours and coming back later, and by the way here is a tuk-tuk we could use to get there, only thirty baht.

Well thankfully we'd been to Japan and had absolutely no interest in seeing any more temples than we absolutely had to (if anything, I felt that missing the Grand Palace might even be a blessing), and the moment he summoned a tuk-tuk he stepped over the fine line between convincing facsimile of an official to blatant confidence trickster, so we effectively told him to F the F Off and made our way into the Grand Palace despite his protestations. While I can appreciate Thailand is a very poor country and these people are only trying to eke out a living to support their families, I have been to much poorer countries in the past where locals support their families by offering goods and services the tourists actually want. Conning tourists shows a remarkable lack of self-respect and a sad lack of national pride or interest in protecting the country's reputation. Most depressing of all is that it appears to be state sponsored, to the extent that the guards of the Grand Palace were happy for the confidence tricksters to operate on and around their grounds, when it would be a small task to clear them away.

It would appear to be cheap to employ people in Thailand, as employers will rarely hire one person for a job when the task can be divided down into four separate tasks for four different people. We hadn't realised one could not wear shorts in the Grand Palace and so had to queue to borrow some more discreet trousers. This required three men to tell us to get the trousers, a long queue to see a man to pay a deposit for the trousers, a queue to see two women who handed out the trousers, a queue to later return the trousers and a queue to then claim back your deposit at the end.

It felt like a complete epic task just to get this far – and with the baking sun, humid atmosphere and polluted air I at times felt ready to just take the next taxi back to our hotel – but the moment we stepped into the Grand Palace we were pleased to find it was all worth it. I didn't bother reading the guidebook to find out what the palace is, but effectively we found a large complex of incredibly detailed temples and other structures which appeared to have expanded over time on the site, from those built in simple carved stone, to those decorated intricately with coloured glass and ceramics, to a single amazing gold-tiled prong which stood high above all else and glowed fabulously in the sunlight. All of the gaps between these structures were then filled with statues of lions, roosters, elephants, dragons, dancing ladies, roaring giants and the type of ugly demon we saw lots of in Japan.

The main draw of the Grand Palace complex was supposed to be the Emerald Buddha, who lives in a huge temple at one end of the complex. We dutifully took off our shoes and trekked in to have a look and were confronted by a huge pile of gaudy antiques with an absolutely miniature green statue balanced right at the top. There were almost as many 'No Photo' signs as there were religious artefacts, and during this holiday I've learned that the bigger tourist attractions are usually the ones less worth seeing so we nipped out and enjoyed the superb lion statues instead.

Next on our itinerary was the Reclining Buddha at Wat Po, and this time as conmen tried to distract us we simply smiled and waved at them as we strolled by, and so we arrived at the temple almost without incident. One particularly vocal man stood directly outside the temple and declared as we turned up “Hello! I am your guide for Wat Po!”. I don't think so, old man. “It's a hundred foot golden Buddha”, we explained. “We can probably find it ourselves.”

The Reclining Buddha is a 151 feet long statue coated in gold which – presumably due to the difficulty of building a 152 foot tall temple – is presented lying down on its side and gazing down serenely at the masses of people who stumble through the temple to peer at him. The huge pillars holding up the roof have been placed between the public area and the buddha itself, so as you stroll along the corridor you can only see him in small cross sections: his face, his shoulders, his tummy button, his crotch, etc. It is also possible to stand at either end and see his full length, however thanks to perspective he then either looks like he has a giant head or ridiculously long legs.

We raced back through the streets to catch a traghetti across the river to Wat Arun, a somewhat home-made temple decorated with pieces of broken shell and porcelain which apparently came to the city as ballast in the boats from China, but which is quite beautiful for it and the recycled materials are quite brilliantly used. The temple is a very steep pyramid (or mastaba, as archaeologists more accurately call it to anyone we think won't snigger) with three viewing terraces at various levels, each reached by a stone staircase which is steeper than the last. This was my favourite of the temples we visited today, probably because it's the only one you can clamber over and explore and it's also a lot less gaudy than the others and you get a super view up at the top.

All this time the sun had been baking down and the air thick and humid, and standing there on the top of Wat Arun we were seized with an urgent desire to get back into our air conditioned hotel and drink water we knew was safe to drink. We shoved our way down the three flights of steps, pushing the dawdling tourists out of the way, and stormed to catch the ferry home.

In the evening we took a dinner cruise in an old rice barge along the Chao Phraya, which possibly lost the element of surprise on account of us already having spent the day travelling along the river and seeing the same temples, but which nonetheless was a very pleasant way to see the city all lit up at night. Somewhat less pleasant was the mass-produced Thai food we received, which had either gone cold or only been half-warmed through in the first place, and comprised some very dubious pieces of meat. On the return leg we were also treated to some traditional Thai dancing, which was all very sedate at first – a lady bending her fingers back and hopping from foot to foot – and then a man dressed as a white lion entered the room and the performance suddenly became a coordinated bitch fight.

We considered going to the roof bar for one last nightcap, but we have an early start in the morning and so to bed.

Day 65, in which we take a massage to avoid the military coup

2010-02-26T00:18:00.000-08:00

We woke up this morning in Bangkok (or, as the locals officially – and somewhat surprisingly – call it, Krung Thep Mahanakhon Amon Rattanakosin Mahinthara Yuthaya Mahadilok Phop Noppharat Ratchathani Burirom Udomratchaniwet Mahasathan Amon Phiman Awatan Sathit Sakkathattiya Witsanukam Prasit) and wandered 47 floors down to Café Mozu for our complimentary buffet breakfast.

When I think of a 'buffet breakfast' I think of sad scrambled eggs drying out under heat lamps, ranks of leathery toast and vats of congealing baked beans. Thankfully the Lebua Hotel does things in a bit more style, with four separate zones offering everything you could want first thing in the morning and plenty more you might not: steamed chicken & pork dumplings; fresh nigiri-sushi and maki rolls; poached eggs benedict; a mountain of smoked salmon and snapper; potato curry with soft rolls; salmon teriyaki and noodles; two long trestle tables of breads, pastries, muffins, waffles and pancakes; a wide range of cereals, juices and fresh fruits (some of which we didn't recognise and had to name ourselves, with one particularly faecal-smelling fruit now known lovingly as 'poofruit'); and a vat of baked beans. We sampled a little bit of everything and rolled out of the restaurant an hour later ready for a snooze.

We'd long been planning to spend today just relaxing in our hotel and this has proved a convenient decision as the Foreign Office emailed us a couple of days ago to warn that “The political situation in Thailand is tense and uncertain”, adding that it is probable mass-protests will erupt in Bangkok today – and could possibly turn violent – following a court ruling regarding the former Prime Minister's involvement in a highly controversial corruption scandal. Reading up on the case, we discovered that political commentators seem to think the ruling might even serve as a flashpoint for a military coup. What better way to stay out of trouble, we thought, than booking in for a 90 minute Thai massage on the fifteenth floor?

My mum had warned me that Thai massage is not like western massage, with the focus less on relaxing the muscles and more on pummelling the life out of them, I suppose with the aim of making you grateful when you finally get out alive. I somehow forgot this advice and signed up anway. I was led excitedly into a dimly lit room where I was told to dress in loose pyjamas and lie on the bed. The masseur asked whether I would like Light, Medium or Hard massage. Figuring there was no point paying $30 for Light when I could maximise my gain with Hard for the same price, I opted for the severest form of massage and I think this was possibly a poor decision.

The masseur was a tiny lady, but still she was not frightened to climb on top of me and dig her hard, bony fingers into my thigh muscles, rummaging around in there like she'd lost her car keys, clambering further up my body and wrapping her legs around mine in order to exert an impossible level of strength, stretching muscles I didn't know I had and popping each joint in turn. For a while she followed the Pleasure-Pain Method, with bouts of tearing muscle and snapping bones sandwiched between brief moments of quite pleasant massage. Things went really awry when she moved onto the spine, however, and the concept of pleasure went out of the window entirely, replaced with the sharp, bony point of her elbow being driven deep through my spine and out the other side. All of this exercise was conducted through the pyjamas with my body covered in a giant towel, the masseur only unveiling each limb as she came to work on them in turn, like a giant version of a child's memory game.

I suppose I felt more mobile and energised afterwards, although I also felt a dark and throbbing pain in my upper spine. It was in this mood that we took lunch at the Mozu Café again, where a vast Asian-themed buffet was presented for our almost exclusive pleasure. The range this time was stunning, but after breakfast we learned to push past the cheap, high-carb filler presented at the front of the buffet and push through to the richer and more expensive proteins at the back. This was a terrific strategy as we stocked up on huge amounts of sushi, smoked salmon, green-lipped muscles, octopus and king prawns.

The Mozu Café sits on the shore of the swimming pool, brilliantly positioned in the shadow of the 54 storeys stretched above it so you never get caught in the impossibly hot sun, and superbly placed ten floors above ground level so that – even though you're in a hot and dirty city – while dining you can only see two or three other buildings on the skyline and you think you might almost be somwhere nicer. After lunch we had a go in the gym and then a swim in the pool, and then already it was time for dinner.

We'd hoped to have dinner at the roof-stop Sirocco restaurant, but the maitre d' intercepted us and dragged us to the rather bland Distil bar on the other side of the building instead. Although Distil is also an open-air bar on the 65th floor and also has stunning views across the city, we were not content and had a quick beer while waiting until the maitre d' was distracted and then snuck out of Distil and round the reception into Sirocco's far more stunning Sky Bar. Although the bar is only five or six metres in diameter, it is suspended on a platform above the city with fabulous 360 degree views. We took some photos, but then vertigo got the better of me and we decided to continue our refreshments back in our room (where sadly we only have fabulous 180 degree views of the city).

Back in our room we discovered that the room service is disgusting and Terminator Salvation is even worse. The script was awful and Christian Bale delivered all of his lines in a gruff voice which left one wondering why his character's goal in the film was to bring down Skynet rather than, say, hunting for a stash of strepsils which had survived the robot holocaust.

Update: Thankfully there was not a military coup. The court came up with a compromise ruling that – although it pleases neither camp – thankfully hasn't enraged anyone enough to lead them to riot either. Phew!

Day 64, in which we ditch Auckland for the Big City

2010-02-25T00:52:00.000-08:00

Today I got back seven of the hours which were stolen from my birthday in the time difference by travelling to Japan, but sadly I still just spent them sitting on an aeroplane. We boarded a plane in Auckland at 3pm and didn't stop travelling until we arrived at the five-star Hotel Lebua in Bangkok fourteen hours later (well, apart from a pit-stop in Sydney where we had a glass of water).

I'd expected Thailand to be a relatively poor country, but standing on the balcony leading out from our suite on the 57th floor of the State Tower it's hard to make out any poverty at all.

Day 63, in which we take a whistlestop tour of Waiheke

2010-02-24T00:49:00.000-08:00

After a fortifying coffee and muffin from Starbucks we wandered down the street to Auckland harbour and caught a ferry east to Waiheke, a sleepy island popular for its beaches, vineyards and cute fishing villages. Paul tells me it is also beginning to become popular as a commuter town, and I can certainly see the appeal of waking up in a beach house and sailing across the sea to the office (well, the beach house and sailing bit sounds good, anyway).

Waiheke is also famous for its large community of artists, although in New Zealand there is a fine line between art and hobby craft and all of it is priced to make the artist rich overnight. We therefore politely looked around a local gallery, smiled at two or three things we could never afford and scowled at much more, then headed to a lovely seafood restaurant overlooking Oneroa bay for fabulously fresh fish and chips.

The weather was baking hot, Paul was still recovering from whatever bug drove him to his bed a few days ago and I'd started coming down with something similar so after a walk along the beach and a lengthy debate about whether or not our constitutions could stand a swim, we took a ferry home to the hotel and spent the rest of the day relaxing and preparing for our next destination. In scintillating news, this included doing the laundry, packing and repacking our bulging luggage and ordering some pretty grim room service.

Day 62, in which I dine on a bowl of smoke and forego the lychee air

2010-02-23T22:38:00.000-08:00

We drove the last leg of our Aotearoan road trip today, back down the Coromandel Peninsula and up to the largest city in New Zealand, Auckland. It was very strange to find ourselves among motorways and traffic jams again after four weeks spent driving along the quiet roads which cover the rest of New Zealand. The guide book reports that Auckland is twice the size of London with just 6% of the population, and we found that this puzzle resolves itself in the form of a huge amount of suburban sprawl.

The city centre itself comprises some fairly low-rise buildings choked by an orbital motorway, with just one small cluster of high-rise buildings serving to create the iconic skyline which is broadcast each week – repeatedly and from different angles – on The Apprentice New Zealand. Our hotel, the Mercure Windsor, is right in the middle of town (next door to Deloitte, conveniently enough) and after checking in we wandered around the town to buy some long sleeved shirts and sufficient insect repellent to permanently clear Cambodia of malarial mosquitoes. We found that most of the historic buildings still survive, now housing trendy shops and cafés, and the result is big city streets with a friendly small town feel.

For lunch we went to a food market described by the Rough Guide as 'salubrious', but after our meal arrived we both wondered whether we'd misunderstood the definition of 'salubrious' – confusing it with 'salacious', perhaps – as the atmosphere and food were both dreadful, with light relief provided only by the indoor sparrows (in New Zealand, sparrows play the role which Europeans reserve for rats and pigeons). The ginger chicken and summer rolls made up what was without doubt the worst Vietnamese meal we've ever eaten, and I doubt the honesty of the waitress who recommended it by claiming she eats it every day (if this is true, I am surprised she is not dead – by suicide if not food poisoning).

After a nap we went to the Tepid Baths down by the harbour for a spot of exercise. This pleasingly old-fashioned swimming pool was built in Edwardian times and reminded me of the Goose Green baths I used to visit in Dulwich, although we were less pleased that the majority of the lanes were taken up by a women's polo team, with the paying public left only to choose between the 'Aqua jogging' and 'Slow' lanes.

We wanted an extra-special blow-out meal for our last big dinner in New Zealand, and so ended up at Simon Gault's restaurant Euro on the Princes Quay, which in London terms is like dining at Claridges (or for New Yorkers, equivalent to three Russian Tea Rooms). We were very excited since for the past three weeks we've been following Mr Gault's superb new television programme Masterchef New Zealand. However, while the food was delicious the restaurant concept struck us as a rather muddled experience. A good example is my starter of tuna tartare, which was served with a plume of wood smoke. Heston Blumenthal might have served the smoke under a silver cloche to be whipped away as served, or at El Bulli they would perhaps have served it in a hollow ostrich egg, to be cracked open by the eager diner. Mr Gault, alas, just poured the smoke into a bowl and then stretched cling film over the top, balancing the tuna tartare on top of the cling. It was all rather cheap and, as the waiter didn't explain the dish, I didn't even realise at first that there was smoke inside the bowl and so went to great lengths to eat the tuna without piercing the plastic, figuring it would be unpleasant for my meal to tumble through torn plastic into the bowl below (which Mr Gault should appreciate, especially as next week's episode of Masterchef apparently includes a contestant berated for getting shreds of cling film in their food). When the smoke did finally come out at the end I felt as deflated as the cling film.

The relaxed atmosphere was also inconsistent with the fairly formal service – more fine French dining than relaxed Italian socialising – and this formality all clashed with the upmarket pizza chain décor and 80s-cum-Spanish-cum-Grace Jones soundtrack. We also struggled to understand why the menu emphasised local produce and sustainability, only to be told overly-laboured stories about ciabatta bread flown in each day from an artisan baker on the South Island (I suppose we should be grateful Simon stumbled across this apparently unbeatable baker, otherwise he might have had it all airlifted in from Umbria). The 'good food served well' concept was also lost in the complexity of the dessert menu of which we only understood about 30% (“Spoons of 2012” was especially esoteric, comprising “mascarpone ice cream w feijoa jelly, organic yoghurt & gorgonzola honey egg, berry fizz & honey sphere w lychee air”).

However, we can't dis the poor man too much as – despite his fame and fortune – he was still there at the rock face running the kitchen, and even had the good grace to send us a complimentary portion of garlic fries when he saw us waiting at the bar for our table. I might even go so far as to recommend Euro to friends visiting Auckland, even if Simon did betray me on Masterchef this week by eliminating handsome Andrew Spear merely for making a duff meringue.

Day 61, in which we elect not to sit in a tepid puddle

2010-02-22T01:10:00.000-08:00

In need of breakfast, we decided to give the Luna Café a second chance and they sank to the challenge by serving the worst poached eggs on toast I've ever eaten. Still, fuelled for the day ahead we hired snorkelling gear from the second most relaxed man in the world (who seemed largely uninterested in deposits, identity or contact details, simply repeating the Kiwi phrase 'sweet as' whenever the world struck him again as a particularly wonderful place) and walked around the coastline from Hahei beach to the small haven of Gemstone Bay.

It turns out Hahei beach is part of the Cathedral Cove marine reserve, of which Gemstone Bay has been turned over entirely to snorkelling and diving, with buoys outlining the key underwater landscapes. We slipped on our masks and flippers and pootled out into the bay. It was initially rather disappointing – comprising a range of seaweeds in slightly different shades of green – and we made the mistake of exploring a cave in the rocky edge of the bay where the tide played with the idea of smashing us against the rocks. However, after a while we stumbled across a school of large fat stripy fish who didn't seem to mind a spot of company, and they led us across the bay to a larger school of thin shiny fish, deeper down, who also didn't seem to mind humans at all.

Less common was a stripy orange fish (which only Paul saw) and some ridiculous fish with very long noses, as well as an assortment of snails and spiky sea urchins which made me wonder whether I'd ever be able to enter water barefoot again.

We climbed out of the waters with the intention of walking further round the coast to Stingray Bay, but sadly some miscreant (I used a different word at the time) had stolen our sunblock and – in a country in which you burn after six minutes – we were unable to press on without it. We retreated to the village to buy more sunblock, and it was a short step from that to a quick nap out of the sun.

Before handing back our snorkels, we decided to try wearing masks and flippers on Hahei beach. We found that the seabed is peppered with tiny shellfish who live on the sand, poking their heads out of their shells to grab a drink of water. The flippers were a terrific accelerant for riding on waves, and I've started to wonder whether there might not be something to the idea of surfing after all.

Next on our itinerary was Hot Water Beach, which sounds superb on paper but turned out to be a bit of a bun fight. Two kilometres under the beach is a vast chamber of magma super-heated to 175 degrees and directly above this is an underground lake which heats up and flows up to the surface, where its reward is to be trapped in a shallow puddle dug by a rabble of tourists, who then take great pride in sitting in their individual inch of tepid water until it cools down again. We had expected to take part, but as we pulled up and saw how many others had the same idea we just left our yellow spade in the boot and decided to treat the wallowing tourists as the spectacle. This was a much more rewarding experience.

Despite breakfast, we had dinner at the Luna Café since on Mondays The Grange is shut. We were served by a somewhat hysterical waitress who demanded that – as we had not reserved – we should order food as quickly as possible. She explained that the restaurant was about to be deluged by responsible customers who had taken the trouble to reserve and who would of course be given priority over us. We ordered two green curries as quickly as we could, but no one else seemed to bother coming in and the kitchen still moved at almost a glacial pace.

Day 60, in which Paul takes to his bed

2010-02-21T01:09:00.000-08:00

Paul woke up feeling dreadful this morning and was largely unable to get out of bed, so we kept the curtains shut and spent the day snoozing and watching Jessica Alba in The Eye and Steve Carrell in Get Smart. Although these were both good choices, the twenty minutes we were able to stomach of Anne Hathaway's Bridewars proved significantly less rewarding.

For lunch I wandered down into the village and discovered that the food market in Hahei is pretty much sewn up between The Grange (where we ate last night) and a grim little place called the Luna Café. Since I only wanted a sandwich I tried the café, but when I asked the lady behind the counter if they did sandwiches to take away she pulled a face which implied she would have been happier working in a morgue where the customers don't ask questions. Alas, Adam Smith would have had a fit as the usual rules of competition have broken down and the Luna Café still thrives, simply because there are only so many times in a row you can eat at The Grange before you become weary of their menu. I certainly still bought us a couple of sandwiches there, once I overcame the waitress's absolute abhorrence of human contact.

By early evening Paul was feeling more mobile so we climbed into our swim shorts and wandered down to Hahei beach. I am running out of superlatives for beaches to use in the blog, so please just apply all those I used yesterday for Ocean Beach. The beach is soft and sandy – I mean really soft, your feet sink into it like snow – and the sea warm and welcoming. There are however very few big waves here, thanks to a row of tiny forested islands lurking far out on the horizon, so opportunities for wave diving were limited.

A dip in the ocean proved to be just the tonic and Paul was soon feeling his old self again, so really it's lucky we came to New Zealand instead of staying in London as god knows what a dip in the Thames would have done. Facing severely limited dining options we returned to The Grange and this time ordered from the pizza menu, sitting outside to create the illusion of being somewhere completely new.

Day 59, in which we are hit by a ten foot wave

2010-02-20T01:07:00.000-08:00

Our goal today was to drive north-west from Ohope onto the Coromandel Peninsula, a huge jutty-out-bit of North Island which is jam-packed with spectacular beaches. Our particular destination was the spectacular beach of Hahei, but on route we also popped in on the spectacular Ocean Beach, just outside the gold mining city of Mount Maunganui. The guidebook says Ocean Beach is the safest ocean beach in New Zealand, but thinking about it I may have misheard the caps and Paul may have said that Ocean Beach is the safest Ocean Beach, which would be an unhelpful truism. Whatever the case, it is certainly a glorious stretch of soft golden sand and iridescently blue water.

We decided to swim opposite a fat little island opposite the beach and discovered this is absolutely the best place for frolicking in the waves, as the island breaks the waves in two, bringing the two halves together in a V-shape, cross-cutting each other and making for especially turbulent waters. The waves rolled in ten feet high, and we had superb fun diving under them, riding on top of them or simply letting them strike us face-on.

As we stepped out of the Pacific Ocean onto almost unbearably hot sand we decided it was time for lunch. I wish we had dined in Mount Maunganui, but we decided that was too industrial and drove on to try the small town of Waihi instead. Although Waihi is described in the guidebook as a small mining village, during our visit it seemed more like a ghost town. It was Saturday afternoon, yet most places seemed to be shut and of those which were open we wrote off a pizzeria (because the waitress was busy doing the hoovering) and a bakery (because they didn't appear to sell any baked goods at all - it didn't help that when I asked for directions to the toilet, the baker indicated the back door, which then led me on an excursion to some public lavatories in a park two blocks away).

We ended up in Waihi's branch of Subway, the sandwich chain, and even that was shambolic as the man behind the counter explained they had entirely run out of bread. Four people walked out from the queue in front of us but when we got to the counter I spotted a shelf full of freshly baked bread behind the counter. “It's hot” he explained when I pointed it out. It did not take much effort to persuade him we did not mind.

We drove out of Waihi as quickly as the car would carry us, and didn't stop driving until we reached the small beach town of Hahei. Thankfully, Hahei is a little more switched on than its landlocked cousin and we were checked into the Tatahi Lodge by a very enthusiastic and friendly receptionist who provided us with everything we needed to enjoy our stay, including information on cheap snorkel hire, a jug of milk and a small yellow spade.

Our 'studio lodge' is possibly the nicest accommodation yet, a lovely and spacious wooden cabin with plenty of natural light and a set of double doors leading out onto a charming little communal garden. Better yet, dinner was just round the corner at The Grange, a trendy but cosy bar/restaurant which specialises in serving up North Island-sized portions. Paul's salad came in pieces so large that – as he struggled to get any of it into his face – he compared the effort to a task on the Krypton Factor, while my burger was so large you could have hollowed it out as a comfortable home for an Eskimo. We later saw a couple of old timers from out of town laughing about the size of their fish and chips and taking photographs of their plates.

We slept poorly, not helped by a resident moth the size of an eagle.

Day 58, in which we wear no comedy gas masks

2010-02-19T17:02:00.000-08:00

The weather has been very erratic lately, and today our much anticipated boat trip out to the active volcano of White Island was cancelled, which means that long standing plans for this blog entry to contain photos of Paul and me wearing ridiculous hard hats and comedy gas masks have been shelved. We apologise for the interruption to our usual service.

We only discovered the boat tour was cancelled once we were about an hour's journey out at sea. The trip had started pleasantly enough, bouncing across the waves in the sunshine, but it was only once the waves started bouncing over us and there wasn't any sunshine that the skipper figured something was up. I had by this point become so seasick I had to go outside into the fresh air, but at times it was difficult to distinguish the fresh air from the sea, and instead of my stomach lurching with every wave I found my entire body lurching across the deck, clinging to the narrow metal railings for support and refusing the crew's kind offer of a cup of fruit punch.

While the skipper thought we might make it to White Island alive, he didn't think we'd be able to leave. As the island is entirely toxic, with a lake more acidic than sulphuric acid, he sensibly decided this was not a place to seek refuge. We thus sailed back and in our two hour boat trip saw only Whale Island – a conservation centre where they killed all of the rats and stoats and introduced 37 very happy little kiwis – and a somewhat workaday statue of Wairaka (pictured above, with hat). Wairaka is a local Maori heroine who – improbable legend has it – saved the lives of all the women in her tribe. According to hearsay, the women were left in the tribal canoe while the men went ashore to forage. Women are not allowed to paddle, so when the canoe started to drift out to sea they all resigned themselves to death and got on with their knitting ... all apart from Wairaka, that is, who declared “I shall be the man!” and single-handedly paddled them all back to safety. Apparently this all translates as “Whakatane”, the name of the town where the statue has been erected, but I find the whole thing very dubious. For one thing, it seems unlikely the Maori men would so proudly embrace a name and legend which immortalises their neglect of one half of their entire tribe, as well as their misogynistic approach to kayaking.

To fill our suddenly empty afternoon, we returned to Ohope beach in the car and then walked along the coast back to Whakatane. We had not expected the walk to be much more than a sunny diversion, but ultimately it took us through some stunning terrain to a hidden beach inaccessible by car and only accessible on foot during low tide. At times we found ourselves clambering around the coastline over shelves of narrow rock while the sea pounded against our feet, and at one point my interest in a hole in the rocks was neatly rewarded when a surging wave simultaneously revealed it to be a blow hole, which dutifully erupted in my face. The walk also offered stunning views across the ocean to White Island, and ultimately we figured we've seen so much geothermal and volcanic stuff in recent weeks that this was enough of a look at White Island to satisfy our interest.

After a spot of cake in a Peejay's Café in Whakatane, a taxi drove us back to the motel (although it is possible to make a return walk through subtropical bush, we've by this point learned that subtropical bush isn't alone worth the diversion). In the evening we dined at The Quay on Pohutukawa Avenue, where I was served steak frites large enough to fill a family of four, while Paul ploughed his way through duck breast swimming on a sea of cheesy risotto. The Quay's portions were absolutely huge, and during dinner we enjoyed the floorshow of a lady shovelling what amounted to two separate platters of fish and chips into her mouth over the course of half an hour. I guess northern Kiwis have giant appetites.

Day 57, in which we head north to bag our next volcano

2010-02-18T14:23:00.000-08:00

Today we tidied up the bach, handed back the keys and drove up to Ohope on the north coast. Ohope is a long, narrow settlement pressed between steep rainforest on the one hand and a long golden beach on the other. The beach is supposed to be one of the best ocean beaches in New Zealand and – although it's only the second we've visited in the country – it certainly knocks the socks off Brighton beach.

We're staying in Jody's Motel, where we were grateful to finally find a large and comfortable bed and fully no flea-infested blankets. Dinner was fish and chips from the other end of town (a twenty minute drive out onto a narrow peninsula, from where you can see huge crashing waves on the lefthand side of the road and peaceful harbour waters to the right).

We stayed in to watch rubbish on the television and allowed ourselves to relax after a week of guerilla warfare against an onslaught of fleas, mosquitoes, wasps and sandflies at the Smokehouse bach.

Day 56, in which we shelter from Rene

2010-02-17T14:22:00.000-08:00

Today is our final day in the Smokehouse and our final day of pottering around and unwinding before we get back on the road to See More Stuff. We'd imagined we'd be able to spend every day swimming in the lake, but in truth it's been raining so much it has been hard to build up the willpower to brave the stormy waters. We also thought we'd be able to visit the toilet freely, but as it's about ten feet from the back door we've learned to hold it in during the storms.

Apparently the storms are a by-product of something called Cyclone Rene, who is coming to visit over the next few days after tearing apart Tonga. Thankfully it sounds like most of his rage was used up in Tonga, but it still doesn't bode well for what we hoped would be a week spent exploring the sunny beaches of North Island.

Day 55, in which we peer at Mabel's Paint Pots

2010-02-16T14:21:00.000-08:00

Today we drove north to explore the geothermal wonders of Rotorura, halfway between Mount Doom (which marks the south end of this particular stretch of volcanic activity) and White Island (which marks the northern end, which we're due to visit in a couple of days time).

Our first scheduled stop was Wai-o-tapu, one of the top geothermal visitor spots on the North Island, and we had to floor it (while safely comfortably within the legal speed limit) as I had taken too long over breakfast and the illustrious Lady Knox Geyser only shoots off once a day at 10:15am sharp (this is not an example of Mother Earth's wonderful time keeping. The geyser erupts when a bored looking man pours some soap flakes into the crater, breaking the surface tensions sufficiently to let the super-heated gases below escape. The guidebook reports that this is a tried-and-tested method first discovered by some presumably very surprised female prisoners who had been clearing bush in the area and had stopped at the geyser to do some laundry in the hot spring).

We got there with only seconds to spare. There were about three hundred people straining to look at the geyser, and room for about fifty to do so comfortably. I peered over the shoulder of one man and saw the back of the head of a Japanese lady, and when she bent over slightly to adjust the bag over her shoulder I could see the base of the geyser bubbling as it prepared to erupt. The anticipation was everything, and the power built up slowly – the crater spitting and frothing violently – until finally a seven metre plume of steam erupted from the ground, at which point all three hundred of us had a pretty good view.

Once in full flow, the geyser can keep going for an hour. Figuring there wasn't much more to see, we were first back into the car park and back down the hill to Wai-o-tapu proper. It took a couple of hours to stroll around the 'geothermal wonderland', which presents examples of the different ways the pressure inside the Earth can force its way out to the surface, including a series of huge craters which pockmark the park at random, where acids have eaten away the ground underneath; mud pools and mud volcanoes, which bubbled and spat with varying degrees of violence; and a series of mutli-coloured acid lakes. The latter were the most picturesque, and best of the lot were the Devil's Paint Pots and the Champagne Lake, two huge adjoining lakes streaked in different colours which change everyday according to the minerals which have welled up inside them (for example, sulphur makes yellow, iron makes reddy brown, orange is antimony and purple is manganese). Today the Champagne Lake was vivid orange at the fringes, turning into deep blue abruptly after that, while the Paint Pots were daubed in blots of green and yellow.

We also saw the Devil's Bath, which is a vivid pond which glows a surreal and even shade of Gatorade green. I've noticed it's all Devil's This and Devil's That in places like this, and I wish the early explorers could be more imaginative when naming the things they discover. At Wai-o-tapu we saw the Devil's Paint Pots, the Devil's Bath and the Devil's Home, and we've previously seen two Devil's Staircases, a Devil's Pond and Devil's Bridge. Could we not have, say, Mabel's Paint Pots, Geraldine's Bath and Leslie's Staircase? Hopefully the New Zealand Department of Conservation is reading.

We drove further north to Te Puia, which is technically a Maori culture centre although we skipped all the anthropological nonsense to eat cake and admire more geothermal stuff. This included a geyser which is active 80% of the time and also more powerful than the Knox Geyser, and while this sounds more impressive it did mean the plume was barely visible though the thick steam and mist. We also saw some very neat mud pools which grew in concentric circles, and the usual range of bubbling cauldrons and steaming pits. We also tried to see a kiwi bird, which was housed in its own special aviary, but I guess he was out doing its laundry as it was a very small aviary and we still couldn't see him.

It had been drizzling all day, so we drove home to Taupo to eat pizza and make a sterling effort finish off all of the cider we'd bought earlier in the week.

Day 54, in which the ducks eat our breakfast

2010-02-15T14:20:00.000-08:00

Today was another quiet day, which we spent pottering around the lake and then popping into town for lunch. We ended up in a Japanese café – eating things like sushi, teriyaki and tempura – and were delighted to find it was all delicious, although Paul couldn't quite bring himself to touch the boiled white rice. It seems our appetites may in time tolerate westernised Japanese food again (but certainly not Japanese western food).

We also fed the ducks some breakfast. They went totally nuts for raisin bran and trotted up onto our lawn to introduce themselves properly. Although they appear to be a rather dull brown colour, when they lift a wing you can see a jaunty row of bright green feathers. Paul later tried to befriend three black swans who live among the rocks to the right of the bach, but aborted on the suspicion that the larger of the birds wanted to test the rumour that a swan can break a human arm with its beak.

I also had to email work today to confirm that I'll be returning in one month's time. Boo.

Day 53, St Valentine's Day, in which we follow in Frodo's footsteps up Mount Doom

2010-02-14T19:30:00.000-08:00

We were due to get up at 5:30am today to walk the Tongariro Alpine Crossing, however neither of us could get to sleep so we got up at 2:30am instead and watched Swimfan (on the one channel in New Zealand that still operates at that hour) before having just a big enough nap to be irritable once the alarm finally went off. A bus collected us from central Turangi and – after a strange briefing from the driver, in which she explained this was really quite an ugly place to walk – dropped us off at the start of what is widely regarded as the best one day trek in the country. About two hundred other people also appeared to be doing the walk, but once we got going we all distributed out nicely along the path. We saw plenty of people on route, but it wasn't so packed you could start a conga.

The walk started at the foot of Mount Ngauruhoe, a huge conical volcano which is now better known as 'Mount Doom', thanks in part to Sir Peter Jackson using it in his popular series of hobbit movies but mostly because no one really knows how to pronounce 'Ngauruhoe'. The sun was still low in the sky, so this part of the walk was relatively cool and we enjoyed an easy hour's hike through the volcanic wastelands, crossing old lava flows and following a soda stream up to the base of the volcano.

The track then turned abruptly uphill, up what the guidebook referred to as the Devil's Staircase. I'd expected this to be a natural formation – say, layers of limestone lying in fractured strata to form a natural flight of steps up the mountain – but it transpired to be just a series of man-made pine staircases which looked no more than ten years old, winding their way up the side of the mountain. This was all a bit blah, although as we climbed higher we were rewarded with stunning views out across the North Island, including lakes, forests, meadows and a very distant snow-topped mountain.

There was an option here to ascend Mount Doom itself, however that track is not really defined and our guidebook contained a series of warnings to the effect that climbing the volcano is an act of suicide (and requires long trousers) so we dismissed the idea. There was also a sign which advised on the correct course of action should Mount Doom start to erupt. Most of these involved advice along the lines of “Try not to let any flying rocks hit your head” and “Try not to get engulfed in a sudden lava flow”, so I suspect there wasn't really anything we would be able to do if it did explode.

We crossed a ridge, descended into the South Crater and then crossed the flattest terrain I have ever walked across, which was so flat it confused my brain into thinking we were walking on water. The crater appears to have been filled with clay and then perfectly levelled off, and while this might sound quite dull we did get some superb views of Mount Doom, which was far more colourful from this angle and appears to be topped in rich deep red.

Also looming on the horizon was the Red Crater ridge, which I particularly feared as the guidebook warned that the track there follows a narrow ridge with long drops on either side. We first climbed up to the top of the ridge where we found a stunningly desolate wasteland on the other side, with volcanic rock formations even more twisted and bizarre than during our initial walk from the drop-off point. We then followed the track along the top of the ridge, which was quite very scary and whenever I slipped and lost my footing I figured I was a goner. When we got to the top at 1886 metres – and enjoyed our sandwiches overlooking stunning views of the way we had come – I was justifiably very proud of myself.

Alas, it transpired that wasn't actually not the scary part of the Red Crater Ridge. After a cheese and jam sandwich we followed the route towards the Red Crater proper and I was confused to see that the path suddenly stopped. As we reached that point I saw why: a couple of feet in front of me was a sheer drop down into the heart of the active volcanic crater, with the pathway skirting left along the lip of the crater (I was petrified, but I postponed hysteria sufficiently to observe that the crater was an unexpected and breathtaking shade of red, cross-cut with bands of black volcanic rock). The guidebook here had a wonderful piece of advice: “Please do not walk too close to the edge of the crater because if you fall in you will not come out.” If this were the UK, they would have ten foot high fences around this sort of hazard – but then, if they did that it wouldn't be worth coming to see.

I focussed my mind on survival and marched up the ridge and back down the other side. The path on the far side was about two metres wide with sheer drops on either side, but worse was made from a sort of volcanic sand and scree which slipped from under you as you walked. Everyone slipped and slid down the ridge, but surprisingly no one toppled off into the volcano and died. Looking back you could see into the rich red heart of the crater, while down below sat the Emerald Lakes, a group of fabulous blue ponds. The eggy stench of sulphur was thick in the air so we assume the ponds were filled with sulphuric acid, although the guidebook only offered the hint “No swimming!”

We trekked down through the flats of the vast Central Crater and then climbed up the ridge on the far side. We were supposed to be admiring the Blue Lake (“No swimming!”) here, but in the opposite direction was the much more beautiful view of the vivid red crater snuggling up against the red-tipped Mount Doom.

It was all down hill from here, in every sense. We endured a long and tedious trek down through the grassy hills of the Rotopaunga Valley into a winding pathway through bland forests which seemed to last absolutely forever (but was in fact only two and a half hours). Despite this, seeing Mount Doom and the Red Crater so close up is definitely yet another Top Ten highlight of the holiday, our pleasure only marginally diluted by the return journey. This was the closest we've been to the heart of an active volcano and we were surprised by how beautiful something so desolate and destructive could be. Although this was called the Tongariro Crossing we didn't actually notice Mount Tongariro at all. It wasn't any particular colour and didn't belch smoke or threaten to erupt, and so went pretty much unnoticed.

We had planned a big dinner with champagne when we got home, but were too tired and dehydrated so we only had toast and champagne, and then bed.

Days 52 and 53, in which we do very little at all

2010-02-13T19:30:00.000-08:00

We've spent the past few days just lazing around the house, reading and snoozing and attempting the odd swim. The beach is made entirely from extremely sharp volcanic rocks so getting into the water for a swim is a bit of a challenge, but once you're in its surprisingly warm. There are also super-aerated volcanic rocks on the beaches, which is a bit of a surprise when you swim along and bump into one floating the other way.

As with much of New Zealand, the whole of Lake Taupo was created by volcanic activity. Apparently, we're sleeping on top of a theoretically dormant super-volcano, which exploded so viciously a few thousand years ago that even the Romans on the other side of the planet saw the sky go red. The magma that emptied out into the world on that day left behind a huge underground void, which then collapsed and created our lovely lake.

We share the waters with some very tame ducks, black swans and some black-and-white birds which spend their days sitting on a nearby rock looking for fish. We no longer share the beach house with insects, thanks to a new insect management programme which involves regular blasts of Raid into the rooms we're not using and a 24-hour Raid plug-in.

Our only trip out was to stock up on groceries in Taupo, and we took the opportunity to have dinner out at the Lotus Thai restaurant opposite the supermarket. Unfortunately we didn't get much of what we ordered and so dinner only lasted twenty minutes. Attempts to find out what had happened to the rest of the meal only led to the waiter repeating the word “okay” (the second most widely understood word in the English language, after “Coca-Cola”), so we drew a line under the experience and paid the bill.

Day 51, in which we fly to Taupo and meet an insect or two thousand

2010-02-11T19:27:00.000-08:00

This morning we drove to Nelson airport, handed back our car and checked in for our 10am flight to Wellington. Being used to international airports, we arrived two hours early and so she checked us on the 8am flight to Wellington instead. We panicked a little about getting through security in time and high-tailed it round to the security desk, where a bored looking man explained “the plane has to be here before you can board it”. Paul asked what sort of security procedures they undertake, noting that in the UK you have your photograph taken, your shoes x-rayed and occasionally a full body pat-down. He frowned. “No,” the security guard said.

Sure enough, the plane arrived five minutes later and a bunch of people got off, and then they opened the doors at security and herded us through unchecked onto the plane. We were carrying bottles of water far more than 100ml in volume and at no point had anyone checked our identity. It is funny how quickly you get used to extremely convoluted administrative procedures.

At Wellington we had to wait several hours for our connecting flight to Taupo, but at least this airport had shops and caféto while away our time in. The plane from Nelson was tiny, but the plane to Taupo even smaller: the passenger cabin was the height of one person and about half as wide, with a direct view into the cockpit. We were delayed for several more hours, as planes this small cannot take off in the fog and – once a strong breeze had blown away the fog – we found they cannot take off in such a strong breeze either.

Taupo airport was the smallest yet, comprising a field and a building only slightly more imposing than a portakabin, so it was not difficult to find Michelle, the chatty lady from Rent-A-Dent who gave us our car for the fortnight. We soon found ourselves motoring down to the Old Smokehouse, a lovely old beach house on the shores of Lake Taupo, the largest freshwater lake in New Zealand. We have fabulous views and the sunset is amazing, but the house is rather run-down and the evening was an endless battle against an onslaught of insects. We've realised that the rules for dealing with insects at night are the same as for dealing with a zombie apocalypse: close all windows, seal off all entry points, close curtains and blinds and keep lights off. We ended up having a romantic bottle of wine by candlelight, while watching a tv show about a 'family wipe-out' murderer.

We've stocked the house up with food and wine from the supermarket in our nearest town, Turangi, but we don't intend to ever go back. The town was built as a temporary settlement while a nearby hydroelectric scheme was built, and is now severely neglected and strikingly different to the wealthy and tourist friendly Taupo in the north. We went to the local fish and chip shop – Grand Central Fry – on the recommendation of the guidebook, and while the food was really very nice the rest of the customers all looked so emotionally and/or physically broken it was a thoroughly depressing experience. The town as a whole seems to have the highest proportion of broken people we've seen yet in New Zealand, which is a great shame but we will still be going the extra 30km next time to shop in Taupo instead.

Day 50, in which we breakfast on wine then fill our faces with mussels

2010-02-09T21:30:00.000-08:00

Breakfast involved tasting a couple of wines at the Highfield Estate – reputed to be the vineyard with the best views in Renwick, but too far up a steep hill to be on our cycling route yesterday – followed by smoked salmon bagels at the St Clair winery. This latter is the largest family owned vineyard in New Zealand and a regular winner of awards, but we didn't try any of their wines since we were driving up to the north coast and along to Nelson.

We passed through a number of small towns and villages along the meandering coastline, but the weather was so poor it wasn't worth stopping until we reached the fabulous Mussel Pot in the tiny seaside town of Havelock, where we sat in a lovely garden and munched our way through two huge pots of steamed green-lipped mussels. These New Zealand specimens are giants compared to our British mussels, and made for a fabulous meaty meal, dripping in a garlic wine sauce on the one hand and chilli and coriander on the other, all mopped up with a basket of bread.

We're in Nelson now – staying at the Palms Nelson motel – which appears to be a (relatively!) large and not particularly interesting city, although we don't have any time to explore its national parks, beaches or parks. Tomorrow morning we hand back the car and fly out to Taupo in the middle of North Island. We'll be spending a week in a lakeside cabin that probably does not have internet access, so until then adieu!

Day 49, in which we drink ten wines and cycle fifteen kilometres

2010-02-09T21:16:00.000-08:00

After a fabulous breakfast at the Alpine Lodge's café – whose poached eggs and muesli with cinnamon poached fruit was more than a match for their restaurant – we drove up to Renwick on the east coast, one of the main settlements within the Marlborough wine growing region. The drive was a rather tense affair, as gas stations are few and far between in the mountains and the fuel gauge was nudging red by the time we limped into town.

After checking into the Watson's Way Backpackers hostel – where the very lovely owners Pat and Paul welcomed us with fresh cut flowers and two hire bikes – we threw ourselves immediately into the focus of this afternoon: Marlborough wine tasting.

What a brilliant business idea: tourists turn up, you feed them free wine and then they cycle off to scrounge more booze off the neighbours. There are forty-six different vineyards within easy reach of Renwick, and since we didn't really have the time or constitution to visit them all we set out on a simple 15km loop from the hostel.

First stop was the Wairau River winery, a pretty huge operation. We sampled the 2009 Sauvignon and then compared it to the previous year's, of which 10% had been aged in oak. Comparing wines turns out to be the best way to appreciate them. For example, I didn't realise that storing wine in oak mellowed and rounded out the flavours so nicely, nor that twelve months is a long time in Sauvignon years and much of the citrus flavour was already in decline, allowing the nettle and pepper flavours to stand out. Alas, despite a superb sticky pork and peanut salad in Wairau River's sunny garden, the wine server didn't have much enthusiasm for her topic or interest in her customers. We didn't feel especially welcome, so after just two wines we reboarded our bikes and figured we'd probably never go out of our way to taste Wairau River wine again.

Our next stop, the Huia winery, was a much smaller and more friendly place, with an enthusiastic wine server who had an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of wines, the wine making process and the growing of grapes. Indeed, it didn't take Paul long to start picking her brains on the trademark and regulatory issues faced by the company when exporting globally. We tasted four delicious wines here: an unusual sparking Chardonnay (2004 Huia Blanc de Blancs), which I thought tasted just a little too much like Chardonnay; Sauvignon blends from 2008 and 2009, of which I disapproved of the more recent for its indulgence in mystic woo-woo (the Huia winery is, alas, converting to 'biodynamic farming' – or witchcraft – which is not something I generally support); and then a surprisingly tart Riesling, with a strong mineral aftertaste. All were excellent and the server had us laughing throughout, so we will probably keep our eyes out for Huia in the UK.

I feared that our next stop – the Cloudy Bay winery – would be overly corporate and formal, as it is the only of the Renwick vineyards to be a household name in the UK. As it turned out, it was a very relaxed affair, with a big basket of bats, ball and other toys for playing in the garden. We tasted five separate wines here all of which were excellent (even the German wines!) and their Riesling pudding wine was one of the nicest I've ever tasted, being much less syrupy than a typical Muscat and also lighter at only 10%. I will definitely seek that out in the UK as a refreshing way to finish a meal.

We wanted to visit a few more vineyards (including the Oyster Bay winery), but it seems they have chosen not to market in the same way as their competitors and, after ten wines and cycling fifteen kilometres through the baking heat, we felt perhaps we'd already had sufficient anyway. Still, we had a superb afternoon, and today's alcocycle is a welcome addition to the dozen or so other experiences in our current Top Ten of the holiday.

For dinner we headed out to the local English pub – the Cork and Keg – where we indulged in nostalgia with a pint of bitter and a pub meal (hotpot and Yorkshire pudding, no less). We returned to the hostel and found we can still only get two channels on the tv in the bedroom, so we watched a series of dross while winding down, including a documentary about a savage pensioner killer from North Island (where we go next week) and an awful US TV show called Canterbury's Way about a vile lawyer.

Day 48, in which we pass Foul Wind and Puke

2010-02-08T21:11:00.000-08:00

We packed up the car, bade Stewart The Horse farewell and continued our drive north along the West Coast. We had only a few important stops on route, first of which was the charmingly named Puke Pub in Pukekura. The pub was closed, unfortunately, and the musty Bushmans Lodge across the road was too unpleasantly stuffed with animal parts and sorry looking pies to be worth more than a toilet break. We pressed on north to the city of Greymouth, the largest settlement we've visited since first arriving (and driving straight out of) Christchurch. After a sandwich at the very lovely DP1 Café, we departed the very unlovely Greymouth as quickly as possible.

We had heard great things about this part of the West Coast, but a sudden rainstorm meant we were not well placed to enjoy it. At one point we had the windscreen wipers at full speed and still visibility was so poor we couldn't make out the coastline beyond. Thankfully the storm was over by the time we reached Pancake Rocks, which I had imagined to be a series of individual rocks which sat low and flat in the sea but which were in fact tall towers resembling a stack of American pancakes (thankfully, as this made for a much more interesting sight).

A walkway has been built through the tropical foliage out onto Pancake Rocks, offering superb views of the rock formations, and it was a superb example of how a natural phenomenon can be sympathetically exploited for tourism. Somewhat less successful was Cape Foulwind, a clumsy walkway to a rather unremarkable lookout point over a very poorly populated seal colony. My favourite aspects of visiting Cape Foulwind were the boysenberry ice-cream and the skittish little flightless bird who befriended me in return for the ice-cream cone.

We turned right and headed up into the mountains, passing a series of increasingly small settlements until finally reaching our home for tonight, the Alpine Lodge in St Arnaud. St Arnaud is a tiny settlement nestled between mountains on the edge of Lake Rotoiti in the Nelson Lakes National Park. The local tourist industry appears to be entirely dominated by the giant Alpine Lodge, which comprises a higher end hotel, a backpackers hostel, a really nice restaurant and a more relaxed café. You could almost expect the locals to resent this monopoly, if only the couple who run it were not so friendly.

After a short walk down to Lake Rotoiti – where we contemplated taking a swim, before falling foul again of the wicked sandfly – we retired to the lodge restaurant for a superb meal before bed.

Day 47, in which we tour the glacier in style

2010-02-07T18:38:00.000-08:00

We got up early this morning and commandeered a helicopter to take us to the top of the Fox Glacier. Twelve of us were going up in total, but as helicopters are very small we went in three separate groups and Paul was lucky enough to co-pilot in the front (he thankfully did not need to assume control of the vessel). I sat in the second row, at the back, crammed between the window and an enormous American man.

A helicopter strikes me as a very silly invention. Unlike most flying machines, if a helicopter's engines stall for any reason then you are effectively just sitting in the middle of the sky in a very heavy metal box. At least an aeroplane can glide to safety or a hot air balloon can deflate gently until it lands in a soft grassy meadow. I somehow managed to keep my mind off this topic during the flight, and enjoyed the helicopter ride immensely. We soared close to the top of the rainforest high up in the mountains and plunged down to follow the length of the glacier, which is effectively a long valley filled with heavily compacted and slowly advancing snow. I was surprised by how huge and long it was, although apparently it is only a fraction of the size it was even a few hundred years ago (although it has been growing since 1985).

We then span round at high speed to look at a small waterfall which spirals down one mountain face and onto the glacier, although with all the spinning it was hard to keep track of what we were looking at. The artificial gravity created by the centrifugal force of the turns and the large amount of sky that appeared to be directly below me completely confused my brain into thinking we were flying upside down. I kept my eyes closed during this section but Paul took some good photos of this bit.

Finally, after a sweeping roll round the valley, we landed on a relatively flat bit of glacier where our guide, Cole, issued us with our safety gear. We had already been given lurid red socks and big boots at the helihike centre, and up here we were issued with crampons to tie to our boots and big wooden sticks to aid balance and for probing the odd intriguing crevice. We had to wait for the other two groups to come up, and as the glacier is a dangerous place to amble around we all had to stay put and wait it out. Every time the helicopter came anywhere near us we had to crouch down and face the opposite direction, and even then the blast of the rotors would almost blow us away and we'd be deluged in a shower of loose ice.

The trek around the glacier took around two hours. I was expecting the surface to be fairly smooth and flat, but in fact it was a mass of complex formations. The vast weight of the ice advancing down the mountain causes the surface to fracture and buckle easily, creating compression arches (huge bridges of ice forced up from the surface). Melt water also bores down into the surface, creating huge ice caves when you're lucky and moulins when you're not (a moulin, Cole explained, is when a perfectly vertical shaft is bored into the ice by melt water. He said they are the most dangerous feature on the glacier, since if you fall in you fall until you wedge into the shaft like a cork, and then the melt water keeps coming and you drown. I asked Paul what he thought the second most dangerous thing on the glacier was, and after some thought he responded “stonewashed jeans and matching jacket”).

All of these features are made to look extra amazing as glacial ice – which is denser than frozen water since it comprises extremely compacted snow – filters out all light but for the colour blue, and so these arches and and ice caves have a magical glow about them. We descended into one particularly superb ice cave quite close to where we were dropped off, and then hiked up towards the peak where we found a series of vast compression arches, one of which Paul happily had a scramble through.

Back in town, we went to the only other tourist attraction in Fox Glacier, the café at Matherson Lake, from where amazing views can be had to Mounts Cook and Tasman, the two largest mountains on the island. Alas, clouds spoiled our view of the mountains, while a decerebrate waitress and a toxic US couple at the next table spoiled our enjoyment of lunch.

After a short nap, we walked to the bottom of the Fox Glacier to get the full picture. While the glacier itself doesn't look like much from down here – with its full height and length left to the imagination – it was superb to see the valley through which it had once advanced and was now retreating. We were surprised by the amount of damage something so slow can do to a landscape, with the valley having been completely carved out by the ice and now left as a wasteland of rocks and stones dumped by the glacier in its retreat. There were also lots of new safety signs I haven't seen before – including one which appeared to mean “If you're not hit by a a rockfall, you'll be killed by an avalanche or tidal wave”. Given the Department of Conservation's determination to stop anyone crossing the safety barriers, and the clear message of the consequences, it is hard to believe the young couple who were crushed last year under several hundred tonnes of ice thought that a close-up photo of the glacier was a good idea.

We waited for nightfall with some superb snapper with mango salsa at the Mount Cook Café, and then took an evening stroll through the Minnehaha forest, a short walk through rainforest on the edge of the village. The main attraction here are the glow worms, who lurked in vast clusters on the ferns and moss of the undergrowth. In pitch black, these little white lights looked almost like Christmas tree fairy lights and created an amazing field of stars stretching back into the undergrowth. I expected them to look like the fireflies I've seen in the US – big ugly insects which flashing green bottoms – but they instead burned bright white. We tracked one of the little monsters down on the side of a tree and found they really were ugly brown wriggly worms. No wonder they only try to attract a mate after dark.

Day 46, in which we finally meet the sandfly, with bloody consequences

2010-02-06T18:31:00.000-08:00

After a spot of breakfast at the unbeatable Vudu in Queenstown, we climbed back into our car and drove along the winding road through the mountains down on to the West Coast, a narrow strip of land around 30km wide and hundreds long, sandwiched between the Tasman Sea and the Southern Alps. The drive that far was much of a muchness. We've spent so much time trekking through the Alps and driving through the Alps and drinking superb bottles of Carrick Sauvignon Blanc in the Alps that seeing yet more of it – however dramatic the mountains and gorges we passed – aroused little more than a stifled yawn.

We've heard superb things about the West Coast, however, and it kicked off in fine style with large clusters of very mangled trees which were so buffeted by the wind they appeared – even in fine weather – to be freeze-framed at the height of a gale. The vegetation is now much more tropical, like a series of house plants which have broken free and gone feral, including giant ferns, alien flowers, twisted tendrils and impossibly tall palm trees.

After a while we came across the coast proper and started to explore a very beautiful sand dune national park, but within minutes of entering we were already under the attack of the sandfly. Our legs were engulfed in a cloud of tiny black specks which left Paul's ankles dripping blood and mine marked with numerous huge red bumps. We had heard tale of the sandfly's powers, but having not met any in over a week we'd clearly forgotten to take the issue seriously. We now won't venture outside the house before first soaking in DEET.

The road meandered inland for a while, cut through a tunnel of tall and dense rainforest, then led us back out onto the coast at Bruce Bay. Storms regularly lash against this beach, spitting out truck-loads of flotsam and jetsam, and passers-by have started using this driftwood – along with rocks, pebbles and other found objects – to build a series of simple structures. Taken together, this collaborative amateur art installation stretches the full length of the beach and makes for an unexpected and surprisingly attractive addition to the coastline, if at times a little too reminiscent of The Blair Witch Project.

We entered rainforest again and pretty much stayed inland until Fox Glacier, a tiny little town with a tiny population and a gigantic mountain glacier. We checked into the Fox Glacier Holiday Park then took dinner at the Café Névé on the main street, where our enjoyment of the splendid food was marred only by seeing the chef – as we entered – standing round the back alternately sucking on a cigarette and coughing up her lungs.

We have a splendid little cabin at the Holiday Park, complete with fridge, microwave, ensuite bathroom and portable television (with access to two channels), which possibly makes this the best equipped place we've stayed in New Zealand so far. The cabin looks out over a horse's field, and the only downside of our accommodation is that our sleep was disturbed that night when we both had graphic dreams following my prediction, just before going to sleep, that Stewart The Horse would put his head through the window during the night and lick my arm.

Day 45, in which we sail through Milford Sound

2010-02-05T17:45:00.000-08:00

A tour bus collected us at 9:30am from the holiday park today and took us on a day trip north to Milford, passing the dreaded Divide Shelter where so much of yesterday had been wasted. It took about two and a half hours to cover what should have been a one hour journey, thanks to numerous sight seeing stops and toilet breaks for the old timers on board.

At Milford we boarded a small motor boat which sailed us up and down the Milford Sound, a long, thin salt water lake surrounded by vast mountains and occupied by seals, penguins and dolphins, which is named after Milford Haven in Wales but with which it otherwise has little else in common. The whole trip was spectacular and came with a delicious packed lunch, and after three days of fighting hard through the mountains with our provisions on our backs just to see a few paltry mountains, it was superb to just sit back and have everything done for us. The whole experience was one of the highlights of our entire holiday, and the photos above don't even begin to do it justice.

The coach returned via Te Anau to Queenstown, an incredibly long road journey made bearable by the showing of a DVD of The World's Fastest Indian starring Sir Anthony Hopkins, a biopic about an eccentric old Kiwi called Bert Munro who broke the land speed record in the 1960s armed with little more than a 1921 motorcycle and a few handmade engine parts.

Returning to Queenstown was like going home, and we even checked back into the YHA Lakefront Hostel. For dinner we went to a seafood restaurant called Finz down on the main jetty, where I ordered mussels and was surprised to find that, as with much else in New Zealand, they are bigger and better than the ones we have at home. Here they come in bright green shells and are the same size as oysters.

After two bottles of superb wine, including a truly awesome bottle of Jules Taylor sauvignon blanc, we decided it was perhaps time to do the laundry. Then bed.

Days 42, 43 and 44, in which we go for a Great Walk

2010-02-04T17:19:00.000-08:00

Day One: Ascent to Routeburn Falls

Having finally packed our key essentials into our rucksacks (Paul's essentials somehow taking twice as much space as mine), we stuffed the rest into the boot of our car and parked it deep in the suburban streets of Queenstown to hide it from wannabe thieves, before retiring to bed.

We rose at 7am the following morning and caught a minibus to the town of Glenorchy at the far end of the lake. I don't imagine Glenorcy is ever a destination for anyone, comprising as it does just a couple of streets, a library the size of a garden shed, a small grocery and a large possum fur shop. Life does not look exciting here: the women of the town seemed largely preoccupied with their large broods of children, while the men (we were told) primarily engage in farming or hunting.

After a brief coffee break we were taken up a dirt track into the hills and dropped off at the Routeburn Shelter, the eastern end point of one of New Zealand's 'Great Walks', the Routeburn Track. This is also apparently where Peter Jackson filmed the scenes for Isengard in Lord of the Rings, although I guess a lot has changed since the ents defeated the orcs as Saruman's fortress wasn't really recognisable any more.

The track started with an easy ascent through temperate rainforest, a tangled mass of mossy evergreen beech trees vaguely reminiscent of Yakushima. The trees offered good shelter from the sun, but as a result we were only occasionally able to glimpse the vast, barren and snow-topped mountains which towered above us beyond the tree canopy. This part of the journey followed the Routeburn Gorge, which we crossed several times on very bouncy swing bridges, before heading up hill to the Routeburn Flats hut, one of four overnight refuges along the track. We only popped in for shade while we ate our lunch, but it did offer some superb views while we did so: the window looked out across a grassy plain bisected by the Routeburn river, with vast grey mountains rising up all around in the distance.

We realised during lunch that our provisions might perhaps be too ambitious, as the young Israeli couple near us were getting by with a white crusty loaf and primula cheese spread, while we were tucking into gluten-free, six-seed wholemeal loaf topped with cracked black pepper soft cheese.

We resumed the second leg of the day's journey and discovered it was entirely uphill (which I suppose we could have predicted, given the lunch hut was surrounded by mountains). The walk continued through verdant beech forest and I started to wish that there were fewer trees and more views. My hopes were in part realised when we come to a point where, in 1994, an avalanche had cleared a 50 metre wide tranche of mountainside, offering views down into the valley and all the way back to where our trek had begun.

We continued our ascent and before we knew it had arrived at the Routeburn Falls hut a kilometre above sea level, where we were booked in for the night. This was a little bit of a surprise as it was only 2:30pm and we had an entire afternoon to kill before we could even think about going to bed. We got round this by taking to our bunks for an afternoon nap.

The facilities in the hut were very basic. The dorm comprised an unlit room of 48 wooden bunks (all filled that night), next to which was an unlit toilet block with sinks and cold water (but no showers), where we were warned to take extra care at night as possums like to play in the cubicles. The kitchen was a large room lined with benches, with a series of sinks and hotplates against one wall and a single light bulb in the ceiling, which we were told is turned on at dusk and off promptly at 10pm.

I tried to wash myself in the sink after my nap, but as the sink was in public view this was not very easy, and I did not come as prepared as the two men who arrived in the toilet block, moistened their flannels in synchrony and then disappeared into their respective cubicles, to conduct who-knows-what mysterious ablutions.

Our dinner comprised a delicious and balanced combination of rehydrated beef teriyaki (recipe: add two cups of boiling water to packet, let stand for ten minutes) and a cup of flame grilled chicken noodle soup (recipe: add one and a half cups of water per packet, stir; no need to let stand as it is fast food), gobbled up with most of a packet of crackers.

Many of the other trekkers had also brought freeze dried food, but some particularly organised couples had carried individual ingredients up the mountain – each weighed out precisely and stored in a separate zip-lock bag – which they proudly assembled into meals which, due to the fact it was all one-pot cooking anyway, generally turned out the same as our freeze dried meal. The two exceptions were the family whose planning stretched to bringing a large bag of freshly made croutons to accompany their soup (which the son dumped entirely into his bowl) and the painfully thin vegetarian who appeared from the dorm room proudly carrying a carrot, a courgette and a tomato which he'd hoiked up the mountainside in order to make himself a bland and nutritionally unsound meal.

We called it a night at around 8pm and retired to our dorm, where sleep was a mere dream thanks to the constant talking, snoring, banging of doors and shining of torches. As one old man later commented, “It was more like being at the picture house.”

Day Two: Across the Harris Saddle to Lake Mackenzie

After finally getting to sleep, I woke to find that most of the bunks around me were already empty as everyone had gotten out for an early start. I woke Paul, we packed up our things and headed off on the track around 10am.

The path climbed up through the valley, meandered through grassy meadows and then ascended a tortuously steep and rocky valley wall, which would have been only half as bad if it were not for the baking heat. The Falls hut had marked the top of the tree line and, as there was not a cloud in the sky, I quickly found myself wondering why I'd wished away all of the tree cover the previous day.

Pausing behind a giant rock halfway up, we finally made it to the Harris Saddle at an altitude of 1,225 metres, just below which Lake Harris – the source of the Routeburn river – sits all glistening and pretty. We celebrated by stopping in the cool shade of the Harris Shelter for a brief brunch of salami and peanut butter sandwiches.

There was an optional steep side trek up Conical Hill from the shelter, which we'd initially thought we might quite like to do, but after nearly killing ourselves getting so far the idea of climbing yet more jagged rocks just for a view of the Tasman Sea (a body of water I didn't know even existed two days ago) seemed like folly. This was confirmed while we ate our brunch, when we overheard one middle-aged lady report, “Well I suppose it was a lovely view, though I was so tired I thought I'd puke.”

The trek thankfully descended after the saddle, following a steep valley wall through sub-alpine foliage, and offering some amazing views of the mountains and forests far below. The sun, alas, followed us into this valley, and so we took a lot of breaks when the rocks proved large enough to shelter behind. When back in the UK, I will have to remember to be thankful we still have an ozone layer.

After yet another climb up a rocky incline, we cut round into a new valley and saw far below us the tiny speck of the Mackenzie Hut – on the shore of Lake Mackenzie – which was to be our home for the evening. We descended the mountain in what felt like a never-ending series of zigzags until we finally crossed back over the tree line, and were embraced once again by the cool shade of the rainforest. This confusing and overgrown foliage again seemed to last forever, and we took a much needed rest break on a mossy stump until finally stumbling out into a clearing and finding the hut directly in front of us.

We arrived at around half three, which was only just early enough to secure a decent bunk bed. Only 16 individual bunks were provided here, with the remaining 34 hikers having to make do with one of several giant beds which were nominally divided into separate bunks and offered absolutely no personal space at all.

As the sun set, it beamed directly into my bunk and so – dehydrated and exhausted from the heat – I was sufficiently roused to retreat into the kitchen for a slap-up dinner of tinned sardines, crackers, seven seed sour dough bread and freeze dried Nasi Goreng (a meal whose description reached the epitome of vagueness: “Brown rice and vegetables in a mildly Asian style sauce”).

We took a stroll along the banks of the lake through yet another wild and overgrown beech forest to watch the sun settle just above the mountains. The lake water was clear and inviting and my body yearned to swim, having not felt the cleansing touch of water since Queenstown, but we watched as two young campers crept into the lake and winced as the glacial waters hit their testicles, and so we decided it was not for us.

We tried to go to bed, but a slightly feral old man on the bunk beside us – who reminded me of a muscular version of spimcoot's dad – instead regaled us with tales of his hiking accomplishments (including the somewhat egotistical claim that “Everyone says I could walk the hind legs off a donkey”), until we finally find the correct combination of words to politely express the desire that he shut up so we could turn in.

Day Three: Past Lake Howden to the Divide, and a shower in Te Anau

We woke up at around 6am and, figuring it was a good idea to make some progress before the sun rose properly, were out on the track by 7 o'clock. After a short ramble through yet more beech forest we ascended for half an hour and found ourselves looking down into a new valley which I initially thought was filled with a giant lake, but which we soon realised was in fact a dense carpet of morning mist far down near the valley floor.

We made our way quickly around the wall of the valley, met a very lovely waterfall and then descended down to Lake Howden, where the fourth hut on the track sits. We paused only briefly at the Howden hut figuring we were making such quick progress without the full glare of the sun that we ought to keep going. We thus disappeared again into thick rainforest and made a quiet descent down to the western end of the trek, at the Divide.

We had pre-arranged transport from the Divide shelter out of the Fiordlands National Park with a company called Tracknet, but that was not scheduled until 3:15pm. As we had set off so early – and walked so fast – we found ourselves emerging out of the undergrowth at 11:30am, and were somewhat surprised to see that there were absolutely no alternative means of transport (short of hitch-hiking) back to civilisation. Quite a few other walkers collected in the shelter during our tedious four hour wait, and I can't help feeling Tracknet might make life a bit easier with a couple more pickups. The fact is, the last leg of the Routeburn Track really does not require a full day's trekking.

The bus eventually dropped us off at the Lakeview Holiday Park in Te Anau, where we checked into an apartment and introduced ourselves to the three hallmarks of civilisation: hot showers, clean clothes and a Come Dine With Me marathon on the telly. We had dinner at a pretty shoddy pizzeria in town (but frankly were thankful for any food that didn't require any cups of boiling water stirred into it) before retiring to our real, comfortable bed in an attempt to watch Project Runway and – in failing to work out when it was showing – watching instead an utterly dreadful CSI clone called Criminal Minds, in which cod psychology is used to catch criminals (“Interesting, the killer used a knife to stab her. I think we're looking for an adult male around fourteen feet high called Henrietta”).

And to Summarise...

We'd heard lots of great things about the Fiordlands and had both expected the Routeburn Track to be an absolute highlight of our entire holiday, and perhaps by building it up so much we were setting ourselves up for a disappointment.

Our first issue was the lack of variety: anticipating seeing some truly open and dramatic scenery we instead spent a lot of time tramping through dark and damp beech rainforests. Even though the track notes tried to draw a distinction between the three different species of beech tree encountered on the track, this did not quite strike us as variety enough. This aside, we did see some stunning lakes, waterfalls and mountain ranges. Perhaps we had just set our expectations too high.

A second issue was that we never really got any sense of achievement, largely because the pathway was overly tamed – taking a map wasn't even officially recommended – and because we were only required to walk short distances each day. We didn't once have a full day of walking, finishing at 2:30pm on the first day and before midday on the last. The whole route might have better suited a two day trek – broken after the tortuous climb to the Harris Saddle – but without a night hut there this simply isn't possible. Alternatively, without carrying a heavy pack you could do the trek in a single exhausting but possibly exhilarating day, but that would be madness unless you could reliably predict the weather (as the various memorials to the dead we encountered during the trek will testify): you cannot afford to get caught unprepared for a storm in the Fiordlands, and storms come quick and without warning.

Despite these criticisms, Routeburn gave us a superb introduction to trekking in New Zealand (or 'tramping', as the locals insist on calling it) and we'd definitely want to do another track if we ever come back, although next time round we might do more research into distances walked and scenery on offer. The whole experience was also a very pleasant holiday away from the holiday, and tramping through the countryside let us really switch off and unwind in a way that sight-seeing and dolphin hunting – for all their wonders – really hasn't.

Always finish on a joke:

The very highlight of the trek came right at the end, when the entire shelter full of bored trekkers waiting for their bus was united in laughter by the inopportune comment of an older Yorkshire lady who had been trekking with her husband: “Peter, shall I hold your pole while you go to the toilet?” His brilliant response, once the laughter had died down: “We're not at home now, Brenda.”

Day 41, a day of intense preparation

2010-02-01T02:36:00.000-08:00

We are going trekking for three days through the Fjordlands tomorrow morning and will have only the stuff we can carry on our backs to sustain us for the entire journey (our nights will be spent in “tramp huts” – how decadent). Today was therefore a day of intense preparation, and so we rose at around midday and strolled into town to take care of our first tasks: buying new trousers and getting our hair cut (results above, trousers not shown).

Well, after a glass of champagne by the lake we went to Freshchoice and bought what we imagined might be sufficient food to sustain us for the duration of the walk. Important questions were asked, such as: How many cream crackers can be considered a dinner? Does the lightness of a packet of Cup-a-Soup outweigh its lack of nutritional content? Are sardines an appropriate side-dish to freeze dried beef teriyaki? (All of these questions will be answered in our next blog entry, following experimentation).

We have a large amount of packing to do, and everything in our already bulging luggage has to be filtered and the key items repacked into our smaller rucksacks. Knowing this to be an enormous and time consuming task, we went to a lovely Italian restaurant – Luciano – for chicken livers and pasta, washed down with a splendid glass of Otago sauvignion blanc.

Twenty to midnight and we are still packing...

Day 40, in which we go west

2010-01-31T17:29:00.000-08:00

A quick coffee for breakfast was the only further attention Oamaru received from us, before we drove 40km south to visit Moeraki beach, where a rare geological phenomenon has created a series of large spherical boulders which – thanks to erosion of the soils surrounding them – now sit in pleasingly elegant clusters on the beautiful beach around them. The boulders closer to the sea were more eroded, with several split open to reveal their honeycomb interiors.

Rare geological phenomena aside, it seems like all of nature is determined to make this place glorious. To complement the pale yellow sand, lush green trees and bright blue sky Mother Nature had strewn a carpet of pale pink seaweed of a type I've seen nowhere else on the planet. Human beings are, as ever, less eager to assist with natural beauty, and we saw several names carved cruelly into the surfaceof the some of the more amazing boulders. At this rate, if Suze really does luv Derek 4ever then their love will be lasting much longer than these boulders.

We had a quick sandwich among the sand dunes before setting off south for Penguin Place outside Dunedin. Penguin Place is a private Yellow Eyed Penguin conservation centre, and getting onto one of the public tours is a difficult business. We had made our reservation for a visit at 12:15 today back in November, and it was only as we climbed into the car to drive there that we realised we hadn't even thought about how long it would take to get to the centre. We plugged in the sat-nav and cheered when it came up with an estimated arrival time of 12:25. After haring down the roads and round the winding lanes of the Otago Peninsula, we arrived at 12:17 to find we had only missed the introductions.

We were led first to the penguin hospital, where two damaged penguins were patiently standing around in the sun, and one executed a very humorous jump off a log, which appeared to require all of his powers of concentration and balance. Our guide then drove us round to the far side of the hill to visit the beachside conservation area itself. I had imagined there would be perhaps a small stretch of beach and a bit of fenced off field, but in fact the conservation area stretched as far as the eye could see, including two huge rocky coves and an absolutely beautiful expanse of beach which curved for several miles from our lookout point round to a rocky peninsula on the other side.

From the top of the hill where we were dropped off, we could see several large black seals playing in the surf, and down in their cove two male seals were having a fight while others were paddling or sunbathing on the rocks. This was already one of the most amazing things I'd seen wild in nature, and then the guide pointed out the little wooden houses built into the side of the hill beside us. Peering in through the doorway, you could easily make out the little blue penguins and their chicks having a nap inside. Clever birds, building little wooden houses like that.

But we weren't here for the titchy blues. We walked down towards the bay and then out across to the grassy area behind it, where the yellow penguins come to nest (the yellow penguin is apparently a forest dweller by nature, and Penguin Place is planting lots of new shrubs to assist this). We saw a couple of baby penguins standing around in the sun, and then were led through a series of covered trenches to various hides which looked out at penguins variously having a snooze or standing around. We mostly saw babies (all around ten weeks old) as the parents wereall out at sea looking for fish, but this was fine as they are fluffier and more ridiculous than their parents.

After a short walk around Dunedin itself – known locally as the Edinburgh of the South, although this suggests to me that the Dunedin locals don't get north very often, as a fudge factory and bagpipe player do not an Edinburgh make – we returned to the car and headed for Queenstown, turning west off our favourite Highway 1 to join Highway 6, which is just like the first only at one point this trunk road west actually reduced from single carriageway down to single track in order to cross a short bridge. Once you turn west the foothills and mountains rise up quickly, and we were soon driving past rugged mountains, vivid lakes and stunning gorges. Although a lot of this was too wild for humans to settle, the calmer plains and undulating hills closer to Queenstown were festooned with a wineries and orchards, all selling their fresh produce on the side of the road. Had we wished to fill the boot with apples, apricots and cherries we could have done so for little money, although I suspect that is not a prank of which Apex Rent-a-car would approve.

Queenstown itself is again a surprisingly small city, but unlike those we've seen before it is clearly thriving. The city is nestled at the foot of some mountains along one side of a very huge lake, and our hostel (the YHA Queenstown) sits on the waterside, with stunning views across the waters to the seriously rugged mountains which rise up on the far side.

We'd heard that Queenstown has a reputation in New Zealand for being overly commercial and too focussed on tourism, so we'd been expecting a mountain-top Ibiza. In fact, the place is just popular, and has made few compromises to accommodate its temporary population. The town centre is small and friendly, with plenty of restaurants and bars to keep people busy, and far from being populated by drunken teenagers out on the pull, we saw a healthy mix of teenagers, twenty-somethings, young families and elderly couples. Everyone seemed to co-exist happily and, as seems to be the way in New Zealand, there never seemed to be any risk of things becoming violent or dangerous. We had dinner on the balcony at a pre-dotcom bubble restaurant called @Thai and then – since that wasn't remotely filling and we weren't remotely drunk enough – we shared chips down by the waterside while the sun set, then retired to a local bar for a second bottle of wine.

Although we're staying in a youth hostel here, we're not really doing the backpacking thing (as, I suppose, is evident from our eating habits), although we've crossed paths with plenty of backpackers while we've been here. I always had a prejudice about the sort of person who came back from a gap year enthusing about their backpacking adventure, and it's good to see my assumption confirmed that they weren't all having life-changing experiences and discovering new worlds at all, they were in fact just traipsing around the same limited set of youth hostels each set in major destinations, where they would sit outside their accommodation smoking cigarettes, getting wasted and trying to pull one of the hundreds of other western backpackers who are all doing precisely the same thing. Which isn't to say this is a bad thing – that's all we were doing at home after all – but I always knew they were fibbing about the spiritual enrichment.

Paul also made me laugh extremely loudly today, by reporting that “a jellyfish cannae work in an old folks' home”. A veiled reference to abysmal movie Love Happens, you understand.

Day 39, in which we don't flash the baby penguin

2010-01-30T17:20:00.000-08:00

We headed back round the harbour for breakfast today, for eggs on toast. Mine quickly became egg on toast when I lowered my defences to get some pepper from a neighbouring table and a gang of seagulls swooped down and gobbled up an entire poached egg and most of a piece of toast. Their leader – an ugly and noisy old thing – had been scoping us out from a tall flag pole the moment we'd turned up. I now have only one rule about seagulls: Kill them, if you can.

We had to leave Akaroa today, just two nights after falling in love with it. The landscape changed significantly as we left the Banks Peninsula and joined the main road south, with the wild and rugged becoming tame and flat – somewhat like Kent without the oast houses. The road was a single carriageway most of the way, and despite being the only trunk road on the east side of the island the traffic was very quiet and fast moving.

Around 1pm we arrived in Timaru for lunch. We had originally planned to stay in Timaru, but today we were very glad we had not. Timaru had all the look of an antipodean Blackpool, and although it had apparently seen glory days as a seaside town they were clearly long behind it. We stuffed a sandwich down our throats outside the tourist information centre (which, judging from its information boards, only specialised in helping people get the hell out of Timaru) and headed for our final destination for the day: Oamaru.

Oamaru looks less like a seaside town whose glory days are behind it, and rather more like Harrogate after global thermonuclear war (the guidebook is more euphemistic, suggesting it is merely “slowly gentrifying”). Apparently once the most attractive city on South Island, the town centre is now a rag-tag collection of Victorian buildings – including our own Empire Hotel Backpackers Hostel, a grand stone building with a neoclassical façade – distributed in between ugly or abandoned buildings, warehouses and factories, with many of the 'classical' buildings now bricked up and used as storage facilities. We should have guessed something was up as we drove down the main drag and passed no fewer than five separate people making their way into town in electric wheelchairs. This is not a hip and happening city.

Of course, none of this mattered as we had only come to Oamaru to see yellow-eyed penguins. We checked into our hostel and walked 5km uphill to a look-out point over the bay, then crested the hill and strolled down a remote country path to the far side of the coastline, where the yellow-eyed penguins live. These are a special, non-migratory and large form of penguin which are relatively unique to the area. We were told that one must be extremely patient if one wishes to see them and – as we're not very patient – we instead killed some time walking back into town for a spot of dinner at The Last Post, took at 90 minute nap and then drove back up to the colony to see if the penguins were up to much yet.

The lady in the tourist information office had warned us that we might not see any penguins at all (they are entirely wild, living on a beach completely naturally, so there's no charge to visit them and no guarantees). Fortunately, as we turned up (at 8pm) there was already a brave penguin strolling around on the beach, in the company of two giant brown seals. As the sun gradually set over the next hour, the penguins became more active and two more penguins appeared down on the beach. It was hard to make out much more than that as we were viewing the birds from a special walkway built high on the top of the cliffs above the bay, and as one American woman exclaimed “they're microscopic!”.

We had imagined that would be about it. Much to our surprise, however, a mother and her baby penguin suddenly appeared about a metre from the fence, high up the cliff wall among the shrubbery, where they politely posed for photographs (although they were visibly scared when flashes went off, something the volunteer attendant demanded we should not do and which – all the same – was a request various idiot tourists were unable to comply with). We were surprised to see them so high up the cliff, but it seems the penguins have made long winding pathways through the cliff-side shrubs and simply walk up from the beach to their cliff-top nests when they're ready for bed. These two were joined by another adult penguin, who posed briefly in front of the hide before shuffling off into the undergrowth with a nonchalant wave of one wing, as though to proclaim “Get out of my way, I'm fabulous!”.

After that, once we knew where to look, a few more penguins appeared in the undergrowth. As the wind raged and the sun began to set, the viewing platform emptied out and we were soon the last ones there. Although yet more penguins were now coming out of their nests for fresh air, we figured we should perhaps leave them with some peace and quiet.

It is a shame really that we were the last to leave, as our car refused to start and there was no one to give us a lift back into town (where I had conveniently left the AA phone number). We therefore enjoyed the walk back into town all over again and – since the AA refused to pick us up from the centre of town – we also got the wonderful opportunity to enjoy a second stroll up to the penguin colony, this time in pitch black and a howling gale.

We sat for some time in the car waiting for the AA – listening to disco tunes on the radio, and trying the engine periodically and without luck – until it was over an hour since we'd phoned for help. I tried the engine one last time and – dumb luck – it randomly fired up, so we drove back to our hotel and went in search of a recuperative drink. Alas, The Last Post was closed by 11pm, and the only other nightlife we had seen during our travels (on this, a Saturday night) was an octogenarian woman hobbling out of a disco at the Scottish Hall, a middle-aged man on each arm. We decided to wait until Queenstown for our drink and called it a night.

Update: Whoops. It seems pressing the accelerator when starting such a modern car as a Ford Focus means the engine can't fire up. I had assumed all cars were the same as my own, a 1971 wreck that typically needed more acceleration than I could provide to start. This was a lesson learned the hard way...

Day 38, in which we hunt endangered dolphins

2010-01-29T20:55:00.000-08:00

After a mammoth amount of sleep, we slipped into wetsuits and joined the Black Cat Cruise company for a tour of Akaroa harbour. We were on the hunt for Hector dolphins (named after the marine biologist Sir Hector Dolphin, a noted dolphin). These are a particularly small breed of dolphin unique to New Zealand which – despite being entirely wild – have a soft spot for the old humans and like to come say hello when they can.

There were ten of us crammed in the boat, each eagerly on the look out, and although we spotted the occasional group of dolphins, when we stopped to see if they wanted to come and play they invariably circled the boat a couple of times and then vanished again. Still, even this was more wild dolphin that I'd ever seen before, and it was quite magical seeing these stubby little animals jumping gleefully through the waves and dancing around in small groups.

Hector dolphins have been dying in their hundreds of thousands over the years. They get caught in local fishing nets and then drown (a Hector dolphin can only hold his breath for four minutes under water, which you'd think he'd take as a hint that he's not meant for aquatic life). Although there are now over seven thousand dolphins left, most of them didn't appear to be in Akaroa harbour.

Dark clouds began to billow over the mountains and the water became choppier, which we were told is superb weather for the dolphins, who see waves as a sort of adventure playground. Our leader soon heard over his radio that another group had found a friendly group further out in the mouth of the bay, so we were driven over there and we all climbed into the heaving waters. Almost immediately my head was under the water and I was so cold I couldn't breath. I tried swimming in light circles but it wasn't helping at all, and deciding it was a bad time to test whether dolphins really do save drowning humans like they do in Greek mythology (and with the tiny Hector dolphins, I'd have needed a whole school of saviours) and climbed back out. Still, while I failed to get close to the dolphins from the comfort of the boat, everyone else failed to get close to them from within the choppy waters (except the lucky lady in the photo above).

We also saw a penguin, who wasn't curious about us in the least and seemed to be just drifting on his tummy wherever the elements might take him. The weather worsened as we returned, and the waves grew huger and more violent as the driver hit full throttle and we bounced home across the waves. This made for an excellent fairground ride home, and we got NZ$100 back as a refund for the poor turn-out.

In the evening we went to the somewhat flamboyantly named La Vie En Rouge – a rather ordinary French restaurant – followed by a stroll around the harbour, where the storm clouds were swirling around all pretty.

Day 37, in which we decide we might quite like New Zealand

2010-01-28T12:56:00.000-08:00

We arrived at Christchurch in the early afternoon, and the contrast with Japan was immediately obvious. Everyone in New Zealand was happy, smiling and relaxed, the sun was shining, and outside the airport was a wide stretch of verdant countryside.

We hired a car from the most laid back man we've met all holiday and drove down to Akaroa, a small town on the east coast which will be home for the next couple of days. In any other country the drive from Christchurch would be a tourist attraction in itself: we passed soaring mountains, lush valleys, dense forests and sparkling blue lakes, all in quick succession and with not a blot on the landscape. Paul noted one bit was like “the Scottish Highlands in technicolor”, although during the 70km drive we also passed bits that looked like Wales, the Pyrenees, Rio de Janeiro and the Yorkshire Dales. In technicolor.

Arriving at Akaroa Harbour itself felt slightly unreal. The sat-nav was being experimental and had us creep up a steep mountain road rather than trundle straight to our destination, so we approached the town over the top of a mountain and our first sight of the harbour was from high above, looking down on the landscape laid out before us, the sea a strangely vivid blue colour and surrounded on three sides by huge and beautiful mountains, the sun shining gaily on all. It quite figuratively took our breath away.

We checked into the Bon Accord Backpackers hostel – a big old house with a superb garden, just a short walk from the sea – before wandering down to the harbour for a nose around, where again we were stunned by the sheer beauty of the place. We ended up having dinner at a restaurant called Ma Maison just as the sun began to settle across the waters, in what we agreed was the most spectacular place either of us had ever eaten dinner. The food was thankfully superb too: fresh fish, fruits and vegetables, and the wine weren't bad neither.

After a mooch along the beach and a bit of a paddle, we realised we hadn't slept in 32 hours and so went immediately to bed and - after three weeks on hard futons - were thankful to be reintroduced to the sprung mattress.

Note for would-be commentators: a few people have mentioned lately that they've been trying to post comments which haven't then appeared. I've got rid of all the 'please type the word above' nonsense for confirming you're a real human being, but it will still ask you to preview your comment when you first click 'post'. If you don't then click on 'post' again, your comment won't be submitted (note also that we love comments!).

Day 36, in which we underestimate our travel time just a smidge

2010-01-27T12:53:00.000-08:00

With the morning to kill before heading to the airport, we wandered over to the Imperial Palace to explore the allegedly beautiful gardens they have there. Looking for breakfast on route through the skyscrapers of the financial district we somehow stumbled across a branch of Dean & Deluca and so we stopped to buy muffins, coffee and sandwiches to eat later for lunch. I was so pleased to find somewhere so nice to eat, I immediately declared Dean & Deluca the third best thing I'd seen all holiday; however, in retrospect this possibly was not fair to the Fushimi Shrine in Kyoto.

The Imperial Gardens were pretty much a flop, thanks to an over-use of tarmac and concrete, but we enjoyed our sandwiches and did enjoy a fairly small stroll garden in one corner, where the pathways were a couple of feet wide rather than ten metres and there was plenty of verdant shrubbery. Still, I was by this point stricken with Japan fatigue and when Paul asked what I wanted to do next, I simply shrugged and suggested we get the hell to the airport.

When discussing our travel plans, we both made the simplistic error of guessing that since Japan and New Zealand are both quite far away from the UK, they're probably pretty close to each other. Even two days ago we believed it would only be a three hour flight to Christchurch, so we had a little bit of a surprise when we checked our travel documents and realised we had a fourteen hour trip ahead of us – including a one hour change in Sydney. We flew with Qantas, an airline which appears to assume its passengers are all amputees as no room is provided to store ones legs. We consequently didn't get any sleep at all, although we did see the latest Jennifer Aniston flop, Love Happens, and Matt Damon's film The Informant!, which is not as funny as the editor of its trailer seems to think it is.

Day 35, in which we return triumphant to Tokyo

2010-01-26T06:34:00.000-08:00

Today was almost entirely spent on trains, travelling the eight and a half hour journey back to Tokyo from Nagasaki. We ate some relatively terrible bento boxes on the way - multiple piles of unflavoured rice with breaded pork fat - and made the somewhat depressing discovery that our next destination is somewhat further away from Japan than we had imagined (around nine hours further, to be precise - tomorrow is also set to be fun).

On the plus side, I had a superb time reading a few short stories by O Henry (one of the few English-language books I could find in Nagasaki) and watching Nicolas Cage and Sam Rockwell (who were so superb together in Matchstick Men) finally reunited in the hit movie G-Force, a film concerning a band of guineapig super-agents and their mole friend, Sparkles.

We have now retired to the Villa Fontaine Hotel Ueno in Tokyo, where we are in the process of doing our laundry and other tiresome things in preparation for visiting a new continent tomorrow.

Day 34, in which we thank the gods for pink peppercorns

2010-01-25T05:16:00.000-08:00

We tried the diner across the road from our hotel for breakfast today, which boasts having 'the first and finest self-service drinks counter in Japan' – a strange claim, perhaps, but with unlimited refills on coffee, ice tea and fruit juices all for just 75p, it certainly appealed to us.

Having already 'done' the Atom Bomb in Hiroshima – during which we learned about as much as you could read on wikipedia about the bombing, but with more pictures – we were not in much of a mood to repeat the whole exercise in Nagasaki (the principal difference being they got a plutonium rather than uranium bomb). So we skipped all that and stuck to the south of the city, which was largely overlooked by the bomb and so has a lot of buildings from the Meji era intact.

Our first stop was Glover Park, a lovely hillside park close to our hotel where the Nagasaki government has relocated a half dozen colonial era buildings in an outdoor museum of Japan's first proper interaction with the west. These included the tiny bungalow of a Mr Walker who brought the railways, industrial manufacturing and what became the Kirin brewery to Japan, and the Glover House, where former arms-dealer Mr Glover and his wife introduced education and commerce, while also secretly conspiring to change the very nature of Japanese government. Glover was also Scottish, which I suppose answers my question of why tartan is still so popular in Japanese school uniforms.

The park was very neatly laid out, and easy to get around thanks to a series of escalators and moving walkways. Nearby we also visited the Dutch Slopes, the original western enclave, so named as it's up a hill and most of the early foreigners were traders from Holland. This was pretty much a redux of our walk around Glover Park, with two traditional colonial buildings to snoop around, and largely the same views down the hill into the harbour.

The tourist information map made a great fuss about the "Site of the Former Dutch Factory on Dejima", an island which for 200 years was the only place foreigners were allowed to engage in trade or commerce. We happened to pass it on our way north through it is quite a mystery why it is still on the tourist maps. The original site has now been demolished, while land reclamation projects mean this isolated trading post is now so far from being an island it is actually a third of a kilometre inland. We didn't therefore stop.

A highlight of the day was taking the ropeway (or, cable car) up to the Mount Inasa Lookout, which commands an amazing 360 degree view across Nagasaki, from the city where we had started, round to the industrial harbour and out to the sea on the other side of the mountain, where the sun was setting behind a small group of islands. It was all rather special, and so to celebrate we drank two beers and waited for night to fall, when the city's rather blunt edges were lost in the darkness, and their field of lights down in the valley made for a beautiful view.

We had dinner at a Russian-French restaurant called Harbin, in the Hamano-Machi Shopping Arcade. We had not intended to spend much on dinner, but this is effectively our last proper night in Japan so we figured we might as well have a bit of a blow out: a scallop ceviche with a dill and pink peppercorn twist started the meal and was the first real burst of flavour we've enjoyed for weeks. We wept, rent our clothes and praised god for pink peppercorns. Slow-cooked shoulder of black pork and a rich and almost stew-like borscht followed, but alas Paul was let down by his beef stroganoff, which amounted to amazingly tender pieces of beef lost in a vat of cream. Only my lamb hotpot - served inexplicably from a two-litre earthenware jug, but fizzing and tasting softly of cumin - saved the day.

We had another spa bath, but this time in the ladies' pool since the men's was closed. Oddly, the women's pool is half the size of the men's. I guess the men in Japan are just generally more dity than the women.

Day 33, in which we go on a day trip to Hell

2010-01-24T03:12:00.000-08:00

We resurfaced from our hotel at around 11am and took brunch at the Royal Host, a Japanese diner in Nagasaki railway station which served some very good fried eggs and one of the smallest sausages I've ever seen. We were on our way to Unzen, which required a 30 minute train journey to the middle of nowhere, and then a long and snaking bus journey through the countryside for an hour and twenty minutes. We were both a bit irritated to discover how long the bus journey took (there was no mention of a four-hour round trip in the guide book), until Paul remembered that sometimes taking a bus through the countryside can be a pleasure in itself, and then we settled down and enjoyed it.

We passed on route through the town of Obama – a settlement on the coast, with small chimneys built into the roads and buildings releasing large amounts of subterranean steam from geothermal activity – and it was nice to see that the tourist office was cashing in on the coincidence of names with a large (if not terribly convincing) plastic model of Barack Obama standing in front of the US flag.

Unzen is a spa town which sits over 700 metres up a mountain, and is famous for its geothermal activity. Japan as a whole is the meeting place of four separate tectonic plates, and its geography is almost entirely the result of plate collisions and volcanic eruptions. While active volcanoes pepper the entire country, Kyushu appears to have more than its fair share and Unzen itself lies in the shadow of Mount Unzen-dake, which last erupted in 1991.

Scattered around Unzen are large and sulphurous areas of steaming geothermal vents, and I really wanted to visit the main ones in the park thanks to a report in the guidebook that an old crone in a bonnet would lower an egg into one of these bubbling craters, and then remove it hard-boiled to eat (for a fee). The reality was somewhat more disappointing: a bored looking teenager in a hoody sat in a wooden shack, and when children asked for an egg he would pull himself to his feet, swagger to a wooden box filled with pre-boiled eggs, shove one in a plastic bag and then begrudgingly swap it for a handful of yen. If I don't get to see the egg being lowered into a boiling crater with my own two eyes, I'm not forking out any yen for it. Bonnet or no bonnet.

The rest of this geothermal park was rather disappointing, in that so much steam is generated you can't actually see the craters themselves. The most famous of these jigoku (or “hells”) was Daikyokan Jigoku, into which 33 Christians were boiled alive in 1630 as punishment for being Christian. I assume they were thrown in consecutively rather than concurrently, otherwise the hole would have soon blocked up and the Shogun would have at least 13 singed and angry Christians on his hands. Anyway, a helpful sign explained that the Japanese call these 'hells' because in the Buddhist faith hell is associated with sulphur, heat and smoke (perhaps the Shogun was not so dissimilar to the Christians), and the gurgling noise made by the hell is likened – somewhat fancifully, it seemed to me – to the screams of the damned as they plunge into Hell.

After taking in all of this sulphurous terror, we took a nice stroll up the mountainside in an attempt to reach the Nita Pass, where one can catch a cable car up to the top of the mountain from which the crater of the volcano can be observed. We had to walk since the tourist information guide had explained that the bus was not working today, but it would perhaps also have been nice if he'd explained that the cable car also was not working as this would have saved us a journey. As it was, we went halfway up the mountain before determining this for ourselves, but it was not an entirely wasted journey: we saw a wild boar, a self-driving motorised golf buggy and a superb view down to the sea before turning back.

Although Unzen has three separate tourist information offices, they were not generally very helpful. When we first arrived in Unzen – worried by the length of our return journey and eager to ensure we knew when our last possible bus home would be – we popped in to ask as tourist information. “There is one leaving in ten minutes,” we were told. “Is there not one three hours from now?” I asked, looking at the timetable in his hand. “Oh yes, but then you'd have to spend three hours in Unzen,” he explained, straight-faced, as though he truly considered the best advice for tourists to be “Get out, get out now and be glad!”

As it happens, he was probably right. The hells were a big disappointment and as the cable car wasn't working there was no real reason to go up this mountain rather than the one in – say – Nagasaki where we'd woken up. As we came back down the hill, full of suggestions of getting a late lunch or perhaps seeing if there was a hotel with a pool, we saw a blue bus destined for Nagasaki and boarded it without another word. Within an hour and forty minutes, we were home.

We bathed again in the hot spa on the tenth floor, this time in the company of an elderly man who sounded very much relieved to be in hot water, before heading out to the Dejima Wharf for a spot of dinner at the St Andrew's Inn. So far, all of the Japanese cities we have visited have been identical to each other: sprawling messes of boxy buildings built high and in concrete. Dejima Wharf bucks this trend, being a modern development of charming wooden buildings, built along the wharf and overlooking the estuary, with a range of interesting bars and restaurants. While sipping white wine here, I realised Nagasaki has a slightly different feel from Tokyo / Kyoto / Osaka / Hiroshima / Kagoshima, and may well end up being my favourite of the cities we visit this holiday (in Japan, at least).

Cultural Note #003: during our time in Japan we've come across a surprising number of examples of relatively mundane noises which have been given extremely poetic interpretations. A bubbling fountain in Kyoto was known as the 'Crying woman in the night', yet might better be compared to 'Urinating man in fountain'. The squeaking floors of the Nijo-jo – a clever alarm system installed to alert to intruders, and sounding mostly like the squeaking of baby rats – was interpreted as 'the nightingale song' floorboards. Most recently, the sound of raging geothermal water – reminiscent mostly of a kettle as it comes to boil – was compared to the sound of screaming souls as they plunged into Hell. It's elegant right enough, but suggests a cultural habit of euphemism in which one describes how one would like the world to be rather than how it actually is, and this may help to explain why Japanese society appears to be so incredibly straight-laced and conformist on the one hand and yet feeds a growing industry of schoolgirl prostitution and manga-porn on the other.

Day 32, in which we chew tobaccy

2010-01-23T03:11:00.000-08:00

We spent a lot of time travelling by train to Nagasaki today. Although Nagasaki is on the same island as Kagoshima it is by no means on the same train line and so we arrived late in the day at the Loisir Hotel in downtown Nagasaki, and ready for a nap.

Our room sits in one corner of the building and so has superb views of Nagasaki: from one window, the estuary snakes down to the sea where the giant cargo ships ply their trade; and from the other the Dutch Slopes rise up through historic Nagasaki, nestled in a warm nest of urban sprawl. That was about as much as we saw of Nagasaki today, although we did indulge in some local history by visiting YouTube to see Bertie Wooster singing the Nagasaki song (“Back in Nagasaki / where the fellows chew tobaccy / and the women all wicky-wacky-woo”; as Jeeves commented: “Most exhilarating, sir”).

After a nap and a soak in the 10th floor baths (nude this time, but all male thank goodness) we went to the local Chinatown and discovered that just as Chinese food in the UK has been adapted to meet local tastes (fewer turkey feet and sea slugs, for example), it has also been tempered to meet the bland austerity of the Japanese palate: our prawns in chilli sauce were about as spicy as white bread soaked in milk, while spring rolls were stuffed with that bland, gloopy brown fluid which has proven to be so very popular over here.

Part III of Cleopatra occupied us until bedtime, and as we reached the end of the two hour epic – with Caeser dead and Cleopatra's plans in tatters – we were disappointed to see the title 'Intermission' rather than 'The End'. It seems there are two more hours to go and, unless Burton and Taylor really pull some twists out of their hat, I can't see it being two hours well spent.

Day 31, in which we explore the primeval forests of Yakushima

2010-01-22T00:21:00.000-08:00

We got up before 6am today and took a taxi to Kagoshima port, opposite which Mount Sakurajima was getting angry as the sun rose, spitting up huge plumes of smoke. Sakurajima is made from such black volcanic rock that the sun's rays don't seem to illuminate at all, and so it sits on the horizon across the water from the port sheathed in ominous shadows and belching out black smoke while the local townsfolk just happily get on with their lives (while they still can).

We boarded the morning's first boat to Yakushima, a small sub-tropical island 100km from the tip of Kyushu. As we arrived we saw that most of the island is completely undeveloped, the boat pulling in to a small harbour settlement sitting at the foot of a mass of tall rounded mountains covered in dense forest. With the assistance of a cheerful lady in the tourist office – who was baffled by the idea we had only come to Yakushima for a day-trip – we worked out a hiking trail we could complete within six hours and still make it back in time for the last ferry.

A taxi took us winding up into the mountains to an altitude of 800 metres and dropped us off at the gates to the Shiratani Unsuikyo Natural Recreation Forest. After paying £2 a head, we followed a trail along a stream and series of waterfalls, before turning up-hill into the forest, following a series of occasional pink ribbons tied to the trees along a natural pathway supplemented where necessary by whatever rocks, logs and roots the park rangers found to hand.

The ancient forest is purposefully kept natural and unmanaged, and comprises a mix of wildly overgrown primeval forest – dominated by grand cedar trees, some over five thousand years old – and an accompanying freak show of the survivors of mutilation. While these latter trees were also thousands of years old, they had been chopped down to their stumps centuries ago to make roof shingles, left to become “second generation” cedars, regrowing with numerous twisted and exotic trunks and bulbous masses of branches. The local people are almost as proud of these fantastical old monstrosities as they are the grand trees which have survived untouched.

Kagoshima is the rainiest place in Japan (although it was clear and blue while we were there), and the sub-tropical weather has created an ecosystem very favourable to exotic ferns and rare mosses. In fact, moss covers absolutely everything, and the bark of many trees was long lost under a springy carpet of green, giving the wildly overgrown forests a pleasingly dark and lush feel which apparently inspired the imagery in Studio Ghibli's movie Princess Mononoke (although neither of us has seen it). The whole place felt magical and isolated, and we met only two other people the whole time we were in the forest, along with a couple of young deer feeding on moss by the track, and a small family of monkeys sunbathing on the roadside.

The last ferry to leave the island was at 3:45pm, but even in such a short time we both agreed it was the best thing we'd seen so far in Japan. There are so many other trails to take on the island – with an ecosystem that changes from tropical to temperate as you climb higher – that you could spend four or five happy days exploring Yakushima. In a few years' time, I think we'll probably put Yakushima at the centre of another trip to the Far East (albeit timed for warmer weather).

It took three hours to get back onto Kyushu, where we had sushi off the conveyor belt (an assured way to get what you want where no English is spoken) at Dolphin Port, before retiring to the hotel for another soak in the hot spa and then bed.

Day 30, in which we sleep in the shadow of a volcano

2010-01-21T00:12:00.000-08:00

Today we took our longest train journey yet, in three legs from Hiroshima to Fukuoka on the island of Kyushu; from Fukuoka down to Shinyatsushiro; and from there down to Kagoshima. Apparently by next year the Shinkansen will have been extended the whole way, which just proves we're ahead of our time.

Kagoshima is a nondescript little city in what is generally regarded as the backwater of Japan, and its primitive nature only revealed itself to us as we tried to take the train to our hotel. We completely missed our stop because we hadn't realised it was a stop at all: there was no sign announcing the station name, no station building and no means of crossing the line to the street (as one little Japanese man demonstrated, it was necessary to climb down from the platform onto the tracks and then cross on foot, hopeful that you would catch your train and not the other way round).

We travelled to the next stop where there was a station building, and asked for directions. The ticket inspector was very friendly but spoke no English, so our conversation mostly involved saying 'Thank you' and 'Bye' over and over again. Eventually we found our way back to the main road and paid for a taxi to take us to our hotel, which was the best £7 I've ever spent. Once in the Kagoshima Tokyu Hotel we were able to relax. Our room was perhaps three times larger than anything we've stayed in so far, with a nice seating area in front of French windows, leading out onto a balcony with a view across the sea to Mount Sakurajima, an active volcano on the other side of the bay. Although still active, spitting our smoke and dust every day, we have been reassured that Sakurajima has not erupted since 1947 (and not significantly since 1914, when the lava flows blocked one entrance to the harbour, creating a new bank of wonderfully fertile soil where the locals can grow radishes five feet in diameter).

We took a taxi to the Dolphin Port for dinner. Tourists are thin on the ground this far south and so the locals speak virtually no English. We had to resort to the 'Waffle House' method of food selection, i.e. just pointing at the picture of the thing we want to eat. This is far from foolproof: while the Italian restaurant we went to had a very long selection of pizzas, they sadly only had photographs of two and so those were the ones we had to settle for.

Back at the hotel we changed into our swim shorts and hotel regulation costume of white gown, towel and straw slippers and wandered down to the al fresco onsen, two large geothermal plunge pools filled with naturally occurring minerals and salts. The waters were almost too hot and, combined with beer from the hotel vending machine, far too soporific. And so to bed.

Day 29, in which we attend a Derwent Enterprises breakout session

2010-01-20T03:12:00.000-08:00

Long-standing readers of my holiday blogs will know that I don't consider it a holiday unless I get to visit the scene of a Second World War human horror, mass slaughter or heart-breaking tragedy. We rolled all three into one today by taking the train down to Hiroshima.

There are very few things for tourists to do in Hiroshima, all of which are atom bomb related, which is largely thanks to the atom bomb itself which destroyed the city's temples, castle, zoo, parks and museums along with the rest of the city back in 1945. We thus went for a stroll in the Peace Memorial Park, a rather bland 1950s concept of a memorial – all modernist statues, wide boulevards and bland lawns – which is designed to provide an uninterrupted view from a sarcophagus housing the names of all of those who died in the bomb at one end, through to the so-called Atom Dome – one of the few buildings to withstand the blast – at the other. Just behind that is a giant black blot of an office building, which I suppose is a reminder that the Japanese revere commercial considerations over almost everything else.

The park also houses the Atom Bomb Museum, which takes a very neutral stance (about who was to blame in the war, I mean, not about whether or not destroying Hiroshima was a good thing), and presents the evidence in a relatively factual way. In the first room we learned on the one hand about the rise of militarism in Japan and the army's belief that Japan's victory was a predestined matter of divine will, provided enough of their people sacrificed their lives; and on the other we learned about the US army's desire to scientifically measure the effects of its new weapon in a real life situation, as well as their need to send a clear message of superiority to the Soviet Union. All of this was then followed by a few personal accounts of the bomb going off (from both the bombers – who reported that their plane got a bit rocky when the bomb went off, poor dears – to an old man who turned around to see the sky split open above him. Apparently to those in the city, it appeared as though the sun was crashing to earth).

The next room was about the reconstruction of Hiroshima and was rather dull so we pretty much waltzed through that one; and then the third room was about the personal effects of the nuclear explosion on the population of Hiroshima. Many were vaporised of course, leaving behind nothing but a shadow burned into the pavement, and those that weren't made for rather upsetting photographs of melting skin and screaming faces. The most moving exhibit was a series of children's possessions, explaining in turn how each of their owners had died, sometimes in somewhat too graphic detail. There were also sections where you could examine the effects of the blast on bricks, roof tiles and – in one room – human body parts, which had been extracted and preserved in formaldehyde.

Hiroshima as a city seems to come out of it all very well. You might expect them to have been angry or driven to seek revenge, but they've largely mopped up the damage, forgiven the United States and are now dedicating themselves to the pursuit of world peace. The city itself bears few scars, and is barely distinguishable from Kyoto or Osaka (except in size, of course: it is a small and friendly place). Only occasionally do you stumble across one of the few remainders of the old city. A coffee shop we tried to visit turned out to be in a converted bank that had been half-destroyed in the blast, and we stumbled across a few more occasional ruins during our jaunt round the city.

After a trip around the park, we went to visit Hiroshima Castle. For hundreds of years the castle was a much admired flat-land military building in Japan, considered unassailable due to a series of concentric defensive moats, however these great defences did little to protect it from the power of Little Boy and the castle was completely destroyed in the blast. To improve morale after the war, the authorities rebuilt the castle in 1957, although unfortunately it was not a particularly good example of restoration work as the new castle is constructed entirely from ferroconcrete with wooden cladding. Admirable from a distance, once you enter the castle it is like being in a municipal leisure centre. The rest of the castle grounds were restored in 1991 – the moats and outer buildings, this time built only from wood – but with this concrete monstrosity sitting in the middle of it all it can only be considered to be stage scenery.

We checked into our hotel – the Chisun Inn in central Hiroshima – and had a light nap before popping out to the lovely Sawadee Lemongrass Grill, a Thai restaurant near the hotel which is very much recommended. The atmosphere was only slightly polluted by the loud bellowing of two western businessmen, who made Fry & Laurie's 'Dammit, Marjorie' sketches tame by comparison.

We watched Part 2 of Cleopatra, then bed.

Day 28, in which we race pensioners up the hills of the Minoh Valley

2010-01-19T01:25:00.000-08:00

After our complimentary breakfast at the hotel – which mostly comprised frankfurters, a very dry omelette and some brown pineapple – we took the train out to the Minoh Quasi-National Park, an area of mountains, forests and rivers just thirty minutes outside of Osaka.

This made for a pleasant walk up through the woods to the 33 metre-high Minoh-waterfall, a walk which in autumn times is regarded as a national treasure on account of how it “makes visitors hearts gentle with the vivid colours in the seasonally changed nature”; however, it was also a lovely walk without the autumnal maple leaves, with the mighty cedars retaining their vivid green.

According to local literature, there is a legend of an exalted Chinese man who attempted to visit the waterfall but “was so frightened by the arduous pass around him that he could not step forward, and so went back.” I'm not sure what motivated this fear as it was a gentle ascent through pretty charming forest all the way there – with everyone else on the walk being of pensionable age – but then the Chinese are prone to over-excitement.

Minoh is also famous for its monkeys. There used to be a zoo here, and when it was closed down instead of moving the animals or having them all put down (as they did with the zoo near my childhood home) they simply released the monkeys into the wild. I was hopeful of seeing at least one wild monkey, but it seems likely they've misinterpreted the “Don't feed the monkey” signs as “No monkeys welcome”, as they all stayed away today. Ultimately, the only monkey we saw was Cheburaska, who has moved into modelling and now fronts a Japanese mobile phone campaign with his friend, That Crocodile:

We arrived back in Shin-Osaka completely exhausted, so took to our bed and watched Season Two of Nighty Night, which lost the subtlety of the first series and was just a sequence of over-the-top plot developments and characters. For dinner we travelled into town to visit the Shinsaibashi region, where the guidebook recommended a particularly good Mediterranean restaurant. Alas, as with about 50% of the book's recommendations, the restaurant was no where to be seen, so we explored the area instead.

Shinsaibashi is a seedy version of Soho, where the men are all dressed as either serious businessmen or Yakuza hitmen, and the women are all dressed like Barbie dolls. We struggled to find anywhere pleasant to eat, and ended up in a rather down-at-heel bar which served allegedly home-made pizzas, while the atmosphere was provided by two chain-smoking ladies who shouted down their mobile telephones.

We retired to the hotel for a nightcap in the bar, where alas the evening's earlier karaoke entertainment had now ceased, then bed.

Day 27, in which we travel thirty years into the future, to 2015

2010-01-18T06:38:00.000-08:00

Today we took the train down to the docks on the eastern side of Osaka to visit the Universal Studios fairground, one of the greatest collections of queues in Japan. It may sound as though we have given up on Japanese culture and are simply seeking cheap thrills at an American theme park, but these parks are actually a key part of Japanese culture. Escapism is huge in Japan thanks to the importance their culture places on conformity, and so theme parks – along with comic books, computer games and the regularly consulted mobile phone – are big business here for adults as well as children.

Universal Studios Japan was built in 2002 as a direct copy of the US version, however this was at a time when most of the US rides were already quite dated. The US site has subsequently been upgraded and replaced, while the Japanese version was presumably too expensive to stand much immediate redevelopment and so remains a fossil of the 1990s original. The somewhat pleasing effect is that the Japanese rides are all based on childhood movie favourites: Jaws, Back To The Future, ET, Spider-Man and – ahem – Backdraft. In fact, so dated are these films, it wasn't lost on us that the 'present' of Back To The Future is now 25 years ago, while the future of those films – all flying cars, Mr Fusion and hover-boards – is just five years away, in 2015. I can hardly wait until I can get my ugly plastic self-expanding jacket.

The best ride by far was Spider-Man, which involved a combination of a roller-coaster ride and 3D Imax, using multiple screens and other effects (water, explosions, strobe lighting, etc) to create a thrilling ride through a New York infested with super villains. Probably the worst – after Backdraft, but only because most of that didn't work at all and so the entire 'ride' just involved a smug (and much younger) Ron Howard wearing an ugly jumper and talking in a very deep Japanese voice – was the ET Experience, in which Steven Spielberg addressed us in the same deep Japanese voice and then we were led into one (apparently deranged) man's vision of what ET's home planet might look like, which comprised a corridor infested with giant smiling cartoon plants.

We also saw the long-awaited sequel to Terminator 2: Judgement Day – T2:3D – in which Arnold Schwarzenegger conveniently forgets that he was burned to death and is not Japanese and rides into the auditorium on a Harley Davison from the post-apocalyptic universe and drags a Japanese John Connor into direct confrontation with Skynet, a glowing pyramid protected by one of the few examples of a T1,000,000 unit. I also finally got to go on the Back To The Future ride, which I remember my cousin Helen telling me about in 1991 when she went to the US park. I remember she sold it well and I was desperate to go on it myself, and it is fortunate for me – 19 years later – that while the ride no longer exists in the US I can still try it here myself in Osaka. It was everything she had promised.

All said and done, then, it may have been a little out dated but it all made for a great deal of fun and was pretty cheap compared to Thorpe Park and Alton Towers in the UK. We returned to Osaka and decided to visit the Sky Garden – two towers topped by a single 'floating garden' 173 metres above ground level – to have a drink while the sun set. 173 metres was a scary enough prospect, but my fear of heights was especially tested when it turned out that the automatic elevator which rose 47 storeys was made of glass, while we then had to ascend the final three storeys in a glass escalator which bridged the space between the two towers. Still, once we were up there it was a pretty spectacular way to see Osaka, with none of the other sky-scrapers even approaching our height.

Back down to earth, we discovered that the plot of open ground next to the Sky Garden towers is a radish patch, which shows an interesting approach to urban planning and land pricing. We had pizza in a local department store, then home.

Day 26, in which we go too far to get to Osaka

2010-01-17T16:27:00.000-08:00

We rose early, checked out of our hotel and took the train south to our next destination: Osaka. It turns out Osaka is less than half an hour away from Kyoto – one of the suburbs, in Tokyo terms – but fortunately we went to the wrong train station, travelling from Shin-Osaka (where the bullet train pulls in) to Osaka Station, then back to Shin-Osaka again when we realised that's where our hotel is, only to find our hotel wasn't ready for check-in so we dumped our bags and took the train back to Osaka Station again. This all helped to pass a very exciting morning.

In the afternoon we went to Kaiyukan, the Osaka Aquarium, whose stirring motto is “Ocean, You Meet Whale Shark”. We did indeed meet whale shark, as well as a range of dolphins, penguins, otters, turtles and fish. Kaiyukan (which is supposed to be the best aquarium in Japan) is divided into just thirteen separate tanks, each of which represents a different eco-system and spans up to five different floors. You start right at the top – watching, say, otters frolic on the beach – and then descend down, seeing the different strata of each eco-system, right down to the seabed where the bottom-feeders lurk.

Star of the show was the Pacific Ocean tank, the largest and most exciting, housing a large number of manta rays, school of mackerel, zebra sharks, hammer head sharks and the much-advertised whale shark. Just as lovely, in single-storey tanks 14 and 15a-c lived the creaking world of the long-legged spider crabs and the colourful and mysterious jellyfish.

We tried to eat in a Japanese fast food restaurant, but the maitre d' (if fast food joints have maitre'ds, otherwise the spotty wee girl standing at the front) insisted we write something down on her piece of paper, and since we didn't know what she expected us to write we just left and ate from KFC instead, as the Japanese for 'chicken fillet burger' is easy to remember (just say it as though you're a weak Italian stereotype: 'chickena filleta burgera').

We returned to Shin-Osaka to check into our hotel, the New Osaka Hotel Osaka, a charming hostelry constructed between two fly-overs and two separate train lines, which nevertheless contains four separate wedding chapels. Despite the opulence of the reception area, our room is the smallest yet. There is no real room for our luggage, and the only place to unpack clothes is a small drawer in the middle of the room and two coat hangers hanging on the mirror.

Shin-Osaka is in the northern part of the city and comes with little to recommend it, but we couldn't face another train trip into Osaka proper for dinner so we googled for nearby food and ended up at an Indian restaurant called Khazana. Although our food was okay, I wouldn't recommend eating here as the premises primarily served as the depot for a food delivery service. We waited for our meal under the watchful eye of a burly delivery man, who sat across the room from us smoking a cigarette. They also forgot to put any prawns in the prawn jalfrezi.

We went to bed and watched season one of Nighty Night, which was terrific even if it went a little far in the final episode.

Day 25, in which we have our fill of tofu in a bedroom of eels

2010-01-16T00:22:00.000-08:00

Today we wandered down to Nishiki-koji, a food market spanning six or seven blocks which has served as a fish and vegetable market since the seventeenth century, but is now home to stalls selling a wide range of products, including waving-cat-tea-cozies, baby-octopuses-on-a-stick and a thousand variations on the ubiquitous pickled radish.

A narrow passageway between a fish stall and a china stall led us into Hale, a traditional vegan restaurant in a machiya. Machiya apparently means 'bedroom of eels', on account of the fact they are extremely long and narrow buildings, divided up into a series of rooms for fiscal reasons (in ancient times, the shogun taxed you according to the width of your house). We slipped off our shoes and padded across the tatami mats to sit on the floor at our low table. Paul is 6'1” and didn't fit under the table, while I kept clumsily banging the sliding screen behind me, and it all felt like we were adults playing in a Wendy house.

We had gone to Hale in the hope of getting some more vegetables, but it turns out Japanese vegan restaurants simply replace all of the animal products with tofu and soya, rather than supplementing any vegetables into the dish. Our vegan meal-deal thus comprised: a big bowl of white rice, topped with thinly sliced tofu and soya cream (and – I counted – two kidney beans); a small side-dish of salted creamy tofu; a miniature plate of crunchy pickled vegetables; and a small side-dish of sliced cabbage and carrot, so finely chopped it seemed almost pre-digested. Green tea and chillies were served alongside.

We left feeling rather nauseous, tofu slopping around in our bellies. We strolled south through the city to Kyoto Station where – after a brief visit to the Tezuka Osamu studio to stock up on Astro Boy manga merchandise – we explored The Cube, a brave new architectural development in a city whose architecture otherwise falls into two camps: the traditional wood and the unthinking concrete. The Cube is a huge shopping centre built into the side of the railway station, into which is cut a vast and continuous staircase (and series of escalators, thank goodness) rising over twelve floors to a Sky Garden on the roof, from which one can see spectacular views across Kyoto to the mountains.

We took the tube out east to follow the Philosopher's Walk. Apparently in the nineteenth century some university professor used to walk along the canal each day, and so they've named the walk after him (not a widespread tradition, otherwise my grandfather's daily walk along the nearby A-road would by now be known as the Asbestos Manufacturer's Walk). It turned out to be a fairly pretty walk in the foothills of the eastern mountains, following a quiet canal through a peaceful part of suburbia. The far end led into a rather hectic street lined with tatty souvenir stalls, serving the tourists attracted to yet another temple (the Silver Pavilion), so we turned in the opposite direction and continued our walk back into town, passing through the city proper. Kyoto is not an attractive city, but it was interesting to get off the temple tourist track and stroll through these suburban streets to see how people live their lives – playing baseball, walking their children to the temple or just hanging out the washing.

We drank a bottle of wine at our local, Merry Island, and then headed out to find dinner. When we first arrived in Kyoto we spent ages trying to locate on our map a recommended Indian restaurant called Mughal, without success, but coming out of Merry Island today we discovered it was directly next door. A superb meal of samosa in chilli sauce, tandoori prawns laced with clove, boiled egg curry and sag paneer – all mopped up with a naan – saw us happy to bed, where the evening movie was Ms Elizabeth Taylor's classic flick, Cleopatra.

Day 24, in which we are hurried through our spiritual contemplation

2010-01-15T17:33:00.000-08:00

We had brunch in the Nishijin weaving district in the north of Kyoto, at a traditional Japanese bathhouse which has been converted into the fabulous café-restaurant Sarasa Nishijin. The café retains the wooden structure and all of the original tile work, and has added some very friendly waiters, great music and a lovely sausage salad and chicken broth meal deal.

We were up in Nishijin to visit the Daitoku-ji complex of temples, which are famous for their 'dry landscape' zen gardens. There are four separate temples to visit, but we showed great restraint in only visiting two before deciding we were sufficiently enlightened. The guidebook reports that zen gardens are aids to meditation and that one could spend entire days in contemplation of a single garden. This was particularly impossible at the Daisen-in temple, where an elderly curator pulled us round the various gardens, only leaving us alone for five minutes before sticking his head back round the corner to see what was taking us so long. “We is reaching a new spiritual plane, innit?” I wanted to shout at him.

Each zen garden was a different arrangement of raked gravel, stones and moss. They would make cute features in a courtyard or quiet corner of the garden, but I didn't buy into their spiritual significance. The interpretations attributed to them were spectacularly unimaginative: raked gravel was usually a river, any flat round stone was a turtle swimming in the river (a symbol of despair, of course) and any longer shaped rocks were usually a boat, typically symbolising a journey down the river (and therefore life). Any remaining rocks that didn't fit into this complex philosophy were interpreted as simply mountains, or were given names the same way one spots cloud formations in the sky: this rock looks a bit like a man humping a cantaloupe, or a beetle carrying a hairdryer, or is it a particularly long wasp?

At the most famous zen garden in the world (in Daisen-in) we thus found the river of life carrying a boat laden with a turtle (despair) and a stork (joy), and near to the mouth of the river (i.e. the point of death) was a sleeping cow (apparently this was to illustrate that even cows must struggle against the inevitability of their death, although as it was sleeping it doesn't seem Daisy was in this case struggling particularly hard). We also saw one of the smallest zen gardens in the world, at Ryogen-in, which had three rocks in a thin strip of gravel, two of them representing binary opposites (male/female, life/death, Mel/Kim) and the third rock completely ignored by this interpretation.

We skipped out of Daitoku-ji and high-tailed it on the tube down to Nijo-jo, a palace built as the Kyoto residence of the Shogun in 1603 in a direct challenge to the authority of the Emperor, but now housing Japan's largest collection of 'No Photograph' signs, as well as a selection of new 'No Sketching' signs not currently viewable anywhere else in the country. We were reaching cultural overload by this point - having seen endless temples and shrines and pagodas and gardens over the past ten days - and things were not helped by the tour information provided at Nijo-jo, which focussed on the 'National Treasures' we were seeing (elegant painted paper screens, wooden carvings, silk tapestries), but mentioned nothing about the purpose or historical significance of the building we were standing in. I came out knowing that Someone Very Important had once painted a tiger on a piece of silk many years ago, but not which room it was in or what political decisions it might have overseen. We also learned nothing about the structure of the building, which was arranged as a row of squares connected only by their north-west and south-east corners, with wide corridors flanking the external walls and the rooms protected by a wall of sliding doors on the inside. It was an odd way to built a palace, but they didn't think to say why.

The gardens were lovely, however, and are structured within two concentric moats, which I suppose the Shogun demanded as it leads to plenty of photo opportunities in front of pretty bridges. It also was here that we decided to go drink wine at the Ace Café at the top of Pontocho Alley. Pontocho is built on a land reclaimed from the river, and has a more friendly, individual Soho feel compared to the rest of Kyoto. The Ace Café is on the tenth floor and looks across the river to the eastern mountains, which glowed red as the sun set behind us and made a great complement to the white wine and Japanese indie music.

We had dinner at Bio-tei off Sanjo Dori, an organic vegan-friendly café in what feels like someone's kitchen. The vegan meal deal – tofu steak with tomato sauce – sounded pretty bland, so we decided to be vegan-unfriendly and had a selection of mackerel and salmon salads, tofu-dressed-vegetables and deep-fried tofu soup. Everything was delicious and the meal contained more salad and vegetables than we've eaten during the rest of our visit to Japan.

We strolled home happy, and watched Zooey Deschanel's new movie, Yes Man, featuring Jim Carrey. It was far, far better than I'd expected, and Mr Carrey only did his silly faces twice.

Day 23, in which we pass through 10,000 gates and meet 1,001 ladies each with 1,000 arms

2010-01-14T16:47:00.000-08:00

After breakfast at a charming Starbucks overlooking the river, we visited the Fushimi Shrine to the east of Kyoto, a sort of Shinto version of Times Square where local and national companies erect giant red gates bearing their names, although the aim is to gain favour from the gods rather than raising brand awareness. The Fushimi Shrine is devoted to Inari - the god of rice - so it's hard to imagine why electronics manufacturers and fund managers are falling over themselves to pay tribute to him, but as it happens there are over ten thousand of these red gates snaking up the mountain through the forest, sometimes so densely packed you cannot see through to the trees outside.

A happy morning was spent exploring the different gated pathways leading up the mountainside, which branch off to visit different shrines and religious sites, most of which are guarded by Inari's messengers (who are all foxes, of course, usually wearing dashing red capes). There were spectacular views of Kyoto from the top of the mountain, and the city was revealed to carpet the entire plain, stretching off to the mountains to the far west in unbroken urban development. We got lost in our descent and ended up wandering through a bamboo plantation into an affluent part of Kyoto suburbia.

After a quick coffee, we trusted the guidebook rather too much by believing its reports of a "near hallucinatory effect" to be had at Sanjusangen-do Temple. Sanjusangen holds first prize in that most hotly-contested of competitions, "the longest wooden structure in the world", and also houses the largest number of statues of Kannon (the goddess of Mercy), a thousand of them all guarding one giant version of the same goddess. Why a goddess should be recruited multiple times to guard herself was not clear, but the effect was far from hallucinatory. Mundane in their uniformity might be a better way of putting it: once you've seen 200 near-identical statues of Kannon, you've pretty much seen them all. To complicate matters, Kannon has a thousand arms and so the sculptors had to produce over a million arms in total. If I were embarking on this exercise I would probably have had Kannon guarded by a thousand slugs - much easier, and you could do it with play-dough.

The south-east of Kyoto is home to a large number of temples and shrines, but after our Sanjusangen experience we decided to skip most of them, gorge ourselves on rice products and head straight for the Kiyomizu-dera Temple, which involves the usual giant red gates, pagodas, camp statues of thunder gods and cruelly contorted cedar trees, but is also halfway up the mountain and has great views of the city. Dusk was approaching by now, the sun resting just above the mountains in the distance, and it was well worth the climb uphill for the view alone.

Trotting home, we passed through the Gion District, which is the oldest and most traditional part of Kyoto, lying east of the river and thus untouched by the fires which typically destroyed the rest of the city at least every 200 years (there isn't a tourist attraction in the guidebook which wasn't at least partially rebuilt within the past century thanks to fire). The houses in Gion were typically Japanese constructions - all elegant bamboo supports, wooden frames and sliding paper doorways - but the Japanese are also typically very private people, and so we got to see little more than the streetside facade. When delicate geisha women slipped through their sliding doorways, the process was an elegant sleight-of-hand designed to prevent any prying eyes from seeing inside.

This is all far more culture than I would typically seek out when visiting a European city (I haven't been to a single museum, church or art gallery in Florence, for example), so to relax and recover we returned to the Happy Island for a bottle of wine and dinner. When we had lunch here yesterday it was 3pm and the place was deserted, but the decor and staff were so lovely we decided it would be good to see it in the evening, bustling with customers and full of atmosphere. Well, we sat there all night drinking wine and eating dinner and the only other customers to enter the building were two grumpy old men who each smoked a cigarette before leaving again. I suspect we might be in Kyoto out of season.

We had an excellent aubergine lasagne - which is an interesting take on Asian fusion - before returning to the room to watch Sir Matt Damon's super new film, the Bourne Ultimatum.

Day 22, in which a badger greets us with its swollen testicles

2010-01-13T17:04:00.000-08:00

Today we checked out of the Chisun Inn and travelled to Tokyo Station to cash in on our JR Passes. These glittering pieces of card give us unlimited train travel for the next fortnight, and we hope to put them to good use.

Our first trip was on the shinkansen bullet train down to Kyoto. The train pulled up at Tokyo Station (its terminus) to be met by an army of cleaners – the men in powder blue, the ladies in baby pink – which boarded each carriage simultaneously and swept through the entire train in minutes, gathering rubbish, wiping every table and pivoting the chairs around to face forward for the return journey. Inside, the train was spacious and comfortable, and when we later pulled up at Kyoto Station both of us were surprised to discover we'd been travelling for almost three hours.

We passed quite close to Mount Fuji during the journey, and we'd both been excited to see it covered in snow. Our excitement grew as we passed large fields covered in deep, deep snow, but it was only when we arrived in Kyoto and were greeted by little flurries of snowflakes that we realised the terrible implication: Kyoto is absolutely baltic. Later in the day I bought a scarf, and I still have ambitions to acquire a hat.

We checked into the Hearton Hotel – which was chosen largely on the basis of price, but turns out to be fairly centrally located, with rooms larger and more pleasant than the Chisun Inn and bedsheets that don't bring on an allergic reaction – and headed out to find lunch down by the riverside. We ended up at Merry Island, an Asian fusion café-restaurant which only served two dishes. We both had the superb shrimp and scallop yellow curry.

We strolled along the riverside, which is very much less spoiled than that of Tokyo, and headed into the east of the city where a larger proportion of traditional architecture remains, mostly comprising elegant two-storey wooden houses arranged along narrow alleys. Some of the houses had statues of badgers outside them, with giant distended testicles, due to the fact one of Kyoto's shinto temples is devoted to the animal, whose testes are believed to have magical powers.

We both agreed that Kyoto is a much more pleasant city to be in than Tokyo, in part because there is a greater sense of space (with the whole city bounded on three sides by beautiful mountains), and also because the people seem both happier and more relaxed. We'd planned to spend a while wandering the streets and taking in the atmosphere, but it got dark early and was very cold so we ended up in the Pig & Whistle, a reproduction of a British pub complete with beers on draft, a large area devoted to darts, and fish & chips on the menu. The Pig & Whistle was more authentically traditional than most in the UK these days, as smoking is still permitted indoors in Japan so we sat supping our bitter in a light haze of cigarette smoke and it was almost like being in my 20s again.

For dinner we went to Ashoka, the type of Indian restaurant that was traditional in England in the 1980s, and then to bed.

Day 21, in which Elizabeth Taylor gets drunk and screams in the garden

2010-01-12T16:59:00.000-08:00

After a week of straight sunshine, we opened the curtains to find it pouring with rain. It was difficult, then, to carry out our plans of taking a day trip to one of Hakone, Yokohama or Kamakura. Instead we slept.

For Late Brunch (or 'Lunch', as it can be abbreviated), we made a second trip to the sushi belts of Maguro Bito – enjoying a largely new range of fishy treats, most of which did not involve sea urchin ovaries – before returning to our room to watch Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor battle it out in the superb Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Burton played an erudite, dissatisfied alcoholic who despises his wife, while Taylor played a drunken adulterer who despises her husband. From what I hear, they were not playing against type.

In the evening we trekked out to Yoyogi, where Tokyo's finest Cambodian restaurant Angkor Wat lives. Still marginally depressed by Japan's obsession with austerity cooking (last night, for example, we watched a cookery show in which the smiling chef took 20 minutes to demonstrate how to prepare the speciality of large daikon radish chopped into quarters and smeared in vinegar), Cambodian food came as a wonderful surprise: fresh varied salads drenched in tasty light dressings and chilli peppers; moist hot skewers of beef served with spicy relish; soft and succulent summer rolls; tasty and rich coconut ice-cream; and other very much non-Japanese treats. The Japanese like to keep rice pure during their meals, and nothing could better illustrate how different Cambodian cooking is than the fried rice served at the end of our meal: a mound of sea food, diced pork, spring onions, peppers and chilli, held together by the rice and the whole flavoured with a spicy dressing. I'm very much looking forward to visiting Cambodia in March.

While we were eating, I secretly thought how much Papa, the owner of Angkor Wat, reminded me of Paul's dad, but I didn't like to say anything. About ten minutes later Paul brought it up himself, and we agreed Papa was his Cambodian doppelgänger. We felt very much at home after that.

Day 20, in which we meet a bright yellow bird in a nappy

2010-01-11T17:01:00.000-08:00

After breakfast we decided to finally visit Senso-ji Temple, just up the road from our hotel, which the guidebook describes as “Tokyo's most sacred and spectacular temple”. It turned out today is a public holiday and the place was swarming with locals dressed up in colourful traditional costumes, including cumbersome wooden shoes which no-one seemed to know how to walk in properly (picture a wooden flip-flop glued on top of a child's alphabet building block). The temple itself is reached via a long red arcade of stalls selling tourist tat – packed densely with people trying to buy sticks of yakatori, postcards of Mount Fuji or Pokemon characters – but today the temple itself was sheathed in scaffolding and plastic wrapping and we didn't like to intrude.

We walked to Ueno and took the train to Komagome to see the Rikugi-en stroll garden, which was built by a Japanese playboy in the seventeenth century and supposedly recreates 88 miniature landscapes, each the subject of a separate 33-line poem. Unfamiliar with these poems we just enjoyed the very unnatural recreations of nature, with trees so carefully pruned and twisted to meet the Japanese concept of perfection that limbs which hang too low were propped up on stilts, while limbs that were too high were weighed down with ropes and anchors. In a couple of very extreme examples cedar trees were lost under the elegant rigging that was keeping them in shape, beautiful webs of rope with a living tree at their core.

We had a long and large lunch at a superb tapas restaurant – where I discovered just how much I missed flavours such as fresh olive oil, chili and garlic – before returning to Asakusa and crossing the river to view Philip Starck's Super Dry building. Known locally as the 'Gilded Turd', it's hard to imagine what else Starck might have meant it to be.

Travelling home from Nikko the other day, Paul mentioned that he was obsessed with sumo wrestling on Channel 4 as a child. Oddly, it hadn't until that point occurred to him to see whether or not it was possible to see a sumo match while we were in Japan. Fortunately for us, it turned out that the National Sumo Tournament was due to start the following day, and so today – day two of the games – we found ourselves trotting into the National Sumo Stadium.

I had never watched sumo as a child and so had no idea what to expect. It turns out the wrestling started as part of the harvest celebrations, and so is closely associated with Shinto, the pagan religion which pre-dates Buddhism in Japan, and largely continues to live alongside it. Every sumo wrestler in the country fights on every day of the tournament, but the actual wrestling still takes much less time than the various Shinto rituals surrounding them: the gyoji chanting out a prayer and waving his fan, the bowing and drinking of sake, the tossing of salt to purify the ring, etc. When two sumo wrestlers actually come together, it takes about ten seconds for one of them to either fall to the ground or be thrown from the ring. Sometimes this was rather drab – a stray hand hitting the sand, for example – and other times it was spectacular, such as when a 30 stone man was hurled out of the ring and into the audience, crashing into a tiny old Japanese lady watching from the ringside. I thought perhaps she might require an ambulance, but instead she was all smiles. I think some women might shell out for the expensive ringside seats just to cop a feel of their heroes.

All told, we watched three hours of sumo and I remained interested and enthusiastic throughout, which is more than can be said for the football, cricket or any other sporting matches I've endured in the past.

We ticked another box in our I Spy Japanese Cuisine book in the evening by visiting Denny's, a Japanese variant of the American chain which specialises in yoshoku, or 'western food'. Despite its name, yoshoku is nothing like what we eat in the west, having been adopted over a century ago and corrupted since. My meal was a rather disgusting pork burger doused in a bland brown gravy served with five chips and a battered prawn, while Paul had a burger topped with a mound of spring onions, a pile of drained tin corn and some KFC-style chicken.

Day 19, in which we see a dog with a very clean bottom

2010-01-10T15:02:00.000-08:00

Sunday is a day of rest, so I relaxed in the hotel with a book while Paul went for a walk along the apparently barren and industrial riverside, before scooting over to Ebisu to visit an exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.

We met up again for a bento box lunch in Ueno Park. I'd heard good thinks about Ueno, but I guess everyone else had visited it outside of winter, when the endless rows of trees would be covered in spring green, summer blossom or autumnal browns. As it was, in winter we had row upon row of brown twigs, and nothing to distract us from the fact that the park is almost entirely concreted over with roads, pavements and squares. It was reminiscent of a very large and relatively pretty car park, but I suppose it makes life easier for the poor schmoes who have to sweep up all the blossom and autumnal leaves each year.

Kbo told me Ueno Park was rather like Hyde Park, and I suppose for all its concrete this makes sense as it appears to be a park where people go to be seen and to promenade. We saw some relatively unusual people during our brief time in the park, including a collection of Teddy Boys standing by the pond listening to very, very quiet rock and roll; a happy man in his mid-30s strolling with a large grey rabbit perched on his shoulder (and a special portable rabbit hutch on his back, for when Bunny got shy); and a woman whose pug dog fouled the pavement, and not only did she clean up the mess but then surgically removed a wet wipe from her hand bag and carefully polished its arsehole.

At the north end of the park sits a series of exhibition halls and museums which fly under the flag of the Tokyo National Museum. Their Asian Collection (sitting in a classical building to the left) was a rather small and drab set of broken pots, spiced up only by a couple of Cambodian statues and a superb series of artefacts sourced from (an apparently Asian) Egypt. The main museum – which is built in the traditional Japanese style – smelled so bad we had to leave almost immediately upon entering, so we went instead to the archaeological pavilion at the rear of the complex, where there was a fine collection of idiotic terracotta figurines.

As night was already falling, we strolled down through the park and south to Akihabara – the so-called Electric Town – to see the chaotic clusters of neon signs that mark out this region (although in truth, you get large amounts of neon pretty much throughout the city). Akihabara was heaving with people, in contrast to the rest of Tokyo which is generally much more civilised, and we were glad to come out the other end and get some space.

We continued our stroll down to Tokyo Station (passing on route the Nihonbashi Bridge, an historic bronze bridge which formally marks the centre of the city, but which is now almost completely forgotten, buried as it is directly below a double-flyover which snakes its way directly over the river). For dinner we had dhosa and curry at Dhaba India near the station, and while the quality of the meat was disappointing our taste buds were eternally thankful for some much needed stimulation.

Cultural Aside #002: A lot of Japanese etiquette concerns hygiene and the avoidance of disease, with the guide book advising that it is socially unacceptable to blow your nose in public, and many people in the city wearing gauze masks to either contain their own disease or to avoid contracting someone else's. Despite this, I've been surprised to see that it is completely acceptable to cough without covering the mouth – even when they're standing directly over me on the tube, and usually with a heavy focus on moving phlegm – while Japanese men (I cannot speak for the women) do not wash their hands after using the toilet. This is not just a matter of personal preference – in 90% of toilets there is no soap to wash your hands (including museums, public transport and – more worryingly, restaurants, where chefs are at work with food I will eat), and in all but a handful of cases there is no means to dry your hands, presumably making the assumption that you won't wash them in the first place. All I can say is, thank goodness Paul packed several litres of hand sanitiser to get us through the holiday.

Day 18, in which we visit the mausoleum of Richard Chamberlain

2010-01-09T15:31:00.000-08:00

Today we took the train north to Nikko to see the World Heritage complex of Buddhist shrines and temples, which are nestled at the top of a hill within a thick forest of pine trees. I hadn't really heard of Nikko so didn't know what to expect, and so while the well-informed tourists rushed from carvings of sleeping cats to frescoes of wise monkeys to paintings of roaring dragons, we happily ambled around taking everything in, from the sheer scale of the buildings to the tiny carvings that gilded their sides.

First was Rinno-ji Sanbatsu, where three giant golden gods were hiding round the back, all the more amazing for being 1,244 years old, although the thousand-armed goddess of mercy was probably a few hundred arms short. We then entered the shrine complex of Tosho-gu which is probably the most famous and (in modern terms) Tomb Raidery, built on several levels up into the hillside and festooned with ancient pine trees. We found about a billion things to take photographs of here, and despite the influx of tourists it was a very pleasant place to be.

I still don't know much about Buddhist traditions, and while trying to enter one room to see the roaring dragon it turned out I was taking my shoes off in the wrong place, next to the 'please remove your shoes' sign. I don't think much of any religion whose main tenet is that you take off your shoes before you reach the sign telling you to take off your shoes. The roaring dragon was also a disappointment; the guidebook reported that a priest would clap his hands to demonstrate how the dragon could roar. From the spectacle that took place, I conclude that dragons briefly roar by gurgling quietly in a high-pitched echo.

After the stunning complex of Tosho-gu, it was perhaps a shame we next came to Futarasan shrine, such was the contrast: on the one hand, a series of immaculate buildings anointed with spectacular carvings; on the other: a couple of lean-to buildings with a spinning plate of plastic cakes, and a hoopla game made from rope.

As we approached the last of the temples – Rinno-ji Taiyuin – Paul read from the guidebook that it contains the mausoleum of the third Shogun. “What's a Shogun?” I wondered out loud. “Shogun was a television mini-series starring Richard Chamberlain,” Paul explained patiently, hiding his disgust at my ignorance.

On the way back to the railway station we passed Nikko's most famous landmark, the red lacquered Shin-kyo bridge, which legend has it marks the site where the Buddhist priest Shado Shonin crossed the river with the assistance of two generous snakes. Although a major tourist attraction, it turns out the bridge is now absolutely surrounded by modern roads and traffic and there is only one nice angle from which it can be photographed (needless to say, the angle used all of the guidebooks - whose side are they on?):

Although you can pay to go on the bridge (we did not), you only get to walk on a scaffold walkway built on top of the bridge and cannot anyway exit at the other side. The guidebook also reports that the original bridge was recently destroyed, and so the bridge is only a 2005 reconstruction (complete with steel supports). This was a slight disappointment.

We took the train home to Asakusa for dinner. After searching in vain for a recommended tempura restaurant opposite the Dembo-in shrine, we ended up at one on the seventh floor of the nearby Matsuya Department store. The Japanese seem to be very fond of carbohydrates, as several tempura options came in a set meal with separate bowls of white rice, udon noodles, wheat noodles and teppan noodles. This is possibly more side dishes than one requires. We opted for a simple tempura, served only with rice and teppan noodles.

There is a traditional conversation-starter where friends ask which cuisine you would happily only eat for the rest of your life, and I've always thought fondly of sushi, sashimi and noodles and gone for Japanese. This evening, however, we decided that we may already be reaching the point where just a little bit of non-Japanese food each day will help refine our appetites. Lovely as their simple approach to cooking is, most meals use the same set of ingredients: umami-rich miso and soy sauce, spring onions, pickled vegetables and the ubiquitous bowl of rice. It tends to prove rather samey, involves very few vegetables and also a poor balance between protein and refined white carbs. Tomorrow we'll try something western and I really won't miss the rice.

Day 17, in which only elementary school children may ride the cat bus

2010-01-08T14:22:00.000-08:00

We rose early and took the train west to Mitaka to visit the Ghibli Museum, an institution established by Studio Ghibli's founder and primary animator Hayao Miyazaki. The blurb had a lot to say about Miyazaki's vision of the ideal museum: that it should be unpretentious, should be explicable to even those unfamiliar with the studio's work, that it should both entertain and enlighten, blah, blah and blah. I'm not sure how many of these boxes it ticked, but we certainly approached it on the assumption it would have more to say about good curating than it would about the Studio Ghibli films (of which Paul has seen none).

On the whole, the museum is a bit of a failure and its blurb is significantly overblown. Its primary success is the building itself, which was designed by the Ghibli animators (people who have created some of the best imaginary buildings on film) and which imitated a large Edwardian mansion. The central hall rose up through four stories, overseen by landings, balconies, criss-crossing walkways, half-height doorways and oddly-shaped windows at different levels, with a caged metal staircase rising in one corner and old-fashioned lift in the other, all designed to create the impression that there was an endless maze of passageways and rooms to explore. The attention to detail was also impressive, with stylised scenes from their movies painted on ceilings, and a spectacularly successful series of stained glass windows telling the legend of Totoro as though it were the seven stages of the cross.

Our favourite room was the cinema, where they showed a specially commissioned Ghibli movie (about an elderly Japanese couple who sought refuge from their mundane farming existence by supporting the sumo-wrestling ambitions of the mice which infested their house – a film only viewable at the museum, the blurb boasted, although I found you could also buy the DVD in the gift shop).

Where the museum failed was absolutely everything else: a third of the rooms in the building were given over to toilets (so much so that when Paul and I took up the invitation to explore the museum and make our own story, we slipped through a miniature door in one wall and ten seconds later found ourselves in the ladies' loos – not entirely a wasted voyage, for we learned that Japanese women use urinals), while the exhibition spaces were quite lazily conceived, comprising as they did lots of original art work from the movies surrounded by large amounts of junk (ash trays, model aeroplanes, books about Scotland) which were not related to the films, but were intended to “inspire the imagination”. We were not suitably inspired, and were instead disappointed that the museum had little to say about what inspired Miyazaki or the actual process of animation at the studio.

There were two other things to excite me: on the top floor, in the far south-west corner, was a life-size cat bus to play on (elementary school children only, alas), while in the first room on the ground floor was a 3D zoetrope: a series of spinning models revolving at the same frequency as a flashing strobe light, creating the impression of 3D animation. The cat bus prowled, Totoro jumped up and down with his umbrella, that wee girl did some skipping and a whole host of rabbits gambolled in between the various characters. Given Studio Ghibli's strong reputation for innovation, this was precisely the sort of thing I had expected to fill the museum.

We left and ate a variety of baked goods outside the station, before taking the train to Tokyo Station and embarking on an architectural tour of Ginza. Thus we saw Tokyo Station itself (a great century-old red brick construction, much neglected but now under restoration) and the superb Tokyo Internationl Forum down the road (a huge upturned boat-shaped atrium made from vast quantities of steel and earthquake-resistant glass). We also tried to visit Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel – known once upon a time as the 'Jewel of the Orient' – but it seems they tore that down in the 1960s to make way for a large concrete box filled with bad carpeting and seedy looking businessmen. A bit of detective work led us to a surviving pillar in the rear lobby and some carved volcanic rock by the bank of elevators from the original facade, as well as a single photograph of how the old hotel had looked. We had until this point been sad that such a great work had been lost, but seeing this photograph disabused us of any such notion. Wright – readers may recall – is very famous for his series of prairie houses, which are inspired to a great extent by traditional domestic Japanese architecture. So what did Wright use as his inspiration when building the Imperial? Why, the Aztecs of course! It was utterly hideous, and if they hadn't pulled it down in the 1960s I'd have signed a petition today requesting that they do so now.

We went for a quick drink in the hotel's Old Imperial Bar – which was supposedly inspired by the original Wright design – but it was a dark and oppressive 1970s-style room populated largely by Japanese businessmen talking business, ignoring their wives, smoking, and drinking whisky. The bar was ultimately reminiscent of Wright only to the extent that they used his name a lot in the drinks menu, and since it was also £10 a glass of very bad sancerre we soon called it a day.

There has been a lot of talk recently about the launch of Sony's new 3D television, so while in the Ginza area we popped into the Sony showroom to have a quick look. Readers with long memories might recall that I am no great fan of 3D cinema, but it was impressive to see the effect pulled off on a single high definition screen. The movie we watched involved a polar bear's bottom looming into the room, and I can think of no better use for 3D technology.

For dinner, we went to Sometaro in Asakusa, our first traditional Japanese restaurant (where you have to take off your shoes at the door and place them into a traditional Japanese plastic carrier bag, and then sit on a cushion on the floor coz they've made the tables too low) to eat Okonomi-yaki. Okonomi-yaki are persistently described in English as 'Japanese pancakes', but as with the ones you get in London they're pretty much just thick (and slightly doughy) omelets. Unlike the restaurant we've been to in London, here we got to make them ourselves and so while we didn't much enjoy eating them it was super fun greasing up the hotplate, frying up the food and mixing in the various condiments. Fortunately we only ordered two – not three as the guidebook had suggested – as Paul later reported that if he'd had to eat any more he would have vomited onto the hot plate (not, I suppose, that anyone would have been able to tell the difference by looking).

The following morning Paul commented that the Okonomi-yaki weren't so bad. "At least we didn't vomit or have the shits," he mused.

NB: photos now restored to the rest of the blog, thanks to our friends at Photobucket

Day 16, in which we see plenty of dead fish and eat some too

2010-01-07T14:50:00.000-08:00

Having woken absurdly early, it was a perfect opportunity to visit the Tokyo Central Wholesale Market at Tsukiji, and so at 4:30am we caught a taxi down to the docks and walked through the dark into the busy warehouses – dodging motorised platforms, push trolleys laden with fish and men carrying gigantic boxes – to enjoy a cup of coffee in a labourers' cafe before inspecting the market proper.

At the back of the market, a closed-off building housed row upon row of headless tuna, laid out on blankets in the hangar like corpses recovered from a plane crash, eager buyers shining torches into the cavities before bidding in the auction. During the course of the first hour we saw the bodies being sold, being transported to retail stalls, being hacked into manageable chunks by men with giant swords, and being carved into precise rectangles by a woman at a bandsaw. Of course, we also then ultimately ate the stuff for breakfast. The Japanese seem to be obsessed with tuna, but of course there were hundreds of other types of fish and seafood to see, and a superb morning was spent inspecting the various species and enjoying the buzz of the market.

We had breakfast at Bentomi, a cramped sushi bar where you sit at the counter as the sushi chefs make the sushi to order, swiftly moulding the rice with one hand while taking a piece of fish and a fingertip of wasabi with the other, combining the three ingredients, compressing and plating it all up in the time it would take me to pour out a bowl of muesli. Behind in the kitchen you could see the freshly bought fish entering through the back door and being sliced into delicate slivers of fresh, sweet flesh before joining the sushi chef out front. It was again almost as good to watch as it was to eat.

After seeing the fishmongers reach the end of their working day, it was almost time for the office workers to start theirs. We took the tube to Shinjuku – the western business district – and enjoyed a cup of coffee and a stroll around the empty plazas before it turned 8:30, whereupon we were greeted by hordes of commuters as they poured out of Shinjuku station (apparently the busiest train station on Earth) and marched together through the streets to their office buildings, battering us out of the way as we fought against the flow.

It was still several hours before anything opened for the tourists, we walked to the nearby Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden for what we imagined would be a sedate stroll. In fact, the park was beautiful, and a happy hour was spent exploring the Japanese gardens with their bridges, ponds, friendly carp and - perhaps most of all - delicately trimmed trees, the topiarists still hard at work turning the bold and masculine firs into gentle floating clouds of leaves.

I has imagined Tokyo to be a forest of giant skycrapers – like Hong Kong without the crippling levels of poverty – but Shinjuku was a small orchard of sky scrapers at best. We travelled to the viewing platform at the top of one of the tallest - the Tokyo Municipal Hall - and while the city is certainly huge (stretching off into the horizon, only stopping when it reaches Mount Fuji), Tokyo was revealed to be mostly carpeted with low-rise buildings. It is only our second day in Tokyo, but the city already seems much smaller and more manageable than I had imagined before our arrival.

We walked to the Opera City for lunch and the ICC Inter-Communication Centre (an art gallery for technology-inspired art, although this turned out to mean exhibits comprising a Twitter search, a Google Image search and a series of poorly tuned radios), before it was midday and we needed our nap.

In the evening we took the tube out to to Shibuya, the teenage playground district which was like a souped-up Times Square, where the huge electronic adverts come with blaring sound and music too. We had a deep-fried supper at Tonkatsu Wako in Centre Gai, before deciding to call it a day.

Cultural aside: During the course of the day we also read about the lives of the average Tokyoite. It seems that Shibuya exists as a pleasure ground in which teenagers are encouraged to enjoy themselves as much as possible before they come of age and must embark on the severe responsibilities of adult life, at which point the women retreat to the home to serve as housewives while the men become commuters, working long hours, travelling at least two hours a day and hardly ever seeing their families again (we saw hundreds of these drab men, swaddled in identical grey suits and either napping on the tube or grimacing as they embraced their predetermined existence).

This extremely constrained life would appear to explain why a country with such great longevity and one of the oldest populations has such a teen-focussed economy, and why so many adult Japanese men seek to escape the drab uniformity of their lives through fantasy and computer games. My verdict is: thank goodness for feminism and the rise of the individual in the West.

Days 14 and 15, in which we fly to Tokyo and eat sushi

2010-01-06T10:37:00.000-08:00

My birthday! We headed immediately to Heathrow for a slap up breakfast, followed by a flight to Tokyo. I was a bit disappointed to realise that not only was I spending most of my birthday sitting on an plane, but thanks to the time difference My Special Day was also eight hours shorter than most. I plan to celebrate for eight more hours when I get them back at the end of the holiday.

People had warned me that landing in Tokyo is like landing on an alien planet, but in truth it felt pretty much like anywhere else we'd ever flown to. I speak Japanese about as well as I speak Portuguese Brazilian or Swahili and I never felt alienated or lost in Rio or Nairobi, and in fact apart from the language barrier everything was precisely as you might expect it to be (only with more bowing and whispering of 'sumimasen').

We took the train into town and checked into our hotel, the Chisun Inn Asakusa. Our room is possibly the smallest I have ever stayed in (outside of a caravan) and we immediately entered into serious negotiations with each other about how to store our luggage, which takes up a quarter of the usable floor space. The bathroom is similarly cramped, but has the advantage that you can brush your teeth, shave or pee while standing in the bath tub, and you can even use the hairdryer in the shower (although a sign does state that exposing the hairdryer to water may 'result in trouble').

We wandered up the street for sushi lunch at Maguro Bito, which was apparently voted the best kaiten-zushi shop in the whole of Japan. There was only a short queue outside so we didn't mind waiting, but then upon getting inside we discovered that the queue continued on banquettes stretching the full length of two walls. Still, it moved fairly quickly and our appetites were plenty whetted by the time we were actually called to the counter. Behind the counter was chaos, as three sushi chefs rapidly assembled plate after plate of sushi taking time out only to bellow into microphones, the waiting staff chanting set catchphrases in a call-and-response game which didn't appear to be remotely functional. Right in the middle of the room was a fish tank housing mackerel, eels and sea urchins.

The sushi travelling on the conveyor belt was fresher than any I'd seen in England. It was visibly brighter and more colourful, a merry carnival far removed from the sad funeral procession of the fish you get in Yo Sushi. This was also reflected in the flavours. I hadn't realised before that mackerel can taste sweet and fresh, while tuna was succulent and flavoursome. There was also an interesting variety on offer, although not all of the offerings were to our tastes (some sort of egg sac like organ served peeking out of a nori roll divided opinion, while the cuttlefish was tough as old boots).

The condiments didn't much resemble the ones proffered in London sushi bars, and I ate my first three plates with a mix of soy sauce and powdered green tea (thinking it was dried wasabi), but this wasn't especially unpleasant. When we finished, a waiter waved an electronic scanner over our towering pile of plates and it automatically read the colours and relayed the information back to the till. Japan really is the land of technology - albeit they use tricorders to run restaurants, not take over the world.

After popping into a supermarket for water and pocky, we returned to the hotel room for a quick nap with promises to wake again at 7pm to head into Tokyo proper. We paid no attention when the alarm went off, and I write this fully refreshed at 2:44am and ready to head down to the docks for more sushi.

Day 13, in which we panic, then pack

2010-01-04T10:20:00.000-08:00

Today was all about packing our bags, cleaning the flat and – in the case of Paul – investing in the largest collection of toiletries I have ever seen, including eight separate bottles of hand sanitiser (see above, back left). We were both rather surprised at how little one can fit into a suitcase or rucksack. Over the next ten weeks we'll be enjoying city breaks, mountain trekking, beach holidays, glacier walking, cycling and boat trips. Taking only one pair of shoes and one pair one of trousers doesn't seem quite enough.

We also visited Tom and Lucy's new baby, Anna, who is a tiny and sleepy little girl and will no doubt be a much larger and noisier baby by the time we get back. Everyone looked very well and, although exhausted, seemed to be far more content and happy than most new parents I've seen.

Days 10, 11 & 12, in which we prepare diligently, get far too drunk and celebrate my birthday

2010-01-03T00:13:00.000-08:00

During our brief period in London to regroup, plan and prepare, we spent a lot of time sleeping and even more time trying to work out where precisely we wish to visit in Japan. It is a very big country, it seems, and not all of it particularly well served by the shinkansen. Nagasaki in particular looks like a pretty major city and yet is about as hard to get to as flying to the Moon. The Japanese travel route finder effectively gave up and suggested walking there from Fukuoka (where the bullet train grinds to a halt), although we've since found some hidden train lines which might - we hope - be operational during daylight hours.

We also went shopping. Somehow we succeeded in buying lots of things which were not on our shopping list (a sleek and super-lightweight Samsonite suitcase, a new red rucksack, around three and two third bottles of chenin blanc, etc.) and nothing that was on the list (beach shorts, sun block, sufficient yen to keep us alive three weeks, etc.). The three and two third bottles of chenin blanc - taken in situ at the New Players bar under Charing Cross - also set back our productivity significantly.

We awoke on Day 12 at midday with thumping hangovers, and after a hurried breakfast of coffee and ibuprofen (and opening my birthday presents) rushed back down to Charing Cross to meet with some London friends to say adieu, farewell and nice knowing you, and to celebrate my birthday a couple of days too early. It was lovely to see some familiar faces - and quite a few completely unfamiliar ones - and to absorb another bottle of chenin blanc.

Day 9, in which we are too shattered to do much about New Year's Eve

2009-12-31T09:16:00.000-08:00

Given I never really adjusted to the time difference in New York, it seems a little bit unfair to discover I don't really fit in with GMT anymore either.

A lazy day was thus had of watching rubbish on tv, doing the laundry and snoozing, until 10pm when I felt wide awake again. We drank some fizz and ate some pizza, and then it was time to sleep again. Good times!

Day 8, in which we slip like shadows into the Guggenheim

2009-12-30T05:17:00.000-08:00

After pancakes and french toast at the Red Flame Diner, we took a taxi to the Guggenheim.

The Guggenheim is a fantastic space, technically containing only one floor which rises up an up in a giant spiral to fill the tall space, today presenting a collection of Kandinsky's work progressing through time from his first sketches at ground level up to his latest works at the top. It was filled with a large number of slow and stupid strangers who only served to get in the way. I can't be alone in thinking the world would be nicer if the majority of people on the planet would just vanish and leave the rest of us to enjoy it, and so it was I wished I could roll a giant Indiana Jones-style boulder down the ramp and clear out the gallery. As it was, no boulder was available so we checked out about some of the later Kandinskys (and a very cool Anish Kapoor sculpture, a giant object crammed into a tiny room which was only visible in small sections, like the blind men's elephant) and then spent twice as much time in the gift shop.

After a cup of coffee back at the Algonquin, we dragged our suitcases down to Penn Station. Manhattan is busy at the best of times, but as New Year's Eve approached the streets were densely packed and the traffic static, and so taxis simply were not an option. We battled our way eleven blocks south and agreed that perhaps we'd had enough of the big city for now and were glad to be returning to provincial London for a brief rest.

Following Al Qaeda's terror attack on the Christmas flight to Detroit (if setting fire to a blanket and then being beaten up by a member of the public can be counted as an 'attack'), British Airways had warned us to be prepared for severe delays in security at the airport. In fact, it was swifter than usual and we soon found ourselves tucking into burgers and ice tea.

The flight home flew by, assisted by the soporific effects of Scott Neustadter's (500) Days of Summer. We arrived back in Tufnell Park at 9am, ready to unpack, launder and repack for Japan.

Day 7, in which I almost vomit in the cinema and Paul takes to his bed

2009-12-29T05:17:00.000-08:00

It is apparently minus 12 degrees celsius today, once you take the wind chill factor into account. We prepared for frozen misery by putting on our black thermal tops and leggings, and for one brief moment it looked like two particularly unskilled ninjas had broken into the room. I wore four more layers on top, plus gloves and a hat, and still the ice cold wind blew right through to our bones.

As today is our last full day in New York, we decided to get a proper American breakfast and - after some google research - ended up at Norma's at Le Meridien on 57th Street. Everything was big at Norma's, including the prices and the queue to get in. However, once seated and served with hot coffee and unlimited freshly squeezed orange juice we soon cheered up. Norma's spin on eggs benedict was somewhat unexpected - sweet pancakes topped with poached egg, hollandaise and asparagus and served with deep fried new potatoes - but it gave us sufficient fuel to brave the cold again.

We strolled up through Central Park and scoped out the Tavern on the Green, the principal joy of which was the wacky topiary out back. To the right: a shrub pruned like an elephant with its trunk held triumphant, its tail elevated and a trail of little poo sized bushes down below; to the left: a leaping horse, its shrub-based mane streaming behind it; and in the middle: a bit shaggy gorilla with its arms raised in the air, its fur made with fir fronds in a realistic - if green - simulcrum of an ape's pelt.

We bore left to the cinema at Lincoln Square, and tried to enjoy Avatar. Unfortunately, James Cameron has not made this easy, not least as the entire plot is a series of tribal cliches ripped off from every Boy's Own jungle adventure show anyone has ever seen. It is also an uncomfortably racist film: giant blue aliens living a feral jungle existence on a completely alien planet for some reason speak in a range of black accents (not one accent in particular, you understand, but any of the range of black accents, from the Caribbean to Harlem to generic Africa). Cameron's theory seems to be - as Doctor Who might put it - "Lots of planets have a tribal underclass".

Cameron also demonstrated that he now struggles to follow Syd Field's screenwriting maxim "show, don't tell". Awkwardly presented exposition was dripping off the screen, and at the start of the film characters were to be seen regularly explaining the key features of the plot to other characters who were either (a) already fully aware of the facts or (b) themselves in no need of knowing it. "Are you forgetting why we're here?" the villain said to a hard-nosed Sigourney Weaver (who had spent the past five years on the alien planet leading a major division of the project the villain was referring to), "It's for the unobtanium, which is a rare mineral worth millions per ounce back on Earth. You've not probably heard me mention it previously, although we've been mining it exclusively for the past five years and you lead my core research team." If people talked like this in real life, you'd punch them in the throat. Given the concept was trite at best, an element of slow reveal might have served the story better.

I doubt we would have walked out of Avatar on the strength of these criticisms alone, but they were certainly contributing factors once I discovered that the new 3D technology causes me to experience incredibly unpleasant motion sickness. Nauseous and dry retching, Paul escorted me from the cinema 45 minutes in and so we never found out which of the two most obvious endings Cameron chose in the end - the hackneyed option or the derivative one. I don't much care.

Today was going to be the day we caught up with all of the different people we know in New York. Alas, Paul was by this stage feeling very ill, as his cold reached the headache and acheing bones stage, and so he called off meetings with two of his friends in the afternoon in favour of walking back to the hotel, eating some chicken salad and napping.

In the evening, then, I travelled down to SoHo on my own (leaving an ailing Paul in bed with nothing more than a Six Feet Under marathon and the promise of RuPaul's Drag Race for company) and met up with some friends at 'Salt' on Macdougal Street. An obscure friend of Paul had recommended the place on the basis that "it doesn't look like much, but does the best Italian food". In actual fact, it looked amazing and did traditional English bistro food. We had some dates wrapped in bacon to whet our appetites, and then shared plates of lamb shank, steak and pork belly. The food was all terrific, the atmosphere was warm and the waiting staff very friendly.

It was great to catch up with my friends who - we realised - I have only met up with a few times previously, although they're the sort of people you feel immediately comfortable with and conversation and laughter came quickly.

I sloped off back into the night, ready to pack for England.

Day 6, in which we go kosher and ascend to the Grand Master's throne

2009-12-28T16:03:00.000-08:00

I am clumsy and confused before I have caffeine in the morning, and so while I was sitting down to sip my first cup of coffee at the shop across the road I kneed a woman in the breasts. She spoke only Spanish and did not (as far as I'm aware) complain.

We had risen early because Paul had persuaded me to try re-running the Abercrombie & Fitch gauntlet, and this time we were targeting the flagship store on 5th Avenue. We turned up half an hour before it was due to open and so the queue thankfully only stretched around the corner and halfway up the block. As we neared the front, I noticed a constant stream of chancers trying to skip the queue. "Are these people queuing just to enter?" they would invariably ask. "No, honey, this is the queue to see idiots asking the doormen stupid questions".

Anyway, it took us an hour to get through the doors, which was precisely the length of time I needed to focus my mind on summoning the energies required to battle the A&F demons. As we crossed the threshold I successfully fought off the stench, noise and poor organisation to identify the t-shirts I had liked the previous night. Figuring I never wanted to experience such horrors again, I grabbed some more t-shirts and a hoody and figured that would probably be enough to last me for the rest of my life.

After a brief restroom stop in Bergdorfs, we went through the whole horror again with the Apple Store, so Paul could buy a new iPod Nano. We concluded that was about sufficient shopping for this week and went for lunch.

The attentive reader will have noticed that much of our diet so far in New York has involved fried foods and fat. We tried to redress this by having a big falafel salad in a kosher health diner, and this was the first time in days my stomach has seen green.

After a short nap, we marched fifteen blocks south to the Grand Masonic Hall of Manhattan. In the spirit of transparency and blowing away the cobwebs of mystery, the Masons have decided to throw open their doors to the public and allow them to be guided around a selected range of rooms by a cranky and deaf octogenarian holocaust survivor. We were taken around around six masonic meeting rooms, each of which was identical to the other in size and layout but themed around a different time period (colonial, renaissance, egyptian, classical, etc.) It was like taking part in a sinister and secretive version of the Crystal Maze, only our guide had marginally more hair than Richard O'Brien.

Although fairly interesting to look at, it soon became apparent that the rooms were decorated with little more than stage props and scenery. Classical architecture was rendered in painted chip board and plaster, while the much lauded marble pillars were just red gloss paint. The choice of historically themed decorations struck us as an awkward means of creating the illusion that Freemasonry is an ancient institution (rather than a series of dinner clubs from the 16th century which took off in their current form under the Victorians), and it was hard to tell whether the guide genuinely believed - as he repeatedly stated - that the halls were built to mirror the layout of King Solomon's temple (a building which may or may not have existed and - if it ever did - has certainly never been seen during the time of the Freemasons). The only truly amazing room was a ballroom on the 4th floor, which was an exact replica (or rather, vice versa) of the ballroom on the Titanic. "The only difference between this ballroom and the one on the Titanic," the guide explained with a grim smile, "is that you don't drown while you're dancing in this one."

The guide only had a few core facts to share, but shared them as often as he could. For example, when I asked what the Egyptian hieroglyphs running around the top of one room meant, he explained that "You see, Masons were stone workers but we don't work stone any more. We don't build buildings, we build character. Do you understand?" Yes of course I understood - not least as he'd already mentioned this twice and would mention it twice again - but what about the bloody hieroglyphs? Similarly, when I asked how much it costs each to be a Mason, his reponse was a long, rambling and almost certainly bullshit anecdote in which we were supposed to believe that Adolf Hitler had shaken hands with each and every jew as they lined up to enter Auschwitz, and that his friend Artie Stenoficz had given the Fuhrer the Masonic handshake and got an instant 'get out of the death camp free' card (nonsense of course, given the Nazis tried to shut down the masons).

The tour might have been rather pleasant were it not for an irritating Canadian-Russian woman who asked a series of banal questions with the persistence of a mongoose. The most extraordinary question came as we were boarding the elevator to leave at the end of the tour. "One more thing," she said pensively. "Can you photocopy books in the Freemason's library?" The guide thankfully played on his deafness and affected not to hear.

Hungry again, we tried to recapture the magic of lunch by visiting a fast food kosher restaurant for matzo ball soup. I've only heard of matzo balls from Woody Allen movies and Michael Chabon novels, and I was very excited to finally find out what they might be. Sadly, they transpire to be relatively disgusting cold chicken dumplings sitting in a plastic bowl of stock.

After a pre-dinner drink in the Algonquin's Blue Bar, we went to Mint at 50th and Lexington, a very good South Indian restaurant with a stylish atmoshpere, delicious food and incredibly friendly (and handsome) Nepalese waiters. What more could you need?

Day 5, in which Carrie Fisher reprises her role as Princess Leia, coffee pot coffee pot

2009-12-27T14:40:00.000-08:00

Today we enjoyed some fortifying coffee and muffins in bed before heading uptown to enjoy the marvellous queues at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, to those in the know). After queueing to enter the building, what could be more charming than queuing to buy tickets? Why, queueing for the coat check, silly!

Finally ticketed-up and bereft of baggage, we joined the queue for the escalator and travelled to the top floor to see the Bauhaus exhibition. We somehow got confused and walked around the exhibit in reverse, and so it was that I shall always hold the impression that Bauhaus got cruder and more primitive through time. I also spent a lot of time not knowin what Bauhaus was or where it came from - something I only figured out right at the end of the exhibition where it was fully explained in an introductory display.

We followed this with an exhibition of Gabriel Orozco's work. I'd not previously heard of Orozco but found him to be a very playful artist, and perhaps the biggest delight was in seeing the other visitors' faces as confusion gave way to laughter (a good example of how he plays with imagery is my favourite work, Cats & Melons. C'mon, follow this link).

After a sandwich in a local bagel shop - where the only bagel filling was 'fat', although you had the option to choose between dairy, animal or vegetable - we went to see Carrie Fisher's fabulous new one-woman show at Studio 54, Wishful Drinking, in which she reveals all about her inbred Hollywood origins, her drug and alcohol addictions, her failed relationships, her manic-depression and the recent death of a friend in her bed. The material may hardly sound like comedy gold, but as Ms Fisher noted "if I can laugh at my life, I know I'm going to be alright", and she went further and managed to get us all laughing along too. Crowd pleasing material concerning her appearance in Star Wars included recreations of the hologram scene and an audience participation section with a life-size Princess Leia sex doll, while more intriguing material was presented with a Q&A session on the said friend's death and an analysis of the lyrics from songs Paul Simon wrote about her (it was not, it seems, at any stage a very happy marriage).

After a stroll down through Greenwich into Soho - through City Hall and down onto the tip of Manhattan to see the Brooklyn Bridge (pointless after dusk, it turns out, as they don't illuminate the piers) - I thought it might be nice to visit the Abercrombie & Fitch store at Seaport. I was wrong. It was in fact fucking horrible to visit the Abercrombie & Fitch store at Seaport. Entering the store, they got us first with a chemical attack: the aftershave hung so thick in the air we were drowning. The second wave of attack came in the form of 90s rock anthems played at deafening volume, while the general public was recruited to complete the assault by screaming, pushing, grabbing and generally being disorderly. Despite seeing a few t-shirts I liked, I had to abort the entire process in the face of cruel and unusual punishment, and we went for recuperative white wine at Pier 17 instead.

We ended the evening at L'il Frankies at 1st & 1st in the East village, a typical local-neighbourhood-pizzeria-cum-world-famous-radio-station, where apparently Mark Ronson DJs (and not Jon Ronson, as I initially and very excitedly believed). Most of the American food we've eaten so far has comprised white carbs, protein and fat (and not in that order), so we ordered a big bowl of broccoli and an entire roast aubergine in an attempt to please the gods of our tummies. It was all very nice, and I'm certain the prosecco we poured down alongside only aided our digestion.

It was a beautiful night, so we strolled home.

Day 4, Boxing Day, in which Penelope Cruz sacrifices her dignity

2009-12-26T12:58:00.000-08:00

We took breakfast at Viand on Madison Avenue, a classic Manhattan coffee shop founded way back in the depths of 1976. The seven staff make up for the impossibly tight and narrow floorplan through sheer sweat and frenzied planning, the whole show conducted by the sweating Spanish waiter who politely takes customers' orders and then barks them in furious code at the relevant cook. Every square inch was carefully invested in either cooking space, seating for customers or storage of ingredients. Our knees thus met romantically under the table, while our plates jostled for space on a small square of chipped formaica. Despite the apparent chaos, it all ran smoothly and Paul's corned beef hash was reported to be just like his mother used to cook.

We had popped into Viand as it was on route north to the Guggenheim, but in the end breakfast was the destination in itself as we reached the gallery to find the queues stretching around the block, the poor suckers getting drenched in the rain. We figured the Guggenheim's best feature is its exterior anyway, and made the most of being so far up the East Side by popping back into the Met.

The Met lets you pay whatever you wish to gain entry. On our first visit (two days earlier) we paid the full asking price of $20 a head, so we figured since we were only popping in (to see William the Blue Hippopotamus and an exhibition of photographs from Robert Frank's Les Americains) it would be reasonable this time round to only pay a dollar total. The cashier did not seem to see things this way, and her beaming smile vanished almost immediately, to be replaced with a look that could sour milk. I've found this to be a common trait among New Yorkers - they treat you like shit unless they think they can make some money out of you. Incidentally, William the Blue Hippopotamus was absolutely the best thing in the Met, while Les Americains was simulataneously illuminating, amusing and bleak.

It was still raining when we left, so we ran to the nearest tube station - via muffins at Dean & Deluca, a delicious deli where apparently Hannibal Lecter ate when he wasn't eating violinists - and took the train down to Union Square to shelter in the cinema there. The only film showing was 'Nine', an absolutely awful musical in which Daniel Day Lewis puts on a dodgy Italian accent and lusts after Oscar-winning actresses while said actresses perform lap dances for the audience. Penelope Cruz lost all of her dignity doing a splay-legged routine in a thong in which she sang lyrics along the lines of "Squeeze this, squeeze that / Darlin', squeeze my twat", while grasping the various body parts she was referring to for additional character depth and in support of her complex narrative arc.

The only reason we didn't walk out after fifteen minutes was the rain and the fact the Flatiron Lounge on West 19 Street doesn't open until 5pm. I suppose if the film ran past 5pm, we'd have been enjoying chenin blanc in the lush art deco bar by the time Kate Hudson was flashing her tits. As it was, we had to endure the tits and wait. The Lounge was an immaculate recreation of a decadent 20s cocktail bar, and a fine place to spend any evening (considerations of Kate Hudson's tits aside).

Racing through the rain afterwards, warmed through with wine, we found our way to the Spotted Pig on West 11th. The Spotted Pig has become something of a legend in London, following a series of articles reporting that the founder of St John's in Farringdon makes an annual pilgrimage to the Pig to share some of his more palatable offal creations. Although it does not seem the Pig has retained any of his recipes (crispy pig ear being as adventurous as it got), we had some great bitter in the upstairs pub while wiating for a table, followed by a nice enough burger in the restaurant. It still has some way to go to earn its legendary status, but was a really cozy place to spend a rainy evening.

We later saw the street where apparently Carrie Bradshaw lives in 'Sex And The City', and the shop where this fictional woman buys her cup-cakes, and then headed down in the seedier side of gay obsessions by visiting Marie's Crisis on Grove Street. On previous visits this show tunes piano bar has been packed enough that you can get away with singing along without actually knowing any of the words. On this occasion, however, it was just a few nerdy looking gays singing the more obscure songs from Little Shop of Horrors, so we discussed international politics, drank up and caught a cab home.

We arrived in our room soaked through and smelling of wet dog, and fell into bed to watch tv. Over the past four days we've become addicted to a ridiculous tv show called 'Clean House', in which three idiots led by Niecy Nash will meet with people with very real mental health issues, and try to fix these psychological disorders by selling the majority of their possessions to the general public and then repainting their living room in earth tones using the money raised. Fortunately, to celebrate the Christmas season Style TV was having a Clean House marathon, and so the remainder of our evening was sorted.

Day 3, Christmas Day, in which we order too much Korean food

2009-12-25T05:31:00.000-08:00

Christmas Day! We woke early of course, and after coffee down in the lobby we Skyped my family in Edinburgh to wish them a happy day. I have spent the past nine years celebrating Christmas in Edinburgh with the same people, and I felt quite homesick to see them doing it all without me.

We had booked Christmas lunch in the Algonquin's 'Round Table Room', which of course is room where stars like Dorothy Parker, Jamie Cullum and Angela Lansbury all made their name. I had imagined a rich atmosphere and even richer food, but frankly the whole thing was something of a disappointment. The food was school dinner quality - all overcooked meat and salty sauces - and the waiting staff comprised a number of ageing gangsters with the grace and manners of an elephant having an epileptic fit. Cutlery was placed on the table with heavy determination, bread roles were tossed through the air as the waiter bizarrely tried to serve them with two spoons, and at one point a passing waiter tripped over, showering Paul in gravy.

After a post-prandial nap we went to the top of the Rockefeller Centre to see what Manhattan looks like from above. The 'Top of the Rock' viewing platform is superior to that of the Empire State Building largely due to the fact you can see the Empire State Building when you're up there. It also has a killer view of Central Park, which stretched out quietly before us and looked absurdly small, like a short back garden covered in puddles.

We had romantic plans to go ice skating on the Rockefeller rink in front of the giant Christmas tree - a scene familiar from every Christmas movie ever set in New York - but alas it seems that several hundred thousand people had the same idea and so it was impossible to even move. At one point Paul was posing for a photo when an obese child tried to push him out of the way. "Excuse me," the boy bellowed. "My mom is trying to take a photograph".

I had my own opinions of what his mom could try to do, but I resolved to keep them to myself and indicated to Paul it was time to abort the Rockefeller Centre. This was in itself a challenge, as the streets were utterly crowded surrounding the centre and riot gates were in place to keep people safely kettled. We took to walking on the roads, ignoring the police's constant and angry appeal to stay on the pavement.

The crowds had cleared a few blocks later, and by 32nd street we found ourselves hungry and on a street full of Korean restaurants. Having had such a disappointing meal for lunch, something with a bit of flavour seemed like just the ticket.

We chose a restaurant called Hangang at 34 W 32nd, largely because it was filled exclusively with Asian customers and they presumably know a thing or two about Korean food. This sadly also meant, however, that the serving staff spoke no English and so we had to order blind. I haven't ordered Korean food before, and my confusion at the menu was only doubled by use of American terminology - it seemed there was no way I could communicate to the waitress that I had no idea what brisket or scallions were.

In the end we guessed that ordering two starters and two mains would probably be appropriate. It was a little surprising, then, when twenty seperate dishes all turned up at the same time, along with various plates of meats and vegetables which were tipped onto the table-top barbecue and cooked beside us. This was, however, precisely the sort of feast we had wanted to celebrate Christmas, and the fact we ate barbecued beef and chicken with chili sauce instead of turkey with cranberry sauce, and a spiced green spinach jelly instead of sage and onion stuffing, only made this Christmas dinner far more special.

We had planned to go drinking downtown, but my confused body clock demanded bed and so it was I found myself falling asleep in bed at 9pm.

Day 2, Christmas Eve, in which we maintain an erratic schedule

2009-12-24T07:59:00.000-08:00

I always forget what a five hour time difference does to a schedule, but sure enough today I woke up at 4am to find myself in a city which - while theoretically never sleeps - certainly isn't up and partying in mid-town. I went to the gym and read my book until the sun rose, and then we went for a walk.

It was freezing cold before the sun has had time to warm up the streets, and my thermal gloves and furry hat had little impact on the cold, so a few blocks later we ducked into the Astro Restaurant on 6th Avenue for coffee, pancakes and to slip on our thermals.

New York at dawn is a wonderfully quiet place, and it was a strange experience to be able to navigate the streets without the usual commuters, tourists and tramps trying to jostle for the same space. NYPD officers stood at street corners in anticipation of chaos, but observing little more than a trickle of traffic. As we entered Central Park, there were so few other people to see that strangers were delighted to stumble across us, and dog walkers would beam and wish us good morning as we passed by.

We dawdled in the park until the museums opened, and then went into the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a bit of a mooch around. There is a lot of stuff in the Met and not all of it worth seeing. A new wing contains reproduction rooms from different time periods, and is about as exciting as walking around the room-by-room displays in Ikea. A completely restored Egyptian temple housed in a giant greenhouse was pretty spectacular however, as was the huge painted glass mural from what I believe was the only French ship sunk by the US during the second world war. We also bought bagels from one of the rudest men in New York (indeed, all of the museum staff were rude apart from the smiling grey duffer whose job it was to secure our voluntary entrance fee).

We wanted a hotdog when we left the museum, but were most particular about who could serve it to us. Hotdog vendors who looked unclean, mentally ill or had bad facial hair were out. We thus made it to the bottom of Central Park before finding anyone worthy of our $3. The hotdog was everything I had dreamed it would be: fatty, chewy and delicious.

After buying snacks and water from the room, we were exhausted. It was 2pm and I'd been up ten hours already. We went back to the hotel for a quick nap, and jet lag took its toll and we didn't resurface until 10:30pm, in desperate search of some dinner.

Again, while Manhattan may be a city that never sleeps, it also doesn't keep many restaurants open after 11pm on Christmas Eve and so by the time we'd found somewhere we wanted to eat the kitchen had already closed. We had a pleasant walk down Broadway and through Times Square instead, then looped round to see the Empire State Building, the Speedy Deli on 32nd Street and the Chrysler Building (only one of these sold us sandwiches).

As we stood before the Chrysler, I noticed it was midnight. We wished each other happy Christmas, then returned to the Algonquin to eat our sandwiches and watch an extraordinarily fat couple look at pretty dreadful houses in the local version of 'Relocation Relocation'.