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

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.