Channelling Mr Toad

Osaka is famous for being the foodie capital of Japan, so I was surprised to learn that it is also the home of the pot noodle.  It was a bit like discovering that Angel Delight is a popular dessert at the Dorchester, or that Raymond Blanc invented the turkey twizzler.

Anway, once I knew that Osaka has the world’s only Cup Noodle Museum, I had to go.

Momofuku Ando created what he called ‘instant ramen’ in a shed in his garden in 1958, and the guide book contains an important message for all of us –

I consider myself to be pretty creative, so am planning my first world-changing invention in the very near future.

The museum is sadly lacking in English translations, so we couldn’t do the quizzes or read about the history of instant ramen, but we could admire –

the instant ramen tunnel –

– not only wall-to-wall noodles, but also wall-to-ceiling noodles – very impressive.

But the best part of the museum is creating your own pot noodle to take home.

First you design the cup –

and then you queue up to fill it with dehydrated deliciousness.

First the noodles –

– and then your own personal selection of toppings –

and then it’s sealed up and you’re good to go –

– with strict instructions that it must be eaten within a month.   I haven’t tried it yet, so can’t report on its deliciousness or otherwise.  To be honest, I can’t read the instructions, so I don’t know how much water to add – being functionally illiterate is very challenging.

There’s lots of other fun stuff in Osaka too – like editing your own glamour pics –

sake tasting –

and admiring strange men sitting around with random creatures –

This might at first glance look like a junk-filled old pushchair –

– but it’s actually a customised mobile rabbit-home.  I feel sure that the chap in the mask created it in his little shed with only ordinary tools, following in the footsteps of Momofuku Ando.

 

I’ve had quite a cultural weekend, one way and another.

I went to Kyoto because I had a ticket to see a kabuki play at the Minamiza theatre, which is the home of kabuki.  It’s a wonderful old building, which has been hosting kabuki performances for 400 years –

– and I was pleased to learn that it was renovated and made totally earthquake proof last year.

Kabuki is a type of stylised drama, where specific actions are used to depict specific emotions, and there are very elaborate costumes and make up.  It always been considered the theatre of the people, and not highbrow like Noh theatre.  But the play I went to see wasn’t at all traditional – it was brand new and based on a very famous manga character, a ninja called Naruto –

As you can see from the poster, he has unusual colouring for a Japanese, and that’s because he has half a fox sealed up inside him, giving him strength and cunning.

Mind you, he wasn’t the only one with unusual colouring; the girl Ninja has pink hair – and there was no mention that she had part of a flamingo secreted in her large intestine –

– and several of the other characters had obviously been reading Hairdressers’ Weekly, which has been advising its readers that aqua and pewter are the summer shades for 2019.

Anyway, it was a jolly good show, with lots of ninja acrobatics and wizardry, culminating in a fight under a huge waterfall, the full height of the stage, which was pouring out gallons of water per second, and the actors got utterly soaked as they wrestled and splashed – all very thrilling and dramatic.

With typical Japanese efficiency, foreigners can rent an audio guide which somehow gives a recorded commentary in English that keeps pace with the live action on stage – all very clever.

It’s a long show – nearly four hours with two intervals – and the timings for each act are clearly shown on posters, and they are accurate to the millisecond.

You can buy bento boxes to eat during the interval, which looked delicious and definitely an improvement on the bag of Maltesers that’s usually on offer in an English theatre.  There’s plenty of comfy seating for the intervals, and you can sit there and wield your chopsticks until it’s time to go back for the next act.  All in all, it was a very civilised experience.

My other cultural experiences this weekend were fortuitous rather than planned.  As I walked around Kyoto castle, I heard bells in the distance.  When I went to investigate, there was a whole procession of men doing very manly skipping with an enormous pole –

Some had a better technique than others –

– and I had to jump out of the way at one point when one of the poles started swaying dangerously.

Each group was wearing its own uniform, and some were a little more unusual than others –

The crowd all clapped politely as each group lowered the pole at the end of the skipping, and I wished I knew what they were doing.

At the Daitokuji temple in the afternoon, there were also strange happenings.

I saw lots of monkishly dressed men hurrying along the paths –

And there was a young chap standing outside one of the temple buildings waving a vicious-looking sword –

And something was definitely happening in the main hall of the temple –

– and I wasn’t the only one on the outside, trying to see what was going on.

In another part of the temple complex there was chanting and dancing –

With their acrobatic moves and vivid hair colour, I wondered if they might be related to the ginger ninja –

But then disaster struck, and I realised they weren’t –

– even in the toughest battles, the ginger ninja’s hair always remained firmly on his head.

 

Shogun Ieyasu was a canny chap.  When he became Shogun in 1603 he forced all the great lords to spend every second year with him in Edo, or Tokyo as it is now.  This meant that they spent huge amounts of time and money travelling with their vast retinues along the road between Kyoto and Edo, and consequently had no time or money to be plotting to overthrow the shogun and take his place.

It also means that this ancient route, called the Nakasendo Way, has a series of picturesque old post-towns which used to provide accommodation and food to these travellers.  There are walking trails – often with the original shogun-initiated paving stones still in place –

– and we decided to walk between two of the prettiest towns in the Kiso Valley, not far from Nagoya.

 

After a stroll through the first town, Magome, which has lovely views and lots of cute houses –

– we started walking through the woods.  And, as they say, If you go down to the woods today …

… you’d better ring that bell hard.

And just in case that wasn’t clear enough –

– there are added visuals to reinforce the message.

There’s a bell every few hundred metres, so we rang them all very hard and I kept a firm grip on the emergency whistle attached to my backpack.  But fortunately no heroics were needed and we had a bear-free day.

Halfway along the route there’s an old house where quaintly-dressed retainers serve tea –

And there’s a traditional irori fire pit, which makes for an authentic, if smoky, experience –

But we soon realised that we weren’t the first Brits to have had tea there –

When we finally arrived in Tsumago, I was thrilled to find that there was a dressing-up opportunity – a small hall with a stage and several traditional outfits just begging to be worn and paraded for a photo opportunity.

The dilemma … how to choose between a kimono and a samurai outfit?

The solution … fusion fashion –

Another problem … four people and three outfits.

The solution … improvisation –

I don’t think anyone would be able to tell that one of these outfits is not traditionally Japanese.

Now that the summer is officially here, the famous Nagoya speciality – eel – is on the menu.  So we went to a recommended eel restaurant to try it and the first thing you see are the eels cooking over hot coals –

– with a large vat of special sauce bubbling away beside them.

I love the way that the ordered and orderly Japanese have rules on how to eat pretty much every dish available – no freestyling here, thank you very much.

It’s not the first time I’ve been given a detailed handout on how to eat something –

So when my eel arrived –

complete with all the necessary components for every stage of the eating process – I obediently divided it into quarters as instructed.

And I have to report that the plain eel, grilled, sauced and served with rice was my absolute favourite.

And what of the eel chips?  Well, they’re actually made from the discarded backbone, which is fried until crunchy –

The general consensus was that they tasted a bit like pork scratchings, only not porky.

But I couldn’t help thinking that they looked rather like a plateful of centipedes –

I’ll definitely be having eel again, but I may give the eel chips a miss next time.

 

There’s a very strict code of conduct associated with being Japanese; they’re the greatest rule followers I’ve ever known.  But unless you’ve grown up with these rules, it can be very difficult to a) remember them, or b) notice them in the first place.  But I suppose that the good thing about being a foreigner is that you have no idea whether or not you’ve offended people, and the polite Japanese are unlikely to say anything to you.

My first mistake last week was when I accidentally pushed the emergency alarm button instead of the flush button in the public loos at the station –

I realised my mistake as soon as the alarm sounded, and my initial reaction was to rush off immediately – but the problem was that I couldn’t find the flush button.  I know that toilet etiquette states that leaving behind any evidence whatsoever of your visit is a heinous crime, and if I’d dashed off without flushing, I would have had to ritually disembowel myself with the nearest sharp implement – probably my Daiso ceramic fruit knife.  So I raced around the cubicle randomly pressing every button I could find, until I finally found the flush, just as I heard pounding feet approaching.  I opened the door, trepidatiously, and saw a very out of breath railway offical standing outside.  I know that the depth of the apologetic bow must match the severity of the crime, so my forehead practically touched the floor as I muttered ‘sumimasen’ (a very useful word for a foreigner, I’ve discovered) and then sidled towards the door as quickly as I could.

Faux pas number two happened as I was enjoying a stroll around the zen gardens of a temple.  It was a beautiful, sunny afternoon and I was looking up at the imposing entrance gate –

– when I heard an ominous crunching under my feet.  I looked down and discovered that I’d strayed off the path and was walking on the raked garden –

– and had left several footprints in the otherwise perfect design.  Having read about the years of training and then hours of toil that go into a zen garden, I dashed away immediately before I could be identified by my footprints.

Then I was supposed to wear this Ku Klux Klan headdress to try on some clothes –

I put it on and took a photo, and then promptly forgot about it while I was trying on the clothes – so I took it away in my handbag in case they could tell that it hadn’t been used while clothes were pulled over my head.

And shoes are another minefield.  If you’re Japanese, you automatically know when you have to take your shoes off and when you don’t, but for foreigners it’s a nightmare.  No shoes in the fitting room in a clothes shop, no shoes in parts of the pub with matting on the floor, but shoes fine on the wooden floor in pubs,  no shoes on wooden floors in temples and shrines – but you have to wear shoes when there isn’t a wooden floor.  I wanted to walk across a bit of concrete in my socks to save putting my shoes on for ten seconds and then having to take them off again – but the strict woman in charge of the old merchant house I was visiting wouldn’t let me set foot on the concrete floor without shoes – so I put them on, plodded across it, and then took them off again.

There are also special bathroom slippers that you put on to use the loo in temples, museums, public baths etc – and apparently Japanese people also have them in their homes.

When you wear them, you must always take them off backwards so that they’re facing the right way for the next person to slip them on when they arrive – AND – the worst possible thing you can do is to go back into the public area still wearing these shoes – it’s the Japanese equivalent of having your zip undone and a wodge of damp toilet tissue sticking out of it, or trailing an incontinence pad across the floor behind you, that’s caught in the bottom of your tousers.

I think I’ve got away with it so far, as I’ve always realised before I got anywhere too public, and scuttled back along the corridor to take them off again.  But I know that shoe etiquette is not in my DNA, and the time will come when I’m publicly shamed.  Hopefully I won’t understand the scandalised comments, as I have no idea what the Japanese for ‘uncouth’ or ‘brazen’ is, but I do know that ‘Gaijin’ is a derogatory term for foreigners, so I expect I’ll hear that.

Every country has its own love-it-or-hate-it foodstuff.  In England it’s Marmite, in Malaysia it’s Durian, and in Japan the polarizing comestible is called natto.  It’s made from fermented soya beans and, according to Wikipedia, ‘is an acquired taste  because of its powerful smell, strong flavor and slimy, sticky texture.’

After coping with the smell of durian, and then the strong flavour of stinky tofu in Taiwan, I reckoned natto would be well within my capabilities, so I went off to the supermarket to buy some.

It comes in a little polystyrene box with some soy sauce and super-hot Japanese mustard to jazz it up, and it has the weirdest texture of anything I’ve ever eaten – it’s very slimy, but sticky at the same time, and separates into a million tiny strings when you lift a forkful –

– a bit like saliva, or lots of tiny baby hairs.  And once you get through the slime, it has a bitter flavour.  I was undecided at first, but when I found out that it’s the latest superfood and really good for you, I persevered.  Then someone recommended natto with avocado – presumably the Japanese hipster breakfast of choice – and I loved it – so I’ll be researching natto stockists when I get back to the UK, to feed my new addiction.

One thing that’s been puzzling me since I arrived is the reputation that Japanese food has for being healthy.  Apart from natto, they seem to eat only protein and carbs and an awful lot of sweet stuff.  Eating out is generally reckoned to be cheaper than cooking at home, and I think that’s partly due to the exorbitant cost of fruit and vegetables.

At my local supermarket you can buy a beautifully wrapped, single stick of celery –

which costs approximately £1.  No wonder they separate it into sticks – at those prices nobody could afford a whole head of the stuff.

Similarly, apples are individually packaged and cost somewhere between £1.50 and £2 each.  And why are they so big?

In a country which tends to serve small portions, it seems perverse to grow apples until they’re the size of your head.

And apples are cheap compared to some other fruit.  I saw this melon in the food hall –

very nicely packaged, you might say – and so it should be … 10,800 yen is £77.27 at today’s exchange rate.

But if you really want to impress someone, you have to give them cherries.  This box –

– contains 40 perfect and beautiful cherries, and will set you back £154.55.

I know they’re intended to be bought as a gift and not scoffed in the car on the way home from the shops, but even so, I can’t help wondering who would buy them, and whether the recipient would fully appreciate the gift, unless you left the price tag on.

The best way to eat fruit is probably in a sandwich, along with custard and whipped cream –

– I haven’t summoned the courage to try one yet, so can’t report back on their deliciousness or otherwise.

In contrast, sushi is much more reasonably priced – and I have a cheap and cheerful sushi restaurant just around the corner, so had to try it out.  The ordering is all done via ipad –

and the sushi arrives on a little train which whooshes along a track next to the tables –

It’s all absolutely delicious.  This is the tuna – my favourite –

and costs less than a pound per two pieces.

In the interests of research, I also went to a posh sushi place, where there’s a conveyer belt of ready-made sushi –

and a chef in the middle, who makes things to order.  Here she is –

– putting the finishing touches to our seared scallops.

You can also get a fantastic selection of sushi at even the most bog-standard supermarket –

After two years in Malaysia, it’s nice to be in a country where drinking isn’t frowned on – and to celebrate my birthday last week, we went to a typical Japanese-style pub called an Izakaya.

We sat on tatami mats – no shoes – but there is a footwell, so we didn’t have to sit cross-legged all night.  We were surrounded by salarymen, all out for Friday night drinks, and the atmosphere was loud and buzzing –

I thoroughly approved of the size of a gin and tonic –

Most Izakayas in Nagoya are famous for chicken wings –

– and they’re so moreish that they must be coated in MSG or cocaine –

The menu also offers some unusual offcuts –

– and I like their straightforward approach to wine –

But I decided to try the sake, and managed to expertly ping an edamame bean straight into the glass –

A jolly good evening was had by all – and the bill was less than £20 a head … about 5 cherries-worth.

If I meet anyone looking for careers’ advice, I shall advise them to start a cherry orchard in Japan.

I’ve now done some reading up on Japanese culture and history, so I feel slightly less ignorant than I did a few weeks ago, when I went to the National Musuem.

Ooh! It’s Morecambe and Wise, I thought –

I now know that they are, in fact, 6th Century tomb figurines.

And what I initially assumed was a statue of Windy Miller from Camberwick Green –

– is actually a nobleman in formal clothing.  But in my defence, they do look very similar

And a Satsuma glass bowl –

– isn’t meant to hold small oranges; it’s a special type of cut glass dating from the 18th Century, from the former province of Satsuma in southern Japan.

Once I’d got to grips with the rudiments of Japanese history – the different eras, the roles of the Shogun and the Emperor, the finer points of Kabuki theatre –

and the inspired, traditional practice of shutting your children in a small box –

– it was finally time to head out into the country and acquaint myself with rural Japanese culture.

I headed up into the Japan Alps for a weekend of fresh air and culture.

It’s only a couple of hours by train from Nagoya, and there are snow covered peaks and not a pair of lederhosen in sight.

Takayama is a beautiful town dating from the Edo period, which I now know was from 1603 to 1868, and it has some lovely old buildings –

– including six sake breweries – and some beautifully preserved, old merchant houses which are open to the public –

I tried the local speciality –

which is miso paste and onion cooked on a leaf over a charcoal brazier.  It was interesting, but I think once was enough.

There are some famous villages near Takayama, where the houses are known as gassho or prayer-hand houses.  To pray in Japan, the hands are placed together in a steep triangle, with the fingers together and the palms further apart, and the houses in these villages are the same shape –

It’s a practical design if you have to contend with heavy snow every winter.  They’re nestled in a very attractive valley –

– with the snowy peaks forming a backdrop.

I was very glad to be visiting in summer and not winter, after I saw this sign on one of the houses –

The traditional toy from this area is a faceless doll, known as sarubobo or monkey baby.  It has no face because you’re supposed to project your own feelings onto it, and imagine its features and expression –

I imagine this one was rolling its eyes and saying ‘OMG – another bloody tourist …’

I’ve come to appreciate, during my travels, that signing up for a food tour in a new place pays back dividends.  The guide takes you to all sorts of wonderful hidden-away spots, explains the whole food scene and generally equips you with enough know-how to go solo afterwards.  So when I got to Tokyo I signed up for two food tours, in different areas with different specialities on offer.

I turned out to be the only participant for the first tour, so Yokio and I got to be best friends after several bottles of sake –

But we started with a very special fish – blow fish or puffer fish sashimi –

I remember reading an article years ago about Japanese businessmen who pay a fortune and risk death just to eat raw puffer fish served by a beautiful geisha.  It sounded like a sort of Japanese roulette.  But Yokio assured me that none of his clients had died (yet) from the puffer fish, so that was reassuring.

Using chopsticks, we had to add spice, spring onion and daikon radish to each piece and then roll it up, which required a fair amount of dexterity –

– it was chewy and succulent – but for me the highlight of this restaurant was the drink they served with it –

– it’s sake with a flambé of dried roasted puffer fish fin – and it smelt and tasted divine.  The fin was removed before drinking, but I kept picking it up for a quick sniff.

Stop number two was an Izakaya – which is a traditional Japanese pub – and this one had been family owned for several generations –

We tried Hoppy, which dates back to after the war, when people were too poor to afford beer.  They drank an alcohol-free beer substitute and shoved a whole load of cheap alcohol into the glass first, topping it up with the Hoppy.

I’m not really a beer drinker, so it tasted fine to me, but I’m sure real ale fans wouldn’t approve.

The last stop on our tour was a very well-known restaurant, which serves dojo loach – a Tokyo speciality.  It was a beautiful traditional place which has been there for over 200 years, with tatami mats on the floor and waitresses in old fashioned outfits.

Our waitress knelt beside our little table to cook the Dozeu Nabe for us.  It has sake, soy sauce bonito soup and Japanese leek along with the loach – and of course we had to have more sake to go with it –

You should always have cold sake, not hot, I’ve been told several times now.  They heat up the poor quality stuff, and save the best to serve chilled.

We staggered out and tottered down to the subway, and both agreed that it had been a great evening – as far as we could remember.

The second food tour took in an area called Golden Gai, which is a small area of six narrow lanes which is packed with over 200 tiny bars and restaurants- some are so small that you can only fit five people inside.

 

Our guide took us into a bar for a drink and it was like travelling down a birth canal –

We started our food tasting with skewers – or yakitori – in a restaurant that had the cutest wash basins ever –

and the yakitori weren’t bad either .

Then it was on to the next place for ramen. You should always slurp in Japan when you eat noodles in soup – a bit like wine tasting, they believe the flavour improves if you take air in with the broth.  There are four main types of ramen in Japan, and this one was tonkotsu , or pork bone broth – delicious and filling.

But not so filling that there wasn’t room for sushi afterwards – my absolute favourite over here.  This was posh sushi – you can tell because the wasabi is added to the sushi, rather than mixed in with the soy sauce.  The tuna sushi was amazing, but the octopus was surprisingly good too.

We had more sake, and I learnt that you must never pour your own sake – your neighbour must pour yours and you must pour theirs – just to add an extra complication to the event.

I was also pleased to learn that it’s quite acceptable to eat sushi with your fingers, you don’t have to use chopsticks.  And real experts put it in their mouth upside down, to allow the full flavour of the fish to linger on their tongue.

So then I was ready – upskilled and keen to try out the local food scene by myself.  I had yuzu flavoured mochi, which was very good –

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But decided against the candy floss, which was large enough to conceal a medium-sized child –

And my greatest achievement was going into a restaurant in a spa town and ordering a bowl of the most wonderful seafood, served with rice and seaweed and lots of tiny little pots  of random nibbly bits –

I was very proud of myself – if there was an exam in Japanese eating, I feel sure I’d get a top grade now.

The new Emperor of Japan ascended the Chrysanthemum Throne today which signalled the first day of a new era.  Whilst they do use the year 2019, they also use their own system based on the number of years the Emperor has been on the throne.  When I got my ID card, I was surprised to see that my date of birth was 34.  When I queried it, I was told that I was born in the 34th year of the Showa Era, which was the name for Hirohito’s reign.

So today is the first day of the Reiwa Era – beautiful harmony – and the cause of a ten-day-long public holiday … hurrah!

The first week in May is called Golden Week, and there are three public holidays, which can give a 5-day break if they fall on the right days, but the extra days this year have doubled that.  So I hopped on a train to Tokyo to make the most of my unexpected free time.

It is soo crowded here – I’ve never seen so many people in the same place before.  I used to think Oxford Street was crowded in the run-up to Christmas – now I know that it’s simply a little bit more lively than usual.

This is a popular shopping street in Tokyo –

– you can see our guide waving her flag below, so we can all fight our way through the crowd in roughly the right direction.

And this is the longest queue I’ve ever seen –

– it’s a two-way  queue which snakes its way around the perimeter of a large Shinto shrine.  There are thousands of people all standing patiently – no jostling or queue jumping, of course.  We asked what they were queuing for ( … The Dalai Lama?  Ariana Grande?) and it turned out they were all waiting for a date stamp from the temple, officially recording the new era.  Oh well, if you’ve got ten days to burn, you can spend one of them standing in a queue for 18 hours, I suppose.

Today was also an auspicious day to get married.  We saw two weddings within half an hour at the shrine –

the bride’s father looks very uncomfortable in his suit at this wedding –

he can’t seem to lower his shoulders below the level of his ears – I don’t think the bride will be very happy with the photos.

There’s a huge installation of sake barrels in the grounds of the shrine –

Sake manufacturers consider it an honour to donate a barrel to the shrine – and they do get a bit of free advertising out of it.  Our guide told us that they’re all empty though, as Shinto priests are allowed to drink – unlike Buddhists.  And these priests have very cosmopolitan tastes … there’s also a display of 60 barrels of the finest Burgundy –

– presumably all empty too.

I went to see the Palace gardens, and the azaleas were magnificent-

all clipped into very tidy hedges, which were a riot of colour.

Following my tried and tested method of joining a queue if I see one  (although not an 18-hour stamp queue, I do have my limits) I joined a queue in the gardens, and it turned out that I was queuing to take my turn to squat in the grass –

and photograph this flower –

Any ideas as to why?  Everyone else seemed very excited by it.

Another busy place today was the maid cafes.  I’d heard of them before, and seen a video clip, but some of the maids were out on the streets today touting for trade –

I picked up a menu, and the Japanese obsession with cuteness hit me right between the eyes.  In fact, kawaii was one of the first words I learnt when I arrived, they all use it so much.

This is not a children’s menu –

– so adults go into these places and  order an omelette and rice shaped liked two (platonic) bears in a bed, or a ‘bunny in the forest’ ice cream.

Think I’ll be giving this one a miss.

 

 

 

In Japan, if the weather forecast says it’s going to rain, then it rains, and if the forecast says it won’t rain, then it doesn’t.

Having spent time in both Norfolk and Malaysia, where it rains if it feels like it, and nobody has any idea what the weather will be like in five minutes, let alone five days, I am in awe of the skill of these meteorologists.  But then this is Japan, where everyone and everything follows the rules, including the weather.

As soon as it starts to rain, a little man appears at every road junction –

– dressed in waterproofs and wielding a baton, he swings into action as soon as the green man appears on the crossing sign.  He stands on the crossing to stop any motorists, blinded by the drizzle, from mowing down the pedestrians on the crossing.

I wondered what these men do when it’s not raining – because there must be thousands of them across the country.  But at least they know well in advance when they’ll be needed, thanks to the forecast.

I also couldn’t help thinking that if there was a list of the countries where you’re most likely to get run over on a pedestrian crossing, Japan wouldn’t be on it.  Instead, it would be top of the list of countries where you’re least likely to be flattened mid-crossing.

And it’s not just the rain that’s organised – the people are too.

Everyone has an umbrella, which is produced when the first raindrops appear, and neatly furled whenever they’re not using it, like when they’re on the train, regardless of how wet and soggy it is.  I felt very under-dressed with my skanky old Ikea brolley, so had to go out and buy a smarter one after my first rainy day.

Once you get to work, or to a shop, there’s a special umbrella drying machine –

– so you queue up in an orderly way to dry your umbrella –

– and then hang it on the special umbrella rack –

In case you hadn’t noticed, this is a country that does detail in a big, big way.

 

I’ve had three weekends in Japan so far, and have chosen to spend two of them in Kyoto;  I absolutely adore it there.  Everything is exquisite – the temples, the gardens, the little streets with wooden houses, the little waterways lined with cherry trees, the tiny craft studios and cafes – it has to be one of the most picturesque cities in the world.

My first visit coincided with peak cherry blossom viewing, so I went to the park which is the place to see the blossom, and headed for the most famous cherry tree in Kyoto –

It’s a huge old tree, which everyone wants to be photographed in front of.  I sat and watched it as the sun started to set, and there was even a stall selling pink fizz just to complete the pink experience –

There were hundred of girls in kimonos, with various accessories, having their picture taken in front of the blossom –

or in other picturesque locations –

– and even Little Bo-Peep had left her sheep for the day to come and send a few texts from a blossomy bridge –

One thing I’ve learnt on my travels is: if there’s a queue, get on the end of it, as it invariably leads to something either delicious or interesting.  So when I saw this line inside a temple –

I immediately jumped onto the end and stood patiently, wondering what we were waiting for.  It turned out to be a queue to look at a particular cherry tree through an attractively shaped window –

I hadn’t realised until then, that individual cherry trees could become celebrities in their own right.

But I was also very taken with the raked patterns in the gravel, and since that first experience, I’ve become a tad obsessed with raked zen gardens, and have a hundred photos just to prove it …

Swirls and lines –

A subtle design with perfect symmetry –

A bold stripe seen through another window – without a queue this time –

This one is supposed to evoke mountains, but looks more like an upturned flowerpot to me –

Or working with nature to enhance and harmonise –

I was smitten with these gardens and had decided to create my very own zen garden, until I read a book on Kyoto

– and decided that perhaps I’ll stick to admiring other people’s efforts instead.

Or …

– sweeping seems to be a possible alternative, for those unable to commit to years of  training.  Admittedly sweeping doesn’t have the cachet of raking, but it’s extremely worthy and much easier to master.

Then I’ll sit on my immaculately swept path and admire the view –

or sit and marvel at my pristine stepping stones –

As Goethe said, ‘Let everyone sweep in front of his own door and the whole world will be clean.’  I think he would have approved of Japan.

I decided to hop on a bullet train and spend my first weekend in Japan in Kyoto.  It’s about 90 miles away, but as the train gets up to 175 mph, the journey only takes 35 minutes and there’s a train every ten minutes or so – what an amazing service!  It’s fairly expensive – £28 for a single ticket on Friday, and £36 to get back on Sunday – but the trains are immaculately clean, with reclining seats and a snack trolley, and of course they are on time, down to the very last second.

When I got to my hotel, I was thrilled and terrified in equal measure to discover that they had a sento – a public bath – for their guests to enjoy.  I knew I’d have to try one some time while I’m in Japan – I just didn’t realise it would be quite so soon.

The receptionist gave me an etiquette sheet, which I studied carefully –

The leaflet also explained how the Japanese manage to be so efficient; they appear to have 25 hours in their day, unlike the rest of us.

Once I’d read it, it was time to go … before I changed my mind.  So I put on the special shoes –

– and changed into the special pyjamas for wearing to and from the sento –

– and I was good to go.

The baths are strictly segregated, which is apparently a modern phenomenon, and mixed bathing used to be the norm.  I can’t yet understand how people who are so modest that even a millimetre of cleavage is unacceptable, will quite happily strip off and show all their saggy, flabby bits to friends and strangers alike.  I have to confess that I was very relieved that my first sento experience was in front of total strangers – but most women there were in groups, chatting away unconcernedly together.

I used my colour-coded female room key to open the door, took a deep breath and walked in.  The changing room was full of women dressing, undressing, sitting at vanity tables with hair dryers – just like any old gym.  So this bit was easy – I undressed and locked my basket of clothes in a locker.

Then came the difficult part.  I opened the door to the sento, which was like opening the door into a sauna, and could see all the women doing the pre-bathing wash at the showers around the edges of the room.  They all had a white wash cloth, and I didn’t – but a very kind woman rinsed hers out and gave it to me, so I felt less of a conspicuous newbie.

I knew from the etiquette sheet that you mustn’t splash your neighbours when showering, but that’s quite difficult, as the wash stations are all quite close together –

I found this pic online, just to show you, as there is obviously no photography allowed inside the sento.

Once I was scrubbed clean, I went down the steps into the large bath, carefully avoiding eye contact with anyone else.  I was surprised by how hot is was, but there are two levels of seating, so you can be immersed up to your neck, or just to your waist, or even sit on the edge and just dangle your legs in the water.

Once I’d sat down, an elderly lady came over and sat beside me and struck up a conversation.  So there we were, discussing her grandson who’s at university in Nagoya, just as though we were at any social occasion – the only difference was that we didn’t have any clothes on.

I was a little disconcerted that she had a small towel plonked at a rakish angle on her head, and it stayed there the whole time she was talking to me.  I wondered if she was perhaps a little eccentric or confused, but afterwards I found a very good website, Sento For Beginners, which explained that you must never put a towel or your head in the water, so people often put the towel on their head to keep it out of the way.

After ten minutes of sweating and conversation, I got out, showered again and got dressed, feeling a great sense of achievement.

And you know what?  I went back the next day and did it all again.  So now I feel that I’m practically a sento pro.

 

I arrived in Japan on Tuesday, and I have to say that it’s a lot more foreign than Malaysia.  On the bullet train from Tokyo to Nagoya I felt just like Harry Potter on the Hogwart’s Express when the trolley lady arrived with the refreshment trolley; I had absolutely no idea what anything was, and as she spoke no English and I speak no Japanese, there was no way of finding out.  I scanned the boxes desperately, looking for a clue, but there’s no English writing, and everything is triple-wrapped, so you can’t even see what’s inside the box.  All I could do was select one at random, and once I’d fought my way into it, it turned out to be a beef cutlet sandwich – perfectly fine, but not necessarily what I’d have chosen.  At least I don’t have specific dietary requirements or food allergies; that would turn a difficult situation into a nightmare.

But once I arived in Nagoya, I had two very nice surprises:

1.  I have a hot bot loo, complete with washing and drying programmes

– it’s great fun – but you have to make sure you sit right at the back, unless you actually want to wash your jumper at the same time.

2. I live within walking distance of the castle and castle park in Nagoya, which are the places for cherry blossom in town, and it’s the peak viewing time for cherry blossom here at the moment, which is something that’s been on my bucket list for ever.

So on my free day yesterday, of course I strolled down to the park to enjoy the sakura –

I was thrilled to see the families and groups of friends all sitting enjoying a picnic under the blossoms, just as I’d been told they do –

I was surprised to see that some groups were obviously work colleagues who’d come to spend their lunch hour sitting on a tarpaulin under the trees in their suit and tie.  Apparently some firms give their employees time off to go and picnic under the blossom – the event even has its own name  – Hanami.

But having already spent time in Asia, I wasn’t surprised at the number of photos being taken.  I soon got the hang of the requirements – you either hold a blossom-laden branch close to your face –

or you pick a few flowers and put them in your hair –

And if you haven’t brought your own photographer, there’s always the tried and tested selfie to fall back on –

or – for a bit of one upmanship – why not choreograph your very own cherry blossom dance? …

She kicked off her shoes and leapt onto someone else’s picnic tarpaulin, that the poor man was trying to sweep clean, and then proceeded to twirl with abandon while her adoring husband filmed her.

It was all getting too exciting in the park, so I went off to see the castle.

It was built by a shogun in the 17th Century, but flattened in 1945, so it’s  mainly a reconstruction – although some of the towers seem to be original, judging by the rickety stairs I climbed up to get a view from the top floor –

The Palace, which is inside the castle walls, was refurbished and reopened at the end of last year.  We all shuffled around in our socks admiring the beautiful painted screens and cloisonne work –

I was interested to note that the castle has a Ninja of the day –

and I saw one of them – or at least I think I did –

– but looking a lot scarier than on the poster.

I discovered that the hardcore cherry blossom posers were all inside the castle grounds too –

I just hope those kimonos are warm, as there was a very cold wind blowing.

 

One of the strangest things about North Island is suddenly coming across a patch of ground that’s smoking –

or hearing a glooping and plopping noise coming from a muddy puddle, which is bubbling away happily all by itself.

The volcanic hot springs are wonderful.  You can either pay to go to the pools –

– where every pool is at a slightly different temperature, ranging from 36-40 degrees, and it’s a good idea to work your way up from warm to hot, rather than leap enthusiastically into the hot pool first.

Or if you want a freebie, just ask the locals where the nearest hot spring is.  We found this one –

just off the main road between Taupo and Rotorua – a waterfall of wonderfully warm water in the middle of the bush … bliss.

And – even better – the geothermal water from these volcanic springs has a lot of health benefits.  The Polynesian Pools in Rotorua are fed from two separate springs – the Priest Spring works wonders on your muscles and joints, and the Rachel Spring offers ageless beauty.  I made sure that I spent an equal amount of time in both sets of pools as I couldn’t decide which benefit was most important to me.

And there’s also hot mud on offer at Hell’s Gate.  The clay in the mud purifies and detoxifies the body, neutralises free radicals and stops ageing, according to the blurb – and so, of course I had to have a go.  You clamber into the pool and scoop up the mud from the bottom and smear it all over you –

and then sit and wait for it to dry and draw all your impurities out –

then you wash all your impurities down the drain, and immerse your newly purified body in the sulphur water to keep the ageless beauty theme going.  The only drawback to all these geothermal springs is the eggy whiff you get from all the sulphur, but that’s a small price to pay for ageless beauty in my book.

Hot Water Beach on the Coromandel Peninsula is another freebie – unless you count the $5 spade rental, which is essential to get the most out of the experience.  There are a couple of hot water springs on the beach, and for two hours either side of low tide you can dig yourself a spa bath and wallow away to your heart’s content.

It’s a very strange sight; the beach is empty apart from the middle section where the springs are, which is full of people digging frantically.  And there’s a skill to the digging too – you have to find a source of hot water to run into your hole, and a source of cold water too, as the spring water is too hot on its own.  One group I spoke to were already on their third hole – rather like the three bears, the first hole had been too hot, and the second one too cold, so they were hoping that the third one would be just right.

Of course you don’t have to do the digging yourself –

– you can always bring your digging bitch with you.

And once your hole is at the correct temperature, you can lounge, wallow, chill, or catch up on your emails –

I’d never seen a geyser before either.  I do remember learning about them in geography, but I don’t think I’d realised that the water that shoots out is hot – yet another example of my failing to pay attention in class.

We saw the tallest geyser in New Zealand, Pohutu, which gets to 100 feet high, and the one called the Prince of Wales because the shape it makes looks like the Prince of Wales’ Feather, apparently –

That’s the two of them behind me, with the Prince of Wales Feather growing out of my head.  When they erupt there’s gurgling, hissing and sulphurous odours in spades.

Another by-product of geothermal activity is the silica terraces –

– the shape is so regular it looks like amphiteatre seating.

The pink and white silica terraces near Rotorua were considered the eighth wonder of the world, and were NZ’s biggest tourist attraction, until they were destroyed by a volcanic eruption in 1886.

And that’s really the biggest drawback of living on a fault line – the smell of sulphur and the risk of third-degree burns in a spa pool are nothing compared to the risk of an earthquake or a volcano flattening you, your home and your family at a moment’s notice.  Perhaps there’s something to be said for hot water out of the hot tap in a country that’s well away from any earthquake zones.

 

 

Hobbiton was at the top of my list for NZ North Island.

Having seen lots of countryside locations where Lord of the Rings had been filmed, I was now keen to see something that had been built especially for the film.

Hobbiton is big business, with 3,000 people a day visiting in peak season.  Although, bafflingly, our tour guide told us that 40% of visitors have no idea what Lord of the Rings is, so why they fork out $80 each to do the tour is a mystery.

We’d already been told about Peter Jackson’s obsessive attention to detail, but it was really brought home when we walked around the set and saw the level of detail involved.

There are two sets of hobbit homes.  The first set are built to 90% human scale –

– so the hobbit actors look the right size for their homes.

The second set are built to 60% human scale –

– so that Gandalf looks enormous when he stands next to them.

Every hobbit hole has a functioning chimney, and during filming one member of the crew had to run around and light each chimney with special beeswax lighters just before it was needed for a shot.

The clothing on washing lines was also in either 60% or 90% scale –

– and someone was employed to hang out the clothes every day, so that they looked like a load of washing put out to dry, and not like costumes that had been left on a washing line for the duration of filming.

There was also the problem of nature not doing its stuff properly.  The story required a plum tree, but it was the wrong season for plums, so Peter Jackson ordered plums to be wired onto an apple tree – and then the tree was never seen in any of the films anyway.

And there was another tree whose leaves, according to PJ, were ‘the wrong shade of green’.  So he employed people to strip all the leaves off the tree, and then wire on fake ones in the right shade, instead.  All that trouble and expense for just one tree among many in Hobbiton.

And the most expensive tree of all is the tree above Bilbo’s house, Bag End –

The story required a large oak tree over Bag End, and there wasn’t one.  So they cut down a tree in nearby Matamata, sawing off and numbering all the branches.  They transported it to Hobbiton, bolted the branches back on, fixed it in place in the ground, and wired 376,000 silk leaves onto it, imported from Taiwan … and you thought people went to a lot of trouble for the Chelsea Flower Show.

Every hobbit home had a clue to the owner’s trade –

– except for Bag End, and I seem to recall that Bilbo was a gentleman of leisure, so no beehives, cheese or freshly-baked loaves there.

All the wood you can see in the photos was aged with vinegar, and then coated in yogurt to encourage lichen to grow, and all the gardens were planted a year before filming began, to make them look mature and established.  Everything was done that could be done to make Hobbiton look like a real, lived-in village.

Such is the  popularity of the tour, that groups walking around the set are just five minutes apart and can easily bunch up if one group has a lot of narcissistic selfie-takers, who slow the whole group up.  Sadly, I was just too late to photograph a woman in the group in front of us who toppled headlong into the shrubbery while attempting a selfie perched on a very small bench.  Needless to say, I managed to sit on the bench very successfully, without upending myself in the bushes –

Finally …

…time for a ginger beer at the Green Dragon –

Unashamedly touristy – and I loved every minute of it!

Touring the vineyards in Marlborough made me feel like a film fan doing the Hollywood celebrities’ tour,

‘Ooh, look – it’s … Villa Maria/Wither Hills/Brancott!’ as famous name after famous name rolled by, and I leapt out of the car to take a pic –

With my liver’s best interests at heart, we didn’t stop at all of them, but I did have to do a tasting at my absolute favourite …

… Cheers!

And then, in a serendipitous twist of fate, we happened to be in Blenheim the very day of the annual Wine and Food Festival.  So of course we bought tickets, queued up with the rest of New Zealand –

and finally got to enter Wine Lovers’ Paradise – every Marlborough wine maker had their own stand in a sunny field just the right size for me to get to any one I wanted within ten minutes.

And just to make sure everyone stayed hydrated, there was Liquid Action Man –

– ready to leap into action and fill up your glass or water bottle.

Very sensibly, you could buy a glass or just a taste of any wine you fancied, to stop people (like me) feeling they had to drink the entire glass of every wine they bought just to get their money’s worth.

The food was great too –

– I love NZ oysters!

And the mussels weren’t bad either –

I got a good tip from the mussel chef – if you want tender mussels, don’t steam them, you should open them and grill them in the shell.  These were grilled with breadcrumbs, garlic and butter and they were delicious.

It was a definite frock and hat day, and everyone was out to have a good time –

My outdoor adventure hat didn’t quite measure up, but at least I’d made the effort.

The northern part of South Island isn’t just about wine – it’s also got the most stunning scenery.

Abel Tasman National Park is considered to be the most beautiful Park in NZ – and deservedly so –

I took this picture on a Sunday at about lunchtime – so a busy time leisure-wise – and yet there’s hardly anyone on the beach.

Nor is there on this equally beautiful beach –

We’re so used to any beauty spots in the northern hemisphere being packed with tourists, that an empty beach on a sunny Sunday seems weird.  Although, if I was being picky, I’d say that the water is a little on the cool side – well, it is for someone who’s now used to swimming in warm tropical water, anyway.

We were lucky enough to catch this large pod of dolphins on a boat trip in the park –

And this is my new friend, Al –

at least, I think we’re friends – now that I’ve convinced him that my hat is made of cotton, and definitely not alpaca.

 

 

I have to say that some of the strangest museums I’ve been to are here in New Zealand.

They have the world’s only steampunk museum on South Island, with some very unusual displays … sort of Dr Who meets Narnia in Steptoe’s yard –

But the descriptions were the highlight for me.

This – if you hadn’t already recognised it – is a lunar dismembulator cannon …

And if you’re not sure what a lunar dismembulator cannon is, there’s a helpful description –

Likewise, some people might have thought that this was simply a room filled with pretty coloured lights –

But they would have missed the point entirely –

– a space-time travel gateway … blimey.

The World of Wearable Art Museum in Nelson offers a different kind of gateway; it’s the gateway to looking otherworldly, rather than actually travelling to other worlds.

I imagine this outfit would make daily life rather difficult, whichever world you happened to live in –

But on the other hand, I could see the appeal of this one –

– particularly on the tube in the rush hour.

And this would be an excellent way to use up a spare bit of shag-pile –

Then there was a section called ‘Bizarre Bras’, which showcased the winning entries in a bra-designing competition.  No matter how outlandish they look, they are all wearable, and have all been worn on the catwalk.

This one won first prize –

It’s called Uplift, and the turbine blades go round as the model walks.

I liked this one, called Step Right Up –

– but it would be difficult to know what to wear over it; a fitted shirt or clingy top would be a definite no-no.

And this one would be quite practical for a wet climate like  Malaysia –

– at least part of you would stay dry if you were caught in a downpour.

NZ museums are so zany that I couldn’t understand how the country gained its reputation for being a tad staid – but then I decided that all the sheep farmers must come home at night and pour all their creative energies into designing wool based creations to showcase the material they spend all day producing –

– like this one, called Cell Belle and inspired by a single cell organism.  They’re versatile people, those sheep farmers.

Apparently, there’s an entry on many a bucket list which reads, ‘heli hike on a glacier’.

It’s not on my bucket list because I’d never even heard of heli hiking before I got to New Zealand, and once I found out about it, I wasn’t really sure how hiking on a glacier differs from slithering around trying to get to work on a snowy January day in England.  So we decided to go on a guided walk to the glacier, and not on the glacier, with an expert guide to tell us all about the glacier … but from a distance.

Fox Glacier is behind us in the picture.  What you can see here is the snout of the glacier – but the whole thing is 13 km long, and it’s one of the most accessible glaciers in the world.  Given that you have to access it by helicopter, I can’t imagine how inaccessible all the others must be.

We learnt that glaciers constantly retreat and advance, and Fox glacier is currently in retreat, and has been since 2009.  Great lumps of ice drop off the retreating glacier –

– and end up in the river where you can pick them up and marvel, or stick them in a gin and tonic.

There are all sorts of weird and wonderful plants growing beside the glacier, including the elephant killer –

– which our guide is pointing out to us here.  There are no elephants in New Zealand (I’m sure I must have known that before he told us ) but several circus elephants have died after eating this plant while grazing out in the countryside, hence the name.

And the elephant killer is not to be confused with the fern –

which is:

a) the national smbol of New Zealand,

b) doesn’t kill elephants, and

c) tastes of walnuts.

These tiny young shoots are delicious, but not very filling, it has to be said.

Another national symbol is the kiwi –

– but they’re much harder to spot than this sign would have you believe.  The kiwi is an endangered species and there are so few in the wild that the only place to see them is in a kiwi sanctuary.  The fact that they are nocturnal birds only makes it harder to see them, because it’s so dark inside the kiwi house that you can hardly see anything at all – you can just hear rustling in the undergrowth and see a dark coloured blob at the back of the enclosure.

Anthony and I went to the kiwi sanctuary at Franz Josef Glacier – and the best view you get of a kiwi is this one –

Entrance to the sanctuary is $40, and they have two kiwis – so that’s $20 for each dark, rustling blob … not exactly a snip.

But in compensation, there are lots of other wonderful birds here, in much more plentiful supply.

This is the weka – another flightless bird – but they’re not nocturnal and there are lots of them around in the wild, so much more satisfying than the kiwi experience.

There’s also the pukeko –

– which has a little white tail that bobs up and down endearingly as it walks.

There are lots of flightless birds in New Zealand, and I started wondering why.  What is the point of being a bird if you can’t fly?  It looks like a serious design fault to me.

 

 

 

Fiordland, in the south-west of South Island, is full of Sounds.  To be honest, I wasn’t quite sure what a Sound (with a capital ‘S’) actually is, so I had to look it up.  It turns out that a Sound is a large sea/ocean inlet, formed when the sea fills a valley, so it’s surrounded by hills or mountains – which makes it very picturesque –

In fact, it’s so pretty that it inspires even the most unlikely photographers –

What’s the matter with this child?  Why isn’t he playing a game on his iPad?

There are some dramatic waterfalls, and the captains of the tour boats liven up their day by getting in as close as they can, to soak all the passengers –

– and I can attest to the fact that the spray is absolutely freezing.

We saw fur seals lolling around on the rocks, and then a pod of bottlenose dolphins came into view –

– and everyone got very excited.

Fiordland also has the world’s only alpine parrot, called the kea, which seems to spend all its time hanging around in the tourist car parks, begging for food –

They hang around humans for two reasons according to the information panel: firstly, they have a fondness for fast food and secondly, they like ‘to exercise their strong, manipulative beaks in the destruction of our unguarded possessions’  … bloody delinquents.

Fiordland is extremely wet – they get between 8 and 12 metres of rain a year.  To put that in perspective, Kuala Lumpur, which seems very wet to me, gets 2.6 metres of rain a year, and London’s average annual rainfall is 60 cm.

In addition to the waterfalls, many of which are periodic, there are also rivers flowing at high speed down the mountains.  They pick up hard, crystalline pebbles which get swirled around and around in the current and grind out weird and wonderful pothole shapes –

The rainwater in Fiordland is stained brown by tannin, and it sits on top of the sea water in the Sounds, making it very dark underneath, and allowing deep sea creatures to live much closer to the surface than they normally would.  This means that scientists and divers love this area just as much as we daytrippers do.

We cruised around Milford Sound and Doubtful Sound on two different days, and these boat trips are quite expensive, so I sat outside on the deck and made sure that I got the most out of the experience.  But not everyone shared my enthusiasm –

Oh well … more room on the top deck for the keenies.

And finally …

Q: What sound does a Sound make?

A: The Maori name for Doubtful Sound is Patea, which means ‘the place of silence.’  Perhaps, with a nod to accuracy,  we should call them No-Sounds from now on.

 

 

 

 

 

 

We landed in New Zealand at Christchurch, and the temperature was 32 degrees.  We just accepted it, having become used to Malaysian and Australian weather – but it turned out to be a fluke, and as we drove south to Dunedin the temperature dropped by more than 20 degrees, until it was just ten above freezing, and there was a cold wind and driving rain.  I thought I’d escaped the British winter, only to find it again 16,000 kilometres away, and at the height of the New Zealand summer.

But we doughty Brits aren’t put off by an Antarctic wind blowing right up our Bermuda shorts, so we pressed on to the very end of the wild and windswept Otago peninsula, in search of albatrosses.  Despite studying Coleridge for A-Level English, and still being able to recite several verses of the Ancient Mariner, I’d never seen an albatross, and was keen to remedy the situation.

In the information centre, we were invited to handle a replica albatross egg –

Verdict: bloody enormous and very heavy.

Then we watched a video all about the life of the albatross, and how, once they learn to fly, they spend the first five years of their life out at sea, never touching land once.  Then after those five years, they come back to the place where they were born to spend three years indulging in laddish behaviour, with lots of squawking, posturing and banter, before they find a mate and pair up for life.  And a very long life too – one of the albatrosses at the centre, known as ‘Granny’, was still breeding at the age of 60, poor thing – no chance of getting empy-nest syndrome if you’re an albatross.

The young birds weigh more than their parents – a whopping nine kilograms after several months of being fed the special oil their parents regurgitate for them.

And we all got the chance to feel just how heavy a 9 kg baby albatross is when you hold it –

And finally, we saw the Northern Royal albatrosses themselves, swooping and gliding over the cliffs where they live –

The wingspan is about 3 metres and they soar and glide effortlessly, but sometimes have trouble landing and either crash to the ground or have to abort the attempt and circle around and try again.  Our guide told us that the Japanese name for albatross means ‘stupid and clumsy bird’ and I felt rather sad about that.

After Dunedin we headed to Queenstown, where it was just as cold, so I dashed into the first outdoor shop I saw and bought some warm clothes.  Unless it warms up, every photo of me from now on will show me wearing my bright blue fleece and grey leggings, as they are the only warm clothes I possess.

Luckily, our next trip involved wearing cloaks, so that was one extra layer of warmth.  We went to Glenorchy to see some of the locations for the Lord of the Rings films.  Our guide took us to the locations, and showed us stills from the film and told us lots of stories about what happened during the filming.

The wargs were ambushed on the hill behind this lake, and the Rohan refugees struggled across the plain in front of the lake.

Incidentally – the Riders of Rohan were all teenage girls from the pony club.  So the long, blonde hair is real, but the beards are not – bet you didn’t know that.

Then …

out came the swords …

And we got cloaked up and ready for battle.

Here I am re-enacting the tea break at the battle of Isengard –

Then we went to the location where Sam and Frodo cook some rabbits –

Where we got into character and pretended to cook our own rabbits –

I haven’t had so much fun since I used to dress up in woolly tights and a jumper and swing from my bedroom curtains, pretending to be Tarzan’s girlfriend Jane – and this time I didn’t get told off for it either.

 

 

 

This is a shot – Tassie style –

It’s an oyster shot –

– sake with wasabi, pickled ginger and a plump, fresh Tasmanian oyster … delicious!

The seafood here is so good –

– I devoured these six scallops cooked with brioche crumbs and herbs in about three minutes, in a little restaurant on the quay in Hobart.

I rapidly came to the conclusion that I absolutely love Tasmania, and I wondered why I’d never been here before during my trips to Oz.  The weather is perfect, the scenery is spectacular, the seafood is stupendous and the people are delightful – I’m just glad it’s so far from Europe, otherwise it would be as crowded as the Lake District, or probably even more so, as the weather is considerably better.

The beaches are wonderful – soft, fine sand and clear water – and totally empty –

We travelled up from Hobart to Wineglass Bay, on the East Coast –

– which is the most perfect crescent of white sand, filled with turquoise water.

The description in the guide book says that nobody is sure how it got the name Wineglass Bay.  I found that rather puzzling, because if anyone has ever seen a wineglass, they would surely notice its resemblance to the shape of the bay?

This is a wine glass –

And this is an aerial shot of Wineglass Bay –

And it’s not as though the Tasmanians are unfamiliar with wine.  They have some fantastic wineries, including my favourite Antipodean sparkling, Jansz –

– and hundreds of others in beautiful locations, where ladies who lunch can sit and enjoy a glass of wine in the sunshine –

and then nip into the appropriately signed ladies loo –

There’s a very down-to-earth quality about Australians, and it’s particularly noticeable at MONA, the Hobart art museum, described by its owner as ‘a subversive adult Disneyland.’  Where else but Australia, would the audio guide for the museum have a selection button thus labelled …?

It’s actually the selection that gives more information about the artist – but that doesn’t sound half so intriguing.

The museum encourages you to listen at doors –

watch goldfish swimming in a bowl with a knife –

and admire the tattooed back of a live exhibit –

This is Tim, and he sold his back to a German art collector in 2008 for $150,000.  Presumably the collector has to wait until Tim dies to get his artwork, and in the meantime, Tim sits in the museum listening to his iPod day in and day out … I think death might be preferable.

Cradle Mountain is billed as one of the last wildernesses on Earth.  It has ancient rainforests and alpine heathland, plus loads of wildlife and the iconic Cradle Mountain itself (I put my phone into the metal bracket next to the path, helpfully provided, to ensure that everyone can get the perfect shot!)

It was a beautiful day when we visited – like pretty much every other day when we were in Oz – and the views were spectacular …

We didn’t see any wombats, it was a bit hot for them that day, but a highlight of the trip was a night walk to see the wallabies at our Airbnb in the middle of nowhere next to Cradle Mountain.  Our host took us out walking in his paddocks and we saw the wallabies just the other side of the fence, feeding. thumping their feet in warning and hopping around.  Don had a bright torch and he balanced it on his head so that I could get my first shot of a wild wallaby –

It won’t win any photographic awards, but it’s a great reminder of a uniquely wonderful experience.