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photos to come…

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I spent a little more time hanging with family, including some time with my cousin and his family as a working bee was launched to beautify their courtyard. Well let’s just call him my cousin, technically he’s my mum’s cousin’s son but that just gets too convoluted. Anyway he and his wife have a gorgeous 2 year old son who spent the day keeping us women busy as the guys were outside working in the rain. Little Colin was learning how to ride his walking bike and apparently the day after I saw him managed to do it all on his own. By all accounts he was as proud as punch. He reminded me that the best sound in the world is the gurgling laugh of a happy child. The second best sound in the world is the clink of ice cubes in a gin and tonic on a hot and sunny afternoon. Before leaving I also spent a day hanging out with some family friends who have twice done long trips around Australia and visited us both times. The first time was with motorbikes and the second with a campervan and kids in tow. They can’t believe an Australian wants to move to Germany when all they want to do is move to where I’m leaving. Funny how that works.

From Stetten I headed back to Munich to pick up some stuff I’d left at the hostel and discovered one of the inexplicable phenomena of backpacking: if you have a full bag, take some stuff out and leave it behind for a while then pick it up again, there is little chance that the left behind stuff will fit back into the bag you originally took it out of. Admittedly, some stuff was bits and pieces Brett left behind for me to carry, but that doesn’t account for the whole problem. I swear there could be a PhD thesis dedicated to the quirks of living out of a backpack and it would probably involve some quantum physics, elementary particles or other seriously complicated sounding scientific words. Anyway, I was left with an extra bag as well as my big backpack and daypack. I feel like a fool.

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Tags: Amsterdam, Munich, Pecha Kucha, Pfalz, rock climbing, Stetten

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Already i’ve failed to keep up to date on my postings, not even a month in to our big trip and i’m already late! I have an excuse though, i’ve been without my laptop for the past half week or so because Brett and I headed off to do the Tanzawa traverse near Mt Fuji. It was a 2 day hike which involved altogether to many ups and downs for my liking. The trail builders seemed to do their best (bless their hearts) to get us to the top of every mountain they possibly could, not even bypassing the totally bypassable nameless bumps to save our legs for the ones worth summiting. So my blogging has suffered as much as my calves (and knees and quads).

We then spent the last few days in the Fuji 5 lakes area, staying at our favourite guesthouse in Fuji Yoshida and one night at the Kawaguchiko youth hostel. Described in the Lonely Planet as “somewhat regimented” it still sounded doable, but then we didn’t expect to be blasted awake at 6:45am with very loud classical music. Once they’d established that everyone (all 5 or so guests) were awake and out of bed they turned it off, but for a while there it was deafening. Odd. Thankfully we were still on hiking time so had had plenty of sleep. At the mountain hut the night before I asked what time breakfast was and must have looked somewhat stunned when the man told me 5am. He gently added that it was “from” 5am. We were up anyway. 

Apart from that our time in Tokyo has been rather mundane, picking up visas (Brett, China), getting new passports (me, Australian, Mrs Voegele reporting for duty), catching up with people and stopping in at our favourite eateries. To Die For Chocolate Cake from the place in Nippori near where I used to live, endless skewers at Piss Alley and some nostalgic drinks in the Golden Gai. It’ll certainly be hard to say goodbye to Tokyo and Japan when we get on the ferry for South Korea.

Tonight I presented at the 61st Pecha Kucha night in Tokyo, a great night of creative presenters from all sorts of different fields. In the slideshow/gallery are the 20 photos I presented as well as a few from the past week. I haven’t taken many though so it’s slim pickings for weekly photos. Hopefully more when we get to Korea.

Tags: Fuji Yoshida, hiking, Japan, Kawaguchiko, Mt. Fuji, Pecha Kucha, Tanzawa, Tokyo