Tuesday, March 25:

We left early to leave Beppu for Mt Koya, which I figured would take about 6 hrs to get to. Boy, was I wrong! We had to take 2 shinkansen (Beppu to Kokura, Kokura to Shin-Osaka), then an express train to Wakayama. We then had to take a small 2-car local country train from Wakayama to Hashimoto, then a very local train from Hashimoto up Mt Koya and finally a cable car the rest of the way (which was very steep). Arriving at the top, we had to take a bus to our ryokan, Sekishoin. We arrived around 7:30pm, having caught our first train at 9:44am! It was pitch dark when we arrived, and very cold (Mt Koya town is 1000m above sea-level apparently). The town consists mainly of Buddhist temples, and our ryokan was actually part of a temple itself. Our room was very nice tho, large, with a private bathroom and view onto a japanese garden (which we couldn't see when we arrived). We were checked in by a resident monk, but we had missed dinner, and everything was closed already. We were starving upon arrival (having eaten mostly snackfood on the long journey). We told the monk we had missed dinner and he then proceeded to find a place in town still open for us to eat at! Buddhist monks are very nice. He found us a place and he drove us, and another couple from London who were also hungry, to the restaurant. He even went so far as to order us a set meal, consisting of vegetarian food (vegetable and tofu dishes). After dinner we had to walk in the dark and freezing cold back to the ryokan. We went via the cemetary, which was a bit creepy. Since we had to get up at the crack of dawn the next day for monk prayers (7:00am) and breakfast (7:30am), we called it a night.

Wednesday, March 26:

We woke up at 6:30am to prepare for the monk chanting. Around 7am we, the guests, amassed in the temple where the head monk began the "service", which consisted mainly of chanting and prayers with sound effects (bells and cymbals). It was pretty interesting. Afterwards he explained the various parts of the temple, with the help of a bilingual guest. There were only about a dozen of us; if we'd come a couple of days earlier there would have been about a hundred people, mostly japanese, come to pray for their ancestors (as the time was the equinox - the Buddhists believe this is the time that the living world is closest to the dead world). We then all went to another hall for a monk breakfast. I was a bit disappointed that no other monks were eating with us tho. Apparently the temple only had 5 resident monks anyway. After breakfast we had to check out but we dropped our bags at the office and headed out into the near-freezing weather to have a look around. As I said, the town consisted mainly of temples, shrines and a huge cemetary, but had hundreds of years of history. We walked through the cemetary which wound slowly up the mountain to a big temple in honour of Kukai (as I recall), who was the founder of the Buddhist sect resident on Mt Koya (as far as I remember). We spent most of the day until about 2pm looking at temples etc, before leaving Koya-san. I'd been searching for a copy of "The Teaching of Buddha", a book in our room, but had had no luck finding an english version of it. When we collected our bags, I asked a monk at our ryokan about it and he gave me a copy of it from one of the rooms (I had started reading it the night before, quite interesting). At first we were going to go to Nara to stay next, but we decided instead to head back to Tokyo, where we could do a day trip up to Nikko. The trip to Tokyo was also very long, taking about 8 hrs, and various trains as before. We arrived back in Saitama about 10:45pm. We met a funny drunk nihonjin salaryman on the train in Tokyo, who accompanied us all the way to Saitama (he lived one stop from Tsudoi's). We met Tsudoi at the supermarket then headed back to his house for a very late dinner, chuu-hi and some much-needed (and deserved!) rest.

Thursday, March 27:

Our plans to go to Nikko were changed the night before, we really couldn't face any more long train trips! It would take about 3 hrs to get to Nikko from Saitama. Tsudoi had offered to take us to Kawagoe, about 5 stops from his house, to see the sakura (cherry blossoms) which had started blooming. We left late morning and Tsudoi gave us a tour of the area of Kawagoe. We bought some food along the way and went to the kouen (park) and drank some traditional Kawagoe beer made from sweet potato. The cherry blossoms, while not in full bloom, were still very nice to see. We were glad to be able to see them before leaving Japan, it would have been a shame to have missed them! We then did a spot of shopping, where Charee managed to lose herself, but I managed to find her after awhile, luckily. There were many people there! Late in the afternoon we went back to Saitama and had yaki niku for dinner, then headed back home to relax.