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Saturday, April 17, 2010

Day 11: Trip to Japan (14 April 2010)

Another travelling day, this time from Osaka back to Tokyo. We checked out of the hotel and took a taxi to a place called Sakura no Torinuke in the city of Osaka. The place is actually a 560 metre-long pathway lined up wit 324 sakura trees. There are 127 species of sakura here, including rare ones like green-coloured sakura. This happened to be the first day that Sakura no Turinuke is opened for the year. As such, there were a lot of visitors to the place when we got there.
The weather was good and the sky was clear, but it was slightly cold because of the wind. After walking from one end of Sakura no Turinuke to another, we took another taxi to Shin-Osaka eki to board the shinkansen to Tokyo. Distance from Osaka to Tokyo is approximately 550 km, and on the Hikari Superexpress, the journey is just under three hours. There were quite a few stops - seven to be exact - before we reached Tokyo. The stops were at Kyoto, Maibara, Gifu-Hashima, Nagoya, Odawara, Shin-Yokohama and Shinagawa.

I missed the view of Mount Fuji when travelling from Tokyo to Kyoto previously. This time I made sure that I did not miss it. The famous mountain can be seen just as we left Odawara eki. The sight of the mountain is amazing with the tip still covered in snow. I was not able to capture any photos as the shinkansen was moving too fast for me to snap a good photo of the mountain. Nonetheless, having being able to view the mountain from afar in person, albeit briefly, was good enough for me.

We arrived in Tokyo at ten past three in the afternoon. We then took train to Shinjuku eki, before checking in at the Shinjuku Washington Hotel. Later that evening, we met up with a group of students from two Tokyo-based universities, namely Tokyo University of Science and Tokyo Denki University.

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