^^ Land Ho! first sight of Japan

Well I didn’t get lost in the ocean in case you were wondering.

I was pretty tired by the time I got to Shanghai, and was glad to be boarding my last vessel on non-Japanese soil the next day (day 22) I guess I now have a few tips to advise others with on such a journey, but forefront among them all might be, don’t take a ferry 2 days after a super-typhoon hits the sea you are travelling on…
I think I coped quite well, but the morning of the second day on the boat, in open sea, I couldn’t stand up, and didn’t try until 3 o’clock, for fear of being ill.
The rough sea aside, the boat was very comfortable, and extremely spacious compared to the train carriages I was used to travelling in – it even had a functioning karaoke hall, that was being taken very seriously by several passengers. The food was great and I met a bunch of people from all over the world.
Finally landing in Kobe, after 3 and a half weeks of travelling, the whole journey seemed like a dream. The only thing anchoring me between the wonderful and overwhelming journey of the past weeks, and the actuality of being in Japan was the Dutch couple in their late 60s, who had been on all of the same transportation as me since Irkutsk, near Lake Baikal in Russia.
They were good company and it was great to have shared so much of this journey with them by complete coincidence. Using my best tourist-Japanese we obtained tickets for my, still undisputed, favourite train – the shinkansen. We parted ways at Shin-Yokohama station and since then I’ve been rushing at Tokyo speed getting a place to live, a bed to sleep on, going to school and plenty more besides. I hope to review this journey soon because during the time since I left England, the Centre for Alternate Technology (CAT) stationed in Wales, emailed me with various figures about the carbon emissions involved in alternative modes of transport. There are some quite complicated calculations to consider so I will need a little time to do it, but I can’t hide from the fact that however much less CO2 my journey produced in comparison with a plane journey, I’m still responsible for a significant amount of emissions.

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