Last night in Japan

Our shinkansen from Osaka arrived at Shinagawa Station, Tokyo, around lunchtime on the 30th December and we walked a couple of minutes to the Airbnb apartment I had booked for our last night in Japan. 

 

That afternoon we did one of the more obscure tourist attractions in Tokyo: We went for a walk over the Rainbow Bridge. This is a suspension bridge that spans Tokyo Bay and is nicely lit up at night. It is just under 800m long, and the roadway, which has a pedestrian path alongside it, is over 50m high. It is certainly an impressive structure.

Once we reached the start of the bridge, access up to the walkway was via an elevator. At this stage you need to decide whether you want to walk on the north side or the south side, as there is no opportunity to change once you are up there. We opted for the north side to make the most of the nice views looking back to the Tokyo skyline.

It was freezing cold up there! Luckily there was one of the magic hot-drink vending machines in the elevator lobby so Will and I could purchase our respective hot chocolate and coffee. The cans made excellent hand-warmers until we found a nice place part-way across to drink them and take in the views.

It was the perfect time to be walking the bridge as we got to see the sun set and the city gradually start to light up.

Once we reached the Odaiba side we went for a walk along the waterfront and got nice views looking back to the bridge.

From here it was onwards to the Diver City shopping centre to check out the gundam that takes pride of place in front of the mall. It was pretty cool, I mean what's not to love about a giant robot??!

We were lucky to see it, as in March this year it was dismantled and will eventually be replaced by a different model.  There is a nightly show where the robot 'comes to life', but we didn't have time to wait for it as we had to get back to the mainland for a dinner date. Judging by the video, I don't think we missed too much! The area around the shopping centre was nice with the Christmas lights still up.

Once we were back in Shinagawa we met up with a couple of friends of ours who happened to be on a family holiday and were staying literally a couple of minutes from where we were. Chris and Sarah were gap students in 2007 for a year at Bearwood College in the UK when I was teaching there, and we got on really well. As is the tradition with our 'gappies', Chris was a valuable addition to our staff touch rugby team! In fact, dredging up a couple of photos from the archives, it looks like we won the competition that year. The after-match celebration would have been pretty epic, as most parties at Bearwood were!

 

I hadn't seen them since then, and in that time Chris and Sarah had got married, had a baby, and found proper teaching jobs in their native Australia. 

First up was a cocktail in the top-floor bar of their posh hotel.

We then headed out for an excellent meal at one of the local restaurants. We had a very entertaining waitress who found us bit of a novelty and spent most of the evening in fits of laughter. There were a few language breakdowns, but she did manage to heed our request for a 'big beer'! It was a really nice evening, and a lovely way to spend our last night in Japan, and in fact our last night away after 10 months of travelling! Let's hope it's not another 10 years before we next manage to catch up...

The next morning it was packing, and praying that we weren't going to exceed our luggage allowance! We seemed to have accumulated quite a lot of new stuff in our 10 months away... We would never have fitted everything into our bags had we not left quite a bit of stuff in the UK with Will's mother. Will had a couple of European conferences in June/July and was going to make time to spend a few days with his mum. He was going to be travelling light, so could bring our left-behind belongings back with him then.

We had timed our 14-day JR passes perfectly so we could take the train to the airport as our final trip. We departed Tokyo early afternoon on the 31st December and arrived in Auckland at 5:10am on the first day of 2017. With 10 months of travelling and 11 countries visited, 2016 was a pretty epic year, and one that I will remember for a long long time.