We arrived in Tokyo on Saturday afternoon after a pleasant flight on Delta - stopping off at Tokyo en route to Hawaii; we were temped to stay on! We`d left our hostel in Beijing at 7am and took the subway to the airport, but our flight confirmation didn`t say which terminal we had to go to and so we had to guess, and we ended up at the wrong one. Thankfully there was a free shuttlebus to the right one, but we were last to check in and the Delta staff were waiting for us. We felt a bit rushed, but it ended up being a blessing in disguise: they didn`t want to let us on the flight without an onward ticket but there wasn`t time to argue and so we ended up getting on fairly easily,

Our hostel in Tokyo was really nice; all of the rooms are aranged around a central area of showers, basins and toilets so everything is really close by, and the Japanese really know how to do showers! There was also a 24 hour cafe downstairs so we could eat breakfast each morning while watching the winter Olympics and chatting to other travellers from the US and Europe. We initially booked two nights there, but, as we usually do, we extended our stay a couple of times and ended up staying in three different rooms (all very nice).

We didn`t do much exploring on our first day as we arrived at our hostel at about five o`clock, but went to a sushi bar that was recommended to us which was fab, and fairly cheap - just under a pound per plate, with hot green tea too. Sunday was spent exploring the Imperial Palace East Gardens which were beautiful, full of people drawing and painting, and we saw the plum blossoms (we`re about a month early for the "sakura" (cherry blossoms)). We then borrowed bicycles which they lend out every Sunday and followed the route around the city which they cordon off specifically for the purpose which was brilliant fun. We only managed one circuit (about 3.5km) as we were both feeling a bit rubbish with our colds, before heading off for lunch.

After visiting Disneyland in Hong Kong last month, we`ve decided to visit all of the Disney parks in the world so on Monday we went to Disneyland Tokyo. It was quite easy to get to - there`s a train station just outside, and we were up bright and early to get there before it opened at nine. Even though it was a weekday, there were quite a few queues to get in, and once the gates were open we headed straight towards a cafe to have some breakfast and were overtaken by nearly everyone rushing to whichever ride they wanted to go on first - it was a bit like the January sales! We had a fab day; we managed to organise our day so that we only queued for a maximum of half an hour for any ride, the parade was fab and they still have the Electric Light Parade at night which is amazing. The fireworks were also pretty impressive - not many of them but they had ones which exploded in heart shapes and ones which had two bursts - one as a sphere and another immediately following which created a ring around the sphere like Saturn! All in all a good park - bigger and better than Hong Kong, with a real life-size Cinderella`s Castle.

Our next few days were spent leisurely as we both still felt a bit rotten from our colds; we visited the Government Building in Shinjuko to go to the 45th floor observation deck (sadly there was too much mist to be able to see Mount Fuji); we visited the Tokyo Dome City where there was the biggest rollercoaster we had ever seen and was also closed; we spent a peaceful few hours in the Koishikawa Korakuen garden; we popped over to Yokohama for the day, and on our last day in Tokyo we went to Saitama Shintoshin to visit the John Lennon museum (ace! Slightly biased in Yoko Ono`s favour as she`s the one who set it up but some quite interesting memorabilia which we`d never seen before).

We have eaten lots of delicious food during our week here - we discovered a local place where we had Chinese Spicy Noodles and another spicy dish we can`t remember the name of, and we visited our local sushi bar three times as it was so good, and the people there were so friendly.

We left Tokyo on Friday night, taking an overnight bus to Hiroshima which took ten hours. We would have liked to try the famous Shinkansen (bullet train) but it was quite expensive and taking the overnight bus saved us a night`s accommodation too. We`re sad that we didn`t manage to see Mount Fuji (we tried several times but it was just too misty), and we didn`t get along to the main shopping area to browse all of the electronic stuff, but we`ve really enjoyed Tokyo and have come to the conclusion that Japan is a place we could live for a while - it feels very safe, the people are lovely and incredibly well behaved (no-one crosses the road until the green man lights up - it just doesn`t happen). If it wasn`t so expensive then I think we would definitely stay longer!