Gifu

Day 73
Hello everyone I’m super excited to share with you what we got up to today!

We started the morning by visiting the Kappanbashi kitchen town in Tokyo which is essentially one long street lined with shops absolutely packed to the brim with kitchen stuff. Of course Tokyo has a cooking utensils street! It was absolute mayhem in these shops though, there were lots of people picking up everything from ramen bowls to vases to tea cups literally everything you could imagine. And these shops have shelves absolutely packed full with the stuff how on earth they do inventory I will never know! With tiny little isles that you have to squeeze through, it’s like playing dodgems in real life except our aim wasn’t to bash into people this time!

It was really quite a sight and there were some shops with beautiful china so it was really fun to look around! After Jacob and I bought a few bits and bobs we popped back to our hostel to quickly put them away before heading to Gifu prefecture so quite a journey for our next and last activity of the day!

Three trains, a bus and 3 hours later we arrived at Gifu cormorant fishing pier. Now cormorant fishing is a traditional fishing method that has been around for over 1300 years, it’s a method that uses trained cormorant birds to dive down and catch the fish. Each fisherman leads about a dozen cormorants on leashes who swim alongside the boat and dive under the water to catch fish by swallowing them whole. The fish are kept in a special pouch in the cormorant's throat to be retrieved later and are prevented from being swallowed by a snare around the bird's neck. Each boat carries a large fire to provide light for the boatmen to steer and the birds to fish by. Now there is definitely some animal cruelty questions that could be raised here and I cannot deny that, however it is an incredible art. We glided alongside them in silence as the fishermen worked with the birds who were successfully catching fish quite often!

It truly was magical and what was lovely is that it’s not really that touristy at all, there were only a small handful of boats going out to observe the fishing and very few westerners there at all. It really goes to show that once you go outside of Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka the level of tourists drops so drastically.

It is definitely one of my favourite experiences we’ve done in Japan even if we had no idea what our guide was saying or what time it would start or finish!

In absolute awe we arrived back at the bank of the river and quickly ran to get the last bus and then the next train and then, once we were finally sat on the bullet train back to Tokyo, we could really take in what an incredible experience we had just had. Absolutely extraordinary and I am so chuffed that we got to see it!

Day 74

After getting back at home midnight last night we groggily got out of bed and headed to a cafe for a yummy sandwich and some coffee before braving the rain. Winding through Tokyo trying to avoid the worst of the rain we enjoyed looking through a few small shops and ended up in Shinjuku and Shibuya for the famous neon signs and buzzy night life, definitely our favourite districts in Tokyo as they have such a fun atmosphere! Another nice day and sumo wrestling on the cards for tomorrow which I am SO excited for I cannot wait!Read more