It's decided - twelve nights in Japan. It was a real struggle to book the tickets last night. Qantas' frequent flyer online awards booking system appeared to be having difficulties. I ended up calling them at around 2am. They waived the additional points penalty due to the technical problems.

Both flights are via Cairns on Boeing 767-300's, arriving at Osaka Kansai and departing via Tokyo Narita. The Cairns to Osaka leg is with Australian Airlines, the first time we have flown with them (discounting their previous Australian domestic existence). No individual entertainment systems on the 767's, but I can usually amuse myself and B often sleeps during the flights.

The trip across to Japan was began poorly, seated at the rear of a Qantas 747 feeling every bump of the tropical air and unable to sleep on our 9 1/2 hour overnight flight. I was relieved to finally touch down at Narita, the clean and modern airport.servicing Tokyo. I had no problems getting through immigration, but they appeared a bit confused by B's status as a Malaysian living in Sydney.

The first task was to convert our Japan Rail Pass vouchers for the actual pass and book a seat on the Narita Express (N'EX). This fast and modern train runs all the way from the airport to Shinjuku in 70 minutes, past rice paddies, forested hills and then the expanse of residential appartments around Tokyo proper. Most interesting was Chiba, where big monorail tracks ran overhead.

Arrived back in Sydney from Japan on Saturday morning, but was too tired/busy to update the site until now. Had a wonderful time, spent way too much money took both too many photos and not enough. Too hot and humid, Sydney's current weather is much nicer. The air is clear here, the land green and myfirst train back was late.

Hated the flight there, the return was better. Qantas couriered the lost case to us on the same day probably a case of mistaken case identity).

I'm still tidying up the description of our trip along with the photos. Will post them up on this site later in the week.

Minutes to go until we leave for the airport. Hope it's a smooth, safe flight there and back. Hope everything else runs well. So nervous about flying after my last few experiences. And to think I used to be so excited about air travel. *Ouch*.

Departing for Japan tomorrow evening. I'm certainly excited, finding it difficult to concentrate at work. Right now I'm also feeling somewhat drained. I need music, but I'm looking at a very limited supply that I can take with me.

The problem is that my portable CD player is worn out. That means my only CD players are the computers and the DVD player - not very portable.

My current solution is to use my Zaurus PDA. Unfortunately, audio recordings take up a lot of memory. I have already filled up a 128MB compact flash card with 2 soundtracks worth of Ogg Vorbis encoded music. Another 64MB flash could hold another CD's worth (but I feel like listening to a 2 CD set!). However, I'm probably going to want to use the flash cards to use in the digital camera. They also take up the slot I use for wireless networking.