Kamakura

This will be my final blog post of photos from Mia's visit. These images are from our day in Kamakura. It's one of my favourite day trips from Tokyo, I love the Daibutsu (Great Buddha) and it's nice to visit the beach as well.

We were off to a good start making friends with this cat in one of the temples.

Later we made another friend. I met this cat once before in February, it had sought shelter in the same shop Ali and I hid in to escape the snow for a while. The three of us sat around a heater the shop owner led us to to warm up.

Inside this building is an amazing spinning library. There was a sign up at the time saying it was not ok to spin the library for the moment, the wording made it sound like sometimes you CAN spin it but that may have been a bad translation.

We hung out at the beach for a bit and had a paddle before heading back to Chiba.

Hakone - Day 2

Day two and clouds everywhere however, there's still plenty to see even when the weather isn't great.

We took a cable car to the top of a nearby peak which, under the right conditions, would have offered stunning views. We knew it was cloudy but figured we'd head up anyway since we'd come all the way there.

It made for some interesting photos but we could barely see our hands in front of our faces, never mind anything else...

It was also very cold. We had not been prepared for that and it took Mia a while to recover!

Descending back through the layer of cloud was quite magical though.

We did a lot more walking and took the "scenic route" back to the station. Google maps assured me there was a path, there was not. We may have had to climb a few fences to get back onto a legitimate road. It was still better than turning around and going all the way back.