Day 06 - Wednesday 1st August

Sleeping on the floor turned out to be not as bad as I'd expected. Even so, I'll go for a bed any day.

The next adventure was to have a shower and bath in the public baths in the basement. There is one bath area for men and a separate one for women. They swap them over every day and so you need to watch out for the blue towel or the pink towel covering the entrance doorway to make sure you get the right one.

You are supposed to wear the dressing gown from your room to go to the baths. Inside the bath area, everyone is naked. You start by having a shower on one of the stools - you have to sit down and lather up while you shower with a European-type nozzle on the end of a hose. Once you are clean, you can enter the hot bath.

Breakfast was included in our stay. As you might expect, it was a traditional Japanese meal with numerous small dishes with a variety of tastes. We enjoyed it.

After breakfast, we went for a walk to see the temples on the hill behind our ryokan. The full walk would have taken us hours. Instead, we spent about 30 minutes looking at the nearest temples and cemeteries.

Checkout time was 10am. This gave us the opportunity to have coffee in the lounge area of the ryokan - the coffee in the lounge was only available until 10am. I woke up with a headache this morning that was probably caused by lack of coffee yesterday.

Next we went for a walk through the streets of Takayama starting with the morning markets. I then left Suzy to visit the shops while I went for a walk.

We met up again at 11:30am to go to the museum near our ryokan. This museum displays the history and culture of Takayama.

The heat was getting to us and so we found a nice cafe nearby to have a cup of coffee - a good opportunity to sit and relax in air-conditioned comfort. We sat at normal tables but we could have used a nearby alcove that had a traditional Japanese low-level table with cushions on the floor and a sunken area under the table for your feet.

Nearby there was a small supermarket where we bought sandwiches and drinks. There was a good selection of pre-prepared food with plenty of options that we wouldn't see back in Australia. We took our food back to the lounge area in our ryokan.

The driver from the ryokan took us to the station at 1pm. This gave us enough time to book our seats for the 1:30pm train - which naturally left exactly on time.

The train took us back down through the valley next to the river to Nagoya where we changed to another platform for a train to Kyoto. We reached Kyoto station at about 5:15pm. The hotel where we'd booked is owned by Japan Rail and is right next to the railway station.

The signs from the railway concourse pointed up some escalators and along long corridors towards the hotel reception. We managed OK with our bags until we got to the foyer area where we were confronted with a long flight of stairs and no escalator. When we struggled down the stairs with our bags, hotel staff came running to help us. They assured us there was an easier way to get there as we later discovered when we explorer the hotel.

This is a very elegant hotel with excellent service. After we checked in, two people escorted us up to our room - one with our bags on a trolley and another explaining everything about the hotel as we went. When we got to our room, he gave us a thorough explanation of the features in our room. We'd read that you don't need to tip in Japan but I thought I should do so for this high level of service. When I offered him a tip, he declined and said something like "no tipping in Japan".

Our room is on the Club Floor (level 15) - the top level in the hotel. It's a big hotel. The corridor to our room in the northern tower seemed to go on forever.

The hotel has free WiFi in the rooms and throughout the hotel. They also have free cable internet connection in the rooms with speeds of up to 100MB/s.

After settling in, we went exploring - starting with the southern tower on the 15th level. There we found the Gravia Lounge where people staying in a Club room can relax with free soft drinks coffee and tea.

Next we checked out the restaurants on this level. There is choice of French, Italian, Japanese etc. They all looked very impressive but were also very expensive. For example, the cheapest bottle of wine was well over $A100. I doubt if we will be eating on this level.

On level 3, there are more restaurants - all with Japanese food. However, we found a restaurant next to the reception area that has a very nice buffet or a-la-carte menu. We opted for the buffet option - partly because they offered a discount for people over 60. When we paid we got another 10% discount because we were hotel guests.

When we got back to our room, we found it was quite warm. Although we had set the temperature at 20C, it felt warmer than this. I rang reception and when they looked at their computer it said the temperature in our room was actually 25C. They sent an attendant up but, when he was unable to fix it, he got a mechanic to come. After a while, they concluded that they wouldn't be able to fix the problem. They said the temperature outside the hotel was so high, they would not be able to lower the room temperature any further.