Sunday April 6th A wet morning in Takayama

 Opening our curtains this morning, the scene does not bode well for the day ahead as it's raining heavily.

We make the most of a delicious breakfast and head out to the coach, where our new driver has thoughtfully packed a whole load of clear umbrellas for us.

First stop is the Government House, an example of a preserved building which demonstrates the way government officials would have lived and worked centuries ago. Unlike the castle, this is fortunately all on one level, however once again we leave our shoes by the entrance and with typical Japanese efficiency we are all handed a plastic bag for our wet umbrellas and another one for our shoes!

It's interesting to discover that the straw mats that cover all the floors, called tatami mats, are all a standard size and Japanese people use them to describe how big the rooms in their house are; rather than saying my bedroom is 10x 16, they will say  it's a 6 tatimi mat room or 10 tatimi mat room.

The rooms where the officials would have worked are very sparsely furnished, they would all have sat on the floor at low tables and there is little in the way of a comfortable chair anywhere!

Following our visit we walk through the town to a very old area of Hilda Takayama, famous  for its rows of old houses and shops, some selling traditional crafts and other much more modern items such as the Peanuts and Charlie Brown shop we walk by.

 Unfortunately, the rain is coming down quite heavily now, so we take the first opportunity we see to duck inside a nice coffee shop to warm up and shelter from the weather. We were also supposed to be visiting the nearby outdoor market, but it doesn't really feel like outdoor market weather, so we decide instead to browse the very stylish furniture and department store next door to the coffee shop, where we look longingly at beautifully designed sofas, chairs and tables, all crafted from the most wonderful range of different woods.

We then have a 2 hour journey on a local express train to Nagoya, from where we will board the bullet train to Hiroshima. It's a journey of varied landscapes, initially winding through more mountainous areas

and then the landscape flattens out and we begin to see more rice fields. We can also see from the vegetation and difference in the trees, that we are coming into a warmer climate, the cherry trees are more prolific and there is much more blossom The soil looks incredibly fine, almost as if it has been spread from a bag of potting compost.

As we near Nagoya, the train buffs begin to get very excited and we actually see a bullet train zoom past us on another line. It looks to me like a train version of Concorde, very elegant and smooth.