We’re rocketing along in a bullet-train (or Shinkansen) on our way to Himeji, after arriving here in Tokyo a few hours earlier by air. We’ve just spent the past five days in Hong Kong and are now on the second leg of our journey, spending the next fortnight touring around in Japan.

It was a bleary-eyed start to this morning, especially as I had only just acclimatised to local Hong Kong time. We had an 08:30 flight, so we left in plenty of time to arrive, check in and load up on Starbucks before jetting off.

Thankfully, the flight up to Tokyo was relatively short (just shy of 4 hours), so I didn’t get enough of a chance to build up my usual level of whining and complaining, especially in regard to our choice of airline (my ever favourite US carrier NorthWest Airlines).

I’d been looking forward to sampling the food in Japan since we arrived from across the water, and even though we only had time to stop and get a few sandwiches, I was super impressed already - even your basic, common or garden sandwich package looks like it came out of some sort of art exhibit, neatly packaged and colour co-ordinated. I think I’m going to enjoy eating here…

Speaking of lunch though, i’m really trying to hold on to it - at the moment it feels as though we’re being propelled along by Saturn 5 rocket. Bullet trains have a top speed of around 300km/h, which is not what I’m used to travelling by rail (If they offered a high speed service like this on the London to Brighton line, maybe I wouldn’t complain so much about the commute), and you certainly can’t complain about the level of politeness here; every time a guard leaves a train carriage, he turns to the passengers and bows politely.