Up early with the hope of reaching a lonely planet recommended organic cafe not far from our Minshuku. This was our third time of trying to get into this place – the opening hours are 8-11.30 in the morning, but it wasn’t open!! For some reason many of the shops and cafe’s say they’ll open at 8am but don’t actually open until 10am, something to get your head around. So we had hoped for an organic breakfast but we settled on an art decor cafe further into town which provided us with fruit, eggs and some good chunky toast.

We checked out shortly afterwards and went to the station to wait for the train. Ivan and Kim turned up and we were set for a good few laughs on our journey. We traveled with them as far as Toyama where we had to rush to get the train to Kanazawa whilst they went in search of a way to get the famous Alpine route. Kanazawa is a fairly large town based on the west coast of Japan above Kyoto, it has a number of historic sites, castles and one of the most beautiful and written about gardens in Japan. We stayed at the very cosy Guesthouse Namaste not far from the station along with several other backpackers from around the world. Our host showed us around the retro designed kitchen, we could cook our own food at last!

Our first night was in a Japanese style room but we were to be moved upstairs to a western style room the following day – a good thing really as it was located right next to the wash areas. So with only a few hours to spare before the sun would set we explored the local market, went to a great little coffee boudoir type of place- the most amount of care taken over making coffee we have ever seen. Then on our way back to Namaste we picked up food stuff for the next few days.

Whilst we’ve been traveling through Japan many of our guesthouses haven’t allowed for the opportunity for us to cook our own food so we were pretty excited about getting things in to cook and also for the prospect of enjoying some long awaited porridge! In the kitchen we heated up some gyoza, enjoyed noodles and our own style broth and a lovely fresh salad. This was enjoyed along with our fellow house mates and we chatted over beers, exchanged creative projects and planned for the next day. Simon from Quebec had won an International short film competition in Tokyo and had won his trip to Japan so we all loved watching his 40 second award winning short film, here is a link…

(Leica M9, Summicron-M 50mm f2.0 & Olympus PEN, 17mm f2.8 & 100mm f2.8, processed in Lightroom 3)