As a day trip from Osaka, we took the bullet train to Himeji to visit the castle - one of the only surviving castles in the country (sadly, most of the others have been burnt down a number of times before finally being rebuilt in concrete)

The castle and its battlements soar above town, and the bright white 6 story structure is affectionately known as the 'white heron' in Japanese.

Now all this would be very poetic, had Sarah and I not made the grave mistake of visiting on a weekend. There were hundreds of thousands of people streaming off the trains up the main road to the castle. However, on entering the grounds we all entered a very efficiently managed queuing system involving scraggly students with oversized-uniforms and whistles and a series of holding pens - so after 45 minutes we arrived at the ticket booth and, to our relief, the entrance to the castle-proper.

Unfortunately, through the main gates we were greeted with the sight of yet another queue. No problem, it must end just around that corner. Nope. Every turn we expected the queue to end, but at every turn it snaked onwards out of sight. After 4 turns we realised that the queue actually wound its way through the entire castle grounds, into the castle, around each floor, up and down the 6 flights of stairs, and back out again. They say the English love a good queue, but having lived through this ordeal I have to admit that we are mere amateurs compared to the average Japanese sightseer.

Needless to say, I was absolutely livid on exiting the castle and would probably have had to vandalise a local convenience store to calm down. Luckily for 7-11, the authorities had cleverly employed a series of actors to dress up as samurai next to the castle and pose for photos with tourists. All was forgiven!