Australia, the return, part 1

Our long-awaited return trip to Australia finally arrived. We'd booked everything using flight miles, ending up with a convoluted routing as a consequence. Given we ended-up needing to go via Tokyo, we decided to break the journey there and spend 3 nights in Japan, staying in Kyoto. We caught the bullet train from Tokyo, got to the hotel and then set about exploring the next day. First stop Nanzen-ji:

Some remarkable wooden buildings, in one of the only un-bombed locations in Japan. Very hot and humid conditions but also lots of tourists

And a semi-traditional wedding on site too, the bride paused briefly, she and her groom were taking their own photos on the grounds of the temple

From there it was to the Imperial Palace and gardens in the city centre. A very imposing site, again very busy with tourists and steamy conditions but well worth visiting

The one-way route goes through some of the gardens

The next morning we headed to Kinkaku-ji, which while impressive is pretty much a tourist shake-down as you get a 10 minute walk through very crowded grounds and then you're done.

We saved the visit to Nijo-jo until our depature day, we wanted to get in right as it opened to avoid some of the crowds and to spend some time exploring the castle and grounds before we had to get our seat reservations for the train back to Tokyo that afternoon.

Kyoto station is an imposing structure but also open to the elements

From Tokyo we flew to Sydney, is was a hazy morning on approach as winds were bringing smoke from nearby controlled burns into and over the city

We spent a couple of nights in Sydney visiting Botany Bay park then flew up to Darwin, collected our car and drove to Jabiru in Kakadu. This bird in fact is a Jabiru (Black-necked Stork) we were happy to see one in the park.

We were back in Kakadu hoping to walk some of the trails that had been shut on our first visit in the middle of 2019. Disappointingly, 4 years later, they were still shut. So we revisted some of the accessible areas including the Sandstone gorges

We spotted a pair of Long-tailed Finches feeding on the ground

Visitied the sites of aboriginal camps, basically rock overhangs that had been used as accommodation for roughly 40,000 years, some with rock art, dating back thousands of years, though touched-up from time-to-time thereafter.

We saw Short-eared Rock-Wallaby

And the elusive Rainbow Pitta

Walked some walks, climbed some climbs and got ourselves acclimatised before heading to Katherine to meet-up with our fellow travelers for the next chapter...