One week 4 countries! Australia, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan!

What a week! Last sunday early in the morning we got on the plane from Darwin to Singapore and had a day stopover in this lively, hot and humid city/country. What is nice for an european tourist: most people speak english and the food is just sooo good! We had a nice walk from the city center to the architecturaly very interesting place:

Flying sheep building!

From Singapore we flew to Taipei, but only a short break there. Taiwan puts much effort in making cycling very popular and that was a piece of art we saw in the waiting room:

From Taiwan we flew to Osaka in Japan. From Osaka, where the airport is on a man made island, we travelled directly to Kyoto, a must for every Japanese citizen,and that is because of the tempels and shrines. The amount of those is just amazing, only 30 world heritage places speak for this city!! We were able to see just a few temples and shrines, but what we have seen was very fascinating...

Nice pricing;-) For money you can also buy happiness or good luck!

And it was hot! 37 degrees C and humidity 70%... Kyoto is the hottest city in Japan in August,, here we go:-) Luckily we left our bikes in the luggage storage at the airport and used the train network around Osaka.

In the evening we meet a couchsurfing member, a Japanese guy Toshio, who introduced us to a japanese pub with lovely food. We had a very good evening and good talking.

Osaka by night

After Kyoto we went the next day to Nara, the city with the biggest golden buddha in the world. Also a world heritage place. Not only this can be seen in Nara, once again we spent a day in temples and shrines, which was very special:

Also very special for Nara the deer. They are everywhere, and since the tourists give them food, they are not afraid of human... That is how it looks like then:

Nevertheless the most spectacular was indeed the buddha temple.

After the cultural and historical injection in Osaka a dsuuroundings we flew the next day to Sapporo which is located on the Hokkaido island in the north of Japan. Here we stayed 2 nights with a Warm Showers host Ken and his whife Kasumi and had a wo derful time. They helped us planning our trip and Kasumi cooked wonderful food for us. Now we are on the road to see the Hokkaido island, meet the people, eat seafood and see the lovely nature!

Katherine to Darwin: crossing Australia from south to north completed!

We left Katherine after a 2 weeks stay and hit the road for our last stretch towards Darwin of about 400km. We decided to go through the Litchfield National Park famous for its waterfalls. 

This area of Northern Territorry is also known for crocodiles, so don´t go into the water if you are not 100% sure it has been checked by a ranger!

Before going to Litchfield we first went to Daly River. Beautiful river, but again: do not go in! While drinking wine we have been observing the river searching for crocs and indeed we were able to spot one!

We have seen some bush fires along the way to Litchifeld, see how kites go crazy waiting for their food...

We also got some food, bush tucker: rosella, sour tasting fruit. Delicious on a hot day!

We travelled in Litchfield on a very rough and sandy off road track and had to push our bikes qiute a bit...

We were really exhausted after getting there... but it was worth.

The next day we had to cross a few rivers! 

That was quite tricky and again a few sandy parts.

And again we ended up on a lovley spot.

Next day we only cycled to the end of the National park and stayed there for almost the complete day at our on private spot which looked like as a japanese garden but just made by nature.

The last 150 km to Darwin to took it easy slowed down the speed but cycling above 35 °C slows you down automatically anyway.:)

Now here we are in Darwin after cycling about 3800km starting from Port Augusta. We have crossed the continent have have seen a lot of wild life, met beautiful people had some very tough days, enjoyed the tail wind, were cold during the nights in the desert, cycled in tropical heat up here and looking now for something new which we acctually found already. Thanks for your comments and following us so far!

Darwin! Finally we are at the beach, on the other side of Australia

The route of 6200km cycled in Australia

We have decided to fly to Japan and cycle there at the top end of Japan at Hokkaido. We fly on Sunday, 2^nd August and have a stop over in Singapore. We are very excited about this next challenge:-)

See you soon in Japan!