Christchurch - Osaka

I got up just before 3am, having woken at around 1am and been unable to get much sleep after that. Things weighed on my mind. I'd done almost no training for the last two weeks. I had blisters on both heels from my new shoes. Would I really be able to keep my pack under 10kg? I had an unsightly bright red scab-like thing on the side of my nose where my doctor had treated a solar keratosis with liquid nitrogen.

One of these weights was lifted when I got to the airport at around 4.30am and placed my pack on the scales at check in. It weighed just 8.5kg!

Both the flight to Auckland and the one on to Kansai were largely uneventful. The seat beside me on the Kansai flight was vacant, but the one next to that was occupied by a young Japanese woman who coughed intermittently (without putting her hand over her mouth) throughout the entire flight. As if the fear of being struck down by a reoccurrence of my ingrown toenail or groin problem wasn't enough, I now had to worry about catching a cold.

There were at least three or four movies I wanted to watch on the plane. I started with Die Hard IV, which was a huge disappointment. The words formulaic and unoriginal spring to mind. A pity, since I enjoyed the first two. I then watched The Flying Scotsman, a biopic about world champion cyclist Graeme Obree, who was bullied as a child and suffered mental health problems throughout his life. I followed this with the Joe Strummer doco and an episode of Flight of the Conchords. The rest of the flight I spent eating, sleeping, listening to John Coltrane's Blue Train, and reading Alex Kerr's Lost Japan, which had been sitting on my bookshelf unread since being given to me years ago by one of my brothers (I forget which one). It's an excellent read. I highly recommended it.

The plane arrived at Kansai slightly ahead of schedule. I breezed through immigration and customs and caught the 5.45pm "limousine" bus to Herbis Osaka, just a couple of minutes on foot from my hotel in Nishi-Umeda, where I was checked in by 7pm. After freshening up, I went out to look at clothes at the new Mont Bell store by Nishi-Umeda station. On my way back I bought some "crisps" at the convenience store across the road from the hotel to eat in my room. I checked at reception to see which channel the Rugby World Cup final was on before going to bed at around 9pm.