We landed in Narita airport the same day they started a new security system. Not for people getting on the plane but for people getting off – us.

Narita’s half an hour out of Tokyo and from what I can gather it’s their main airport. Big enough to have it’s own monorail system shuttling people from terminal to terminal. It was about seven in the evening our time when we landed, the kids were tired and all movied out but happy enough to lug their bags when they saw the mini train pull up.

Their happiness and patience however soon faded when we joined the end of a long queue. Jack looked at me and said ‘I don’t like this kind of travel, the queuing kind.’

The queue thankfully moved fast, giving Poppy only just enough time to wind up the whinging and dump her heavy back pack on the ground, stomp her foot say she wasn’t going to carry it any further.

We got ushered through and told to wait behind a red line for the woman checking the passports to call us. All too easy, but then I saw the posters stuck up at every check in point.

‘New security system starting on the 20th of November.’ We’d landed on the very first day.

There was a lady in front us standing at the counter being checked in. She looked Malaysian, or maybe Korean, in about her mid fifties. She was with a younger guy who had already been checked through and was waiting for her on the other side. Her two pointer fingers were poked into a new fandangled finger print machine and she was staring into a mirror above it, which I guessed was going to take a photo of her eyes. Her friend that had already been checked in was talking to her in a language I couldn’t understand. He was pointing with his two pointer fingers as if to push them down hard on something. The Japanese woman behind the counter was smiling and nodding and the machine that this woman had her fingers in was making a d-dong noise, the type of noise machines make when you get it wrong. This went on for a good ten minutes with the woman taking her fingers out and putting them back in, then out again and wiping them with a cloth and then back in again. Finally a happy ping and then a flash as a camera somewhere behind the mirror went off. The Japanese woman behind the counter smiled and nodded handing the woman with the faulty fingers her passport back.

Great, there was only six of us, times that by fifteen minutes and we were looking at an hour and a half. Luckily though they figure it’s only the adults who are going to cause trouble so the kids didn’t have to go through the whole fingerprint process, just Pete and me. Pete took a couple of goes, but I’d been watching so intently that I got it first time. Simple really, all you have to do is push down hard.

When we made it out of the airport there was a bus waiting for us ready to take us to our hotel. The check in was easy and they told us the exact time we had to catch the bus the next morning to make sure we didn’t miss the plane. There would be no chance of a repeat of yesterday’s performance. So all adventure and possibility of mishap had been eliminated, that is, until it was time to eat.

Eating in the hotel for six of us was out of the question. There was a sushi bar but it was traditional Tokyo sushi – not sure what that means, except super expensive sushi.

‘Lets go for a walk and see what we can find outside,’ Pete said.

When the glass doors of the hotel slid back cold air and the smell of exhaust fumes hit us, twelve degrees they’d said on the plane before we landed. We walked down the road where the cars were queued both ways for traffic lights and spotted a small restaurant on the other side.

‘What do you reckon? Over there?’ Pete asked.

‘Looks good,’ I said.

There were traffic lights not far from where we were standing but no crossing to go with them.

‘Everyone grab a hand and stay with us,’ I said, already seeing the head lines back home, starving family of six flattened out the front of Japanese hotel.

We made it across the road, dodging the cars, and bundled ourselves into the tiny restaurant that smelled of bean curd and pork. The smells made our stomachs growl. The restaurant was packed. We pencilled our names in on the waiting list. There were no tables set for six but I was hoping they weren’t against dragging a couple of chairs over. I found a spot on a bench just inside the front door where I could sit with Poppy on my lap. By this time my head was throbbing, my skin so dry from over tiredness and the plane trip that it felt like I could peel it off my face.

Pete came over to where we were sitting, ‘They only take Yen.’

‘OK,’ I said and pulled myself up off the bench, grabbing Poppy’s hand.

We all piled out of the restaurant and headed to the convenience store next door in the hope of an ATM. By this stage everyone was getting ratty, Poppy was crying and saying she wanted to go home, Kai was complaining of stretchy legs and Jack and Noah were starting to whinge about food.

‘OK, chips, everyone grab a packet of chips,’ I said as we wandered down the aisles looking at food that was unfamiliar and at signs written only in Hiragana.

Pringles was the only brand we knew and no one besides me was game to try another. There was no ATM.

‘Ask the guy at the cash register,’ I said to Pete.

‘Ask him what?’

‘If he knows of any restaurants close by.’

Pete paid for the chips on visa and then asked, ‘Anywhere to eat?’ Miming a fork putting food into his mouth.

The young guy behind the cash register looked straight past him and answered in Japanese.

‘You ask,’ I said to Jack.

Jack, very bravely, went up to the guy and asked him in Japanese, if there was another restaurant around.

No luck though, the guy did the same as he had for Pete, looked straight past Jack and answered in Japanese that Jack had no chance of keeping up with.

Outside the shop Noah started laughing at Jack.

‘Hey buddy,’ Jack said, ‘you don’t know how brave that was.’

‘Yeah, very true, good on you Jack, you’re now our official guide for the next twenty four hours,’ Pete said.

We crossed the busy road again and went up past the hotel where we found a seven eleven and this time an ATM. It was weird to see your card spit out yen instead of dollars. Pete was keen to make sure we had enough for dinner so he took out one hundred thousand yen, yeah that’s right a thousand dollars and no the restaurant wasn’t expensive. It only dawned on Pete when we sat down to order that he’d taken out a thousand Australian dollars, way too much for our dinner which would only cost 600 yen per person, about six Australian dollars.

The bowls of soup we had were warm and salty, bean curd and pork. They filled our bellies, made the kids smile again and got rid of my headache. Don’t think they did anything for my dry skin though, Pete said I looked as bad as I did in my passport photo, not a good look.

Bed that night was one of the best places I’ve been. Clean sheets on a firm mattress, a dark room. Everyone slept for ten hours without moving.

The next morning after breakfast we decided to go in search of a temple we’d heard about. The plane didn’t leave until one forty five. After talking to the guy behind the desk at the hotel we figured we’d have just enough time. Yeah, I know, with our history risky, but from what we’d heard the temple was worth it.

We got in a taxi out the front of the hotel. It took us through Narita, past road works and traffic snarls, past boring square buildings with triangle rooves, just like the houses back home. But then as we got closer to the temple and could spot it high up on a hill, the landscape began to change. There were little shops that opened onto narrow footpaths, they looked more like market stalls. They were selling intricately decorated trinkets, dried fruit covered in sugar, parcels of rice wrapped in seaweed and then egg. The shape of the rooves began to change too, they were now concave like sails that had been caught in the wind, joined together at their apex.

When the taxi pulled up outside the temple and we all clambered out, I was disappointed to hear the noise of machinery. There were diggers and orange barricades, rollers flattening just laid pathways, truck loads of pebbles being spread, heavy boulders being moved and workmen in orange vests dotted everywhere. Like the Japan I’d seen out the taxi window it appeared the Buddhist temple was under construction as well.

We walked past the workmen and their machinery and headed up some stone stairs towards the buildings with their curved rooves and wooden pillars, gongs and statues of Budda adorned inside. The construction was left behind, we could no longer hear the trucks and pebbles being moved but were instead enveloped in a peace from centuries and centuries ago. That is until Poppy couldn’t get her wheels from her rolly shoes to stay out and then all we could hear was screaming, loud enough to make us walk away fast, pretend she was from some other Australian family who must be around somewhere.

There was a group of Buddhist monks in one temple praying. We got to hear them chant, listen to the gongs, watch as they left the temple and had wooden thongs put out for them to step into. Then we watched as they walked down the stairs into the sun in their bright orange robs, a large red umbrella held high above the head monk. Not an umbrella like you’d find at your house or mine but a big version of an umbrella that you’d find stuck in a cocktail at a bar.

We walked further up the hill, up the steps made out of carefully placed stones. More temples with cylindrical gutters whose down pipes emptied into huge steel buckets. Pete stopped to take more photos. The kids ran up to the temple, looked in and then danced back down the steps. From where we were I could see the temple at the top of the hill, the one that all the others cascaded down from. It had a bright green roof and was at least three stories high. We had ten minutes before we had to leave to catch the bus back to the hotel, I started heading for the top of the hill.
The kids had other plans. They’d found a stone stair track that wound down amongst tall trees into a gully. I went to call out to them, to tell them we were going the other way, but then realised my words would bounce around the serene silence like the clanging of a garbage tin in the middle of the night. I glanced up at the temple at the top of the hill and then followed them down the stairs.

As soon as I walked in under the trees I could see what had attracted them to the steps, the sound of a waterfall splashing into a creek. The kids were already there laughing, calling to each other.

‘Look over here, come this way,’ Jack called to the other three who were following.

I jogged down the steps, visions of wet shoes and wet clothes on the twelve-hour trip to Rome.

Kai spotted me on the steps, ‘Mum! Mum! Look at this! Come over here!’

They were all in the middle of the creek standing on large flat stepping stones which had been placed so you could walk to the waterfall. The stones also led too a large square which had been cut out of a rock to act as a shower. There was no water flowing into the shower area but looking up, into the dappled light, you could see where it would run over the mossy stones.

It looked like the type of place you read about in fairy books as a kid, the type of place you dreamt about when you went to sleep. The kids were giggling as they leapt from stone to stone.

‘Don’t fall in,’ I called stupidly, I should know by now that you never say to children around water. As soon as the words were out of my mouth Jack splashed one foot into the water, going in up to his knee.

‘Jack!’

Jack pulled his leg out as fast as it had gone in and slouched on a stone, his face buried in his knees. Then he looked up at me and laughed. Nothing was going to stop him enjoying the water he’d found, not even a wet shoe all the way to Rome.

Needless to say we missed the bus back to the hotel and ended up having to get a taxi, Pete in the front seat and the five of us squashed in the back with Poppy on my lap. The taxi got us back to the hotel much earlier than the bus would have giving us enough time for a serious game of handball. Pete thrashed everyone with his own made up rules, telling us of course you’re allowed to bounce it into the tennis net on the full, it’s up to the other person to get it before it hits. Yeah right.

We became so engrossed in the handball game and whose rules we should follow that we almost missed the bus to the airport. Pete had to hold it up while we raced to gather our things from the room. The Japanese people who we’d made wait all smiled and nodded as we walked down the middle of the bus, my backpack, so Pete told me later, banging into every second persons head.

The check in queue was easy this time, all our shampoo safely stowed away. While we were waiting in the queue in a Japanese man ran past us. He was running so fast that I thought he must have been a plain-clothes policeman or some sort of security guard on his way to stop a bomb going off. He had no bags in his hand, no ticket. He ducked under one of those seat belt barricades that retract on themselves, knocking it with his back, causing it to flip out of it’s pole and recoil. He stopped when he realised what he’d done, turned and came back to fix the barricade, then bowed to it in apology.

As the plane lifted off the tarmac all the kids waved out the window. They all wished they could stay. ‘August next year,’ I said, ‘and we’ll be back in the land of head bowing and smiles.’

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