kyoto – AmbassadorNique

On day 5 I woke up, replied to some emails, released Episode 5 of Road to Fuji, had some iMessage conversations and napped a bit longer. We all got up around 630a re-organized our bags for checkout, ate breakfast at Starbucks and headed toward Kyoto to the Obubu Tea Farm which is in Wazuka, Japan. To be honest no one knew what to expect but this was an idea created by Rupert. We road from Osaka to Kyoto, took a local train, bus and walked before we reached our destination around 11am. From the time we entered to the time as left our host Manchu and his interns showed us nothing but hospitality. We tried 10 different teas that opened my eyes to teas outside of the usual strong bitter traditional Japanese tea. We ate tea cake and even had green tea noodles for lunch. We drove up 2 mountains to see and feel the tea fields. Although the tour was only to supposed to take 4 hours we spent an extra 2 hours learning more about tea, telling stories and buying tea. Monchu even gave us a ride back to Kyoto station which was about an hour and a half away. We talked to Manchu about Japan, his family, his business and life. We were sad leaving the farm, but even sadder to leave Manchu. Obubu has a website Facebook twitter and YouTube where you can watch the tea cultivating process!

We boarded a bullet train from Kyoto to Nagoya ate, checked in, debriefed about the day and slept.