Fucuoka

Cruising has one major downside. Just as you begin to understand a place, it's already time to leave. Fortunately, Fukuoka packs a surprising amount into a single day.

Our first stop was Nanzoin Temple, home to one of the world's largest reclining bronze Buddha statues. You don't really appreciate its scale until you're standing next to it. The temple itself is hidden amongst forests and walking trails, making it one of the most peaceful places we visited on the whole trip. After the bright lights and constant noise of Shanghai, the silence was almost suspicious.

Back in the city, things became a little less spiritual and a lot more... Japanese.

Only in Japan can you go from a centuries-old temple to drinking coffee surrounded by miniature pigs, then continue to a shopping arcade, another shrine, and finish the afternoon inside a futuristic shopping mall. Somehow it all feels perfectly normal.

The kids, unsurprisingly, declared the mini-pig café the highlight of the day. I still can't decide whether it was a café with pigs or a pig enclosure that happened to serve coffee.

We wandered through Kawabata Shopping Arcade, stopped at Kushida Shrine, admired the enormous festival floats, and ended up in Canal City Hakata, where modern Japan happily takes over again with fountains, toy shops and enough restaurants to make choosing lunch unnecessarily difficult. It's exactly the sort of city I enjoy: traditional without feeling like a museum, modern without trying too hard.

Before we knew it, we were back at the port watching our floating hotel patiently waiting for us.

Fukuoka wasn't the city we were most looking forward to before the trip.

Ironically, it may have been the one we'd most like to come back to.

Sometimes the best places are the ones you weren't expecting.