Japan (Day 1) – Prep and Travel

Ok guys, this is it! This is the trip I’ve been wanting to do for years now and I finally have the chance. As many may already know, I’m between jobs and pushed out the start date for my next position so that I can take 2 1/2 weeks and travel Japan. It’s been a long time coming and I’m super excited to be making this trip and sharing as much as I can with y’all!

I feel like this post will mostly be for those interested in how I tackled my trip to Japan. I am making this trip alone, which is a big first for me so a lot of my preparation has been the result of a decent amount of research myself.

So tl;dr: If you’re only interested in the sights of Japan, skip this post.

Ok.

The first step I took was of course to look at my flight options. For this I mostly used the Hopper application on my phone. I love it because it lets be browse months at a time for when the cheapest travel dates might be to and from my destination. I know there are other sites and tools that let you do similar things, specifically Google Flights, but I happened to already have Hopper so I kinda stuck with that to get an idea of dates, and then dove deeper into the airlines themselves. Through using Hopper, I found out that flying to Osaka was actually cheaper than flying in and out of Tokyo. I also definitely knew that I wanted to spend a decent amount of time in Tokyo as well, so my first big decision was that I would start my trip in Osaka, arriving in the Kansai International Airport, and end it in Tokyo, leaving from Narita. This prevented me from having to find transportation back to Osaka to fly back home. It cost me a bit extra, but I figured that was all right, not knowing what it might cost me to travel back to Osaka from Tokyo. Overall, the flight cost me $1400, which is MUCH more expensive than what you should be able to find flights for given a few months in advance, but given my entire trip was pretty much planned in 2 weeks (from the time I received a job offer and established a start date to leaving), mine cost quite a bit more, but I was willing to bite that bullet given the opportunity.

Next, I definitely knew I needed a reliable way to get all around Japan, since I definitely wasn’t planning on staying in or near 1 city the entire time. In previous attempts to plan out a trip to Japan, and through recommendations from some friends, I decided on using the JR Pass. The JR Pass provides you access to all of the JR rail lines for what seemed like a reasonable price. For two weeks, 14 days, it cost me a little over $400. To me that still seemed a little expensive, but if I factored in what it would cost to rent a car for that time, which I knew I didn’t want to do, it would have easily been much more than that, and I would have had to worry about parking and navigating the Japanese roads. I also wanted the reliability so was willing to pay out for the JR Pass to avoid having to navigate individual lines or buses throughout my trip. This also left me with 2 days without transportation (my entire trip encompasses 16 days in Japan), but I’m planning on spending my last 5 in Tokyo, so I’m hoping I can navigate the city well enough by then, buying individual train or bus tickets shouldn’t be too bad.

From that point I got down to packing. I was going to be making this trip alone so I knew that I had a lot of flexibility in how I wanted to travel around. I’ve also read a number of blogs that explain how convenient it can be to pack light with essentials only, and buy what other items you need at your destination. So I decided to take this route. I bought myself a travel backpack from REI that I found and looked like fit my needs, and planned my packing around the space I would have available in that bag. After a bit of guestimating, I decided to try and pack clothes for a week and do laundry a couple times while in Japan. It actually turned out to be fairly accurate. I managed to fit quite a bit into the bag and managed to fit a good week’s worth of clothes without packing crazy tight. But this an experiment, we’ll see how I manage with just a single bag!

At this point I really just needed to decide on a few things I really wanted to do and plan those into my trip, finding accommodations along the way. For this I relied on Airbnb, HostelWorld, and a little bit of google searching for sites that could book me places in a capsule hotel (which was a must do for me :D). In total, to this point I haven’t spent more than $40 a night on accommodations. It may be possible to scrape some more off of that price, but I still wanted to stay at decently nice places, even if I hardly ever have a room to myself. All this being said, I still haven’t planned out about 4~5 nights of my time in Japan, as I mentioned I wanted to go into this open to making changes and finding what I enjoy experiencing most, so we’ll see how that $40 ceiling holds up!

That about encapsulates the vast majority of my planning though! I have a few cities planned and sites I want to see, but for the large portion of the trip I just plan on exploring, hopefully taking in recommendations from locals and other travelers, and going from there. I would add that I did come into this trip knowing I wanted to take in some rural sights and therefore do some hiking, but other than that I had very little agenda. A ton of people have been asking me “What’s the ONE thing you want to see most while in Japan?” And I honestly don’t know if I can answer that question. I want to see it all! I know that’s unrealistic, but all I can say is I want to see the shrines, temples, and architecture, I want to absorb the landscape, I want to live the life in the huge cities, and I want to experience the culture. That’s it. Oh! And stuff my face full of wonderful food. Wherever my trip or plans take me to fulfill those desires, that’s where I’ll go.

First Day Travels

So I’m actually writing this on my flight from Vancouver Canada to Osaka. If anyone reading this has read about my family’s experience to Australia, you’ll know that’s there almost never an international Frost flight that happens without hiccups. This was, unfortunately, no different. Literally minutes after I made it through DFW security and to my gate, I got a notification from Air Canada advising me that my flight from Vancouver to Osaka was delayed, 6 HOURS. I was like, well I guess thanks for giving me a heads up instead of telling me this at the gate, but that still completely botches a number of my plans. I immediately contacted my Airbnb host, who had previously mentioned that check in for them was only between 1 and 7 pm, and at this point I’d almost be arriving at midnight. They were gracious enough to work with me because they knew of the circumstance causing the delay, a typhoon was about to pass through Osaka! Welp, I guess I can’t complain too much for missing that. However I still have a couple things I need to work out. For example, I ordered a mobile WiFi router for my entire stay in Japan so I wouldn’t be without internet, but the pick up time ends at 9:00, which my arrival time is now 9:30. Also, the latest I can pick up my JR Rail pass which I essentially have to have to even make it to my Airbnb is 11:00pm. I should be able to make that hopefully, but I’m cutting that closer than I would like.

So yeah I ended up staying about 10 hours in the Vancouver international terminal. Luckily it’s fairly nice and not too crowded so that experience wasn’t terrible, but it lacked a lot of food options which was a bummer. I also attempted at one point to head outside and maybe visit some sights like Stanley Park, but discovered I had to have special permission to exit the terminal given that Canada wasn’t one of my actual stops. Once I realized the hoops I had to jump through I gave up on that idea. It came down to reading books, watching Netflix (the airport WiFi was pretty decent), and getting up every couple hours and walking the entire terminal to keep the blood flowing.

Now I’m finally on my flight to Osaka and I got super lucky that I got a window seat with an empty aisle seat next to me. I essentially have the row to myself, yay! Keep posted for more stuff tomorrow, my first day in Japan!

Update:
Ok… So the whole flight situation turned out to be a lot worse than expected. We got half way to Japan and then the pilot told us that we were turning back around to Vancouver because the Kansai International Airport was closed. Evidently it took a lot of damage during the recent typhoon, flooding the airport and damaging the only bridge into and out of the airport. So I experienced a 9 hour flight and got no where, yay.

Once back in Vancouver I managed to get a spot on the next flight out to Narita International Airport in Tokyo. This of course is quite a bit out of my way, but with the JR Pass I already bought, getting to Osaka from Tokyo was already paid for, just another few hours. Luckily, this flight had no hiccups and I made it to Osaka at about 10:00pm.

All in all I spent about 48 hours between Dallas and Tokyo, and then another 3.5 to Osaka by bullet train (Skinkansen). Not the best scenario, but hey, I made it!

Here are some evening photos of my train ride to Osaka.

Day 2 in Japan ->