Tokyo Trip - Day Five

KODAK 2005 12 30 09 19 12
Originally uploaded by Yasashisa.

G'day. Well, our trip to Tokyo had to end sometime. We went to Tokyo by night bus, but we soon found that just before New Years is a very busy time to travel in Japan. The busses were full for our trip home. Furthermore, the cost of taking the super express bullet train, the shinkansen, was almost a $150 for one person. Well, at this particular time of year, another option presented itself. There is a ticket called the Seishun Juhachi Kippu. This is basically a ticket aimed at helping young people travel in the holidays. What is does is it gives its holder unlimited train travel for a period of five days on local or rapid trains (read: not express, limited express, or super express). This ticket can be shared by several people. One person can use it on five separate days or five people can use it on one day, provided they travel together. All together, the ticket cost about 11,800 yen (approximately $120 Canadian). It amounts to about a little over 20 bucks a day. It was with a little trepidation that Charity and I considered this option for a cheap, although by no means speedy, return trip to Osaka.

We set out fairly early in the morning, leaving the Hotel New Star Ikebukuro and having our ticket stamped twice (once for me and once for Charity). We headed to see Tokyo Tower, which we had kinda seen from a distance in Odaiba, but I wanted to see it close up. It's not a beautiful sight to behold, like Fujisan, but it is an interesting sight. It's taller by a bit than the Eiffel Tower in Paris, plus its painted a gaudy orange and white. My guidebook on Japan suggested that the tower is actually slated for destruction in the coming years, since it has outlived the purpose for which it was constructed, that is, television broadcasting. With Japan moving to an entirely digital transmission system in 2009, there will be no practical purpose for the tower. I don't know what will become of the wax museum and shopping centre they built under it.

After Tokyo Tower, we headed to Tokyo station and caught the Tokaido line that we knew we needed to follow all the way to Osaka. I had researched the trip before we left and knew which stations we needed to transfer at along the way. I was a little uneasy, though. The schedule I had found on the internet charted a course from Tokyo station leaving at 8:00 am. They said you could get all the way to Hiroshima by midnight. We were leaving Tokyo at about 10:15 am, so I didn't know if we'd make the same connections. By my estimation, it should take about eight hours to get to Osaka, but if I was wrong, and it took ten or twelve, we could be in trouble. Heck, we could end up in some unknown corner of Japan for all I knew. After a few hours, though, it seemed as though things were going very smoothly, so I was able to relax and enjoy the ride.

The trip was actually quite enjoyable. We got to see a lot of the Japanese countryside on the return trip. We passed through Yokohama and Kawasaki. We saw orange groves covering a hillside in sweet, Christmasy orange goodness. For a good chunk of the trip, we were able to see Mount Fuji from a different perspective. We actually even got a view of the Pacific Ocean, and I can now say I've seen the Pacific Ocean from both sides. We were able to sit for most of the trip and the connections went very smoothly (except for the train that never arrived and just seemed to disappear from the schedule, but we didn't need that one too badly, as it turned out). We passed through some very snowy country. It was a long day, but we made it. We got into Osaka station around eight o'clock and caught the Kansai Airport Express. We made home by 8:38 pm. Not bad, if I do say so myself. Charity and I both agreed that we had done the right thing. We came back from Tokyo for a little over twenty bucks a piece and had the chance to see a lot of interesting scenery. We even saw a New York Giant, but that's a story for another time. We arrived home tired, but happy that our trip had gone so well. My foot, which had hurt for most of the trip, was still hurting rather badly, so we both got some much needed rest the next day. That's our trip. Please check out the pictures by clicking through the picture of Tokyo Tower above. Also, if you have any comments, please feel free to post them below. I'll be back soon with my story of when I visited the Osamu Tezuka comic book museum. Until then, take care.
-Joe