Day 5-9: Tokyo

A little bit behind with the blog now so I'll try to summarise a couple of the days rather than going into detail!

We spent a few days visiting a few various areas of the city; Shinjuku, Asakasa and Ginza to name a few. We mostly just browsed the shops and observed the people. The Japanese are so orderly, extremely patient, polite and punctual!

The nights were mostly spent in the lounge of the hostel chatting, watching a movie or two and having a few beers.

The nights also gave me a chance to start reading my book which I had been meaning to do since the start of the trip. Bill Bryson: Down Under. Normally it takes me a while to get into a book but all it took to get me interested in this one was to flip it over and read the blurb. "It is the driest, flattest, hottest, most infertile and climatically aggressive of all the inhibited continents and still Australia teems with life - a large portion of it quite deadly. In fact, Australia has more things that can kill you in a very nasty way than anywhere else". FANTASTIC! Especially since we're going to end up there in a couple of months!

It was strangely entertaining, reciting certain parts of the first 100 pages to Gav, explaining how of the world's ten most poisonous snakes, all are Australian. How five of its creatures - the funnel-web spider, box jellyfish, blue-ringed octopus, paralysis tick and stonefish - are the most lethal of their type in the world. How even the cutest and fluffiest of caterpillars can lay you out in a nip. Luckily we will only have to deal with things like the box jellyfish and Bluebottle jellyfish (I hope!!).

We also decided one night that, if possible, we wouldn’t mind paying Mount Fuji a visit, especially with it only being a 2 hour coach journey away (even less on the Shinkansen (Bullet Train)). We came across a tour operator who offered a ride up Mount Fuji, a cruise on Lake Ashi and sweeping views of celebrated Hakone National Park from Mt Komagatake which we would access by a cable car ride. We decided this would be the best option in order to make a good day of it and booked it.

The coach for the trip was set to leave at 9am sharp and given the punctuality of these people, we knew we had to be there with plenty of time to spare. The fact that we had three trains transfers to get to the bus station didn’t help! We got up at 7.15, got ourselves ready and left to conquer the metro underground trains during one of the busiest times of the day! Now I don't know if you know what the world record for people fitting into a Mini is. It's 21 (See below). Now imagine that on a larger scale, say a train carriage! You get the picture.

The only way to get onto a train, if you make it this far, is shear brute force. They have ten carriages compared to our measly six and trains come on an average of about two minutes apart, yet every train is packed to the brim. What seems to be the most favorable approach for people to get on these already full trains is to turn backwards, place one hand inside the carriage door and use that as a leaver to push yourself and everybody behind you backwards so you can get in far enough so the door won't close on anything valuable. When inside, the concentration of people is so high the body heat acts as a sauna and you sweat out most of your body weight. Despite this, the Japanese seem to have mastered the ability to sleep while standing up. They simply just lean on the person next to them and away they go until their stop!

We made it to the last train transfer, bought the final ticket for it and attempted to go through the gate to get to the line. Now it wasn’t till later that I learned Tokyo Metro is run by a number of different operators, most of which don't really like each other and involve purchasing a completely new ticket for their line. This was totally unknown to us at the time and after failing to get the gate barrier to let us through numerous times, we went to the gate helpdesk, told them the ticket wasn’t working, only to be issued a refund for that ticket and be sent on our way. That unfortunately didn’t help answer our question, so we went back to the ticket issuing machine and bought the same ticket again, hoping that if we tried a different gate we would be let through!

No.

Time was getting on so we ran outside and hailed a taxi. Jumping in we explained where we needed to go but unfortunately the taxi driver didn’t understand. We handed him the booking confirmation sheet for our tour which had the address of the bus station on and the driver SLOWLY reached into his pocket to pull out a pair of glasses. "Oh God" I muttered to Gav. "AHHH BUS STATIONS!??" he said.

The next half hour must have been the most indirect driving route to this bus station. I think we must have gone down almost every side road in that part of Tokyo and by five to nine I knew we were doomed.

At 9.15 we pulled up in front of the Bus Station, literally threw the money at the driver and jumped out to make a dash for the bus terminal. We got inside, reached the tour check in desk and were told we had JUST missed the bus. It had gone! Our faces dropped, we turned and started to walk away. "Hey Mister, wait!" someone shouted. We turned to see one of the women calling us over. She told us to wait and just a few seconds later a guy appeared. He offered us a refund or the chance to go on the following days tour! "We'll go tomorrow please!" I said.

Since we didn’t have anything to do for the rest of the day we decided to book ourselves in for an afternoon tour of Tokyo which would visit some temples, the Imperial Palaces gardens (which strangely had orange grass), a popular tourist shopping street and finally a "cruise" downriver back to the bus station.

During this tour I received my fortune which consisted of things like "Do not take a trip", "Do not travel", "The sick person will not get better", "The person will not wait" and other fantastic things like this...

After the tour we actually managed to navigate our way back to the hostel with the trains, a relief since we would be making the journey again the following day. Upon returning to the hostel I think I went to sleep straight away. There was no way I was going to miss that bus again the next day!