Tuesday 23rd / Wednesday 24th April
It turns out that BA’s Tuesday lunchtime flights to Tokyo are very quiet. No idea whether that’s always the case but it was for us. For an 11.5 hour flight it was remarkably smooth – I don’t think we had any turbulence at all!
We both managed a little bit of sleep – but not enough given that after landing in Tokyo it would take us another 9 hours of travelling to get to Hiroshima.
We got through immigration fine, and our bags were waiting for us on the carousel, but as soon as we entered Japan proper our ‘money-saving’ schemes caught up with us.
First Ben had to find a post office to collect his SIM card before we headed to the JR travel office to activate our JR passes. They may be worth it financially but be prepared to have to deal with an unnecessary level of faff to get them – it took about 15 minutes of the staff filling out different forms on top of a 20 minute queue before we had the passes.
After a series of shenanigans which I have come to think of as ‘learning experiences’ (including an almost unheard of DELAYED train) we managed to get to Hiroshima. By that point however it was 6pm (we had landed at 9am and had been up for almost 30 hours).
The Shinkansen trains are pretty special, the seats are large and the legroom spacious. Their major drawback is the lack of luggage room – only a small area behind the back seats in the carriage is available, which means people often have to sit with bags at their feet (we were lucky however and managed to squeeze our bags in). Feeling quite jetlagged I ended up sleeping through most of the journey.
We travelled on two different Shinkansen, which we discovered come in two sizes with 8 and 16 cars. This can be confusing (especially to travellers) as in Japan there is a platform etiquette which requires you to stand at a marked point on the platform to begin a queue for your car (we’re British so we love a good queue). This means you have to double check that you are standing in the right place as this will change depending on the size of the train you are getting.
Whilst there is a food cart that travels up and down the train frequently, we found that a bento box is the best thing to snack on. This is a small box of food which you can buy at numerous station outlets before you board. There is usually a wide variety of different meals to choose from and they are reasonably priced. We went for a duck and egg and rice based box, which was delicious until it fell on the floor…
So after arriving in Hiroshima and getting a tram to our hotel we decided that all we really wanted was to eat a quick dinner and then sleep. So I sent Ben out for what I was craving: Mcdonalds. He came back with the next best thing – the Japanese version of a cheeseburger, chips and coke, which we shared before succumbing to jetlag.
Daily distance travelled: 10,251km
Total distance travelled: 10,251km