Trip to Japan

Millions of men in dark suits, crowded subway trains, sushi, taxi drivers with white gloves, neon lights, earth quakes, capsule hotels, sake, sumo wrestling, samurais, geisha, bullet trains, toilets so advanced that you need an instruction manual to use them, manga, polite people, Lost in Translation….this is our trip report from JAPAN.

A short summary
The dream team Nikki and Gard on another adventure :-) This time we headed for Japan and we travelled in the period May 15th to May 28th 2005. We started out in Tokyo where we stayed for about a week. We used a Japan Rail Pass to get to Nagoya (the World Expo) and after that we went to Kyoto where we stayed 5 nights and we used this as a home base to see Kyoto itself, Osaka, Hiroshima, Kobe, Himeji etc. I hope that this trip report can help others that are going to Japan. Get in touch if you have any questions or comments and I’ll do my best to answer. All pictures are taken by Nikki and Gard with our Canon Powershot S1 IS camera (now available in a S2 version).
Prelude
So why Japan? Through movies and books we have become a bit fascinated by the Japanese culture. We also like to travel to destinations that are different compared to Norway/South Africa. One of our worries was that it would be a very expensive trip as the rumour has it that everything is expensive in Japan. Another concern was the language problem as we got an impression that English is not widely spoken. But we found out that the rumours where exaggerated and I hope that this trip report will show that.

Planning a trip is important and, as usual, we bought a guidebook in the DK Eyewitness series from Amazon. This gave us some idea of what to expect but we also used the internet to try and get an understanding of what to see, what to do and where to go while in Japan. After searching for a while we ended up buying tickets with www.reisebutikken.no and we got the tickets for the reasonable amount of about 6500 kroner each (about 800€). We were quite late when it came to booking hotels in Japan. We started searching for hotels on different websites and local travel agencies and it was hard to understand where it would be best to stay in such a big city as Tokyo. Our travel agency came up with a suggestion to stay near Shinagawa station but I’m not sure that would have been so great…it seemed to be a bit outside of town. In the end we booked a room at The New Otani hotel in the Akasaka district. We booked the hotel using Expedia and it cost us 180 US dollars per night. In Kyoto we booked a room at Hotel Gimmond and we booked this directly on the hotels homepage (www.gimmond.co.jp/kyoto/khome-e.htm) and we got the room for about 95 US dollars per night. We also stayed a couple of nights at the Akasaka Excel Tokyu near the New Otani. This hotel was booked through Asiarooms and Expedia at about 160 US dollars. We were quite happy with staying in the Akasaka area by the way. From the subway station Akasaka-mitsuke it was only a few minutes to Ginza, Shinjuku and Shibuya