Turning Japanese, I Think I’m Turning Japanese, I Really Think So....

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I thought I’d resurrect our travel blog for our next adventure to Japan. It’s been nearly 5 years since our last foreign holiday, if we exclude a long weekend in Athens last year, and Japan seems to be a place worth immortalising in our blog.

Our holiday started on 17th Oct 2015 (arriving in Japan on 18th), and lasted two weeks, returning on 31st Oct 2015.

I was not looking forward to another long haul flight. And the Air China website's inability to check us in online for an unknown reason didn't help matters. But the check in process at Heathrow was pretty simple, despite the electronic terminal also refusing to check us in, as a nice Air China representative checked us in and saw that we were both tall, so kindly gave us emergency exit seats with lots of legroom on the first (10 hour) flight. This made the flight bearable, albeit neither of us got very much sleep. My tablet did me proud though, playing through two films and a good hour's game playing and only using up 50% of its battery.

The change at Beijing was simple enough, though we were lucky to have a 3 hour changeover as the queues for security were pretty horrendous - doesn't bode well for our 1 hour changeover on the way back. It was good also that I had some Chinese currency left over from a previous trip, so we could buy a few thing at the airport before catching our flight to Japan.

We arrived in Japan completely knackered at around 9 in the evening. Luckily Audley Travel had arranged for us to be met by a local representative, and she helped us get our Japan rail pass, and also booked us in on various of the train journeys we needed to make during out holiday, and then found us our taxi transport to Kyoto (the airport was in Osaka, so it was an hour's drive to Kyoto). None of this was particularly difficult had we had to do it ourselves - our first taste of Japanese efficiency - but after around 20 hours on planes and in airports with very little sleep, we were glad of the help!

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