Preparing…
February 28, 2009 - 22.04It’s been a month since my last post. While half of that time was spent being lazy, the latter half of this month had been rather busy for me. I’ve finally booked tickets to Japan. Since I’m not joining any tours, I had to do a lot of research. This will be my second trip to the Land of the Rising Sun. Last time, I went on a 5 day tour with my sister and two aunts to Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe. This upcoming trip will be much longer and cover a (somewhat) broader area.
My original Japan plan was two weeks in the Tokyo area. My friend, Missa, is teaching English there and her contract will be completed at the end of March. She’ll stay behind for two weeks in April before flying home. This was the window of time I had plan to visit and have her show me around Tokyo and its neighbouring area. However, a little over two weeks ago, another friend of mine had a few days of holiday to use up from work and want to take a short trip to Hiroshima around March. She asked me if I’m interested and I ended up moving my departure date up a week in order to tour Hiroshima before Tokyo.
After booking my ticket, I started looking up information on Hiroshima such as sightseeing spots, hotel, food, transportation. This is my first time planning a trip to a location where the main language isn’t a language I know. While there are a lot of English sites with information on Hiroshima, the Japanese ones always provide more information. Additionally, many official site of tourist locations are in Japanese only. I literally got a headache looking for hotels one night. This site I was using, Rakuten, showed a lot more hotel listings on its Japanese site than English site. Cheaper ones too. Eventually, my friend and I ended up booking the hotel on the hotel’s official sites, both of which are in pure Japanese.
Another thing that gave me a headache is transportation. The train system in Japan is so complicated. There are A LOT OF trains running in Japan but they are operated by various companies. I intended to buy the JR pass which allows unlimited riding on the JR trains including Shinkansen train. However, that also means I’ll have to pay for trips on non-JR trains. With this being a budget trip, I’d like to avoid that as much as possible. Since the city of Hiroshima is not that big, we had to plan which other neighbouring towns to visit while minimizing the traveling time.
Trip planning is serious business. :P More to come later…
