Day 1 – To To To Tokyo!

The day has arrived! Departure day to Tokyo. We’re flying on Zipair, Japan Airlines’ budget subsidiary that recently launched a direct route from Vancouver to Tokyo. There’s no free food, water, headphones, blankets, nor entertainment screens. Henry did get his own seat, however, so he was living in luxury (they don’t allow infants to be on lap). We’re going very lightweight on this trip, since we’ll be hiking sections and don’t want to have to cart around luggage. Between us we have a single big backpack and the Henry-carrier (which has up to 30L of additional storage for stuff).

The travel went smoothly. Starting off in the lounge in Vancouver at 7:30am, we filled up on lounge sausage, eggs, potatoes, and lots of misc and also stashed plenty away for the flight. The flight was 10 hours and was reasonable. Henry napped for the first 2 hours and last hour, but caused plenty of chaos in between.

We touched down in Tokyo at 1pm Tokyo time and proceeded to try to find the arrival “lounge” we had access to, that was apparently a restaurant, but named just with the Japanese characters for “eel”. The restaurant did indeed just serve eel. We each had our half eel bento box (which Henry also enjoyed) and meekly had a few sips of our eel-liver soups (not daring to eat any of the misc blobs floating in it though).

We took the bus into Tokyo station (1300 yen per person), which took an hour and was pleasant. It was then a 40 minute walk to our hostel, “Tokyo Central Youth Hostel”, where we reserved a private four bed dorm. We settled in to this odd hostel on the 18th floor of an office building, had our separate naked communal “onsen” baths, grabbed some dinner from 7-11 (well more like Viki started getting hangry and ordered food to appear in front of her, with no additional clarification of what kind). We ended up with some milk for Henry and some kind of chicken karrage and rice that we microwaved and shared. We’ve just witnessed a beautiful fiery red sunset and are now ready to fully pass out at 7:20pm.