Going Broke While Hauling Luggage (The Trip: Part 1)

I was sitting in the tourist information center for the second day in a row when it struck me that I'd been in Japan for over 48 hours and hadn't really done anything Japanese. The trip up until that point was a bust.

Damian, Dy, and I got off the plane only to find that Damian's credit cards didn't work. As he was relying on their use and getting cash advances for his financing of the trip, this was a major problem. While he did eventually find a way to get some cash, this started the trip off with frustration and kind of set the tone for the next few days.

On the plane trip to Japan, I hadn't slept. I never can sleep on planes for some reason. So when we got on the bus into Tokyo, I was running on fumes already. After the hour long trip on the bus, we lugged our bags up the street toward a youth hostel I found in my guide to Japan.

This was a bad idea.

After about an hour of lugging, and damn, my bags were heavy, we found the place. Damian went up to get us a room only to find they didn't have one. I looked up another hotel in the guide. We decided on a taxi this time.

Again, no rooms.

We lugged the bags another block to a nearby hotel. Damian went up to the desk and tried out his Japanese. Damian's Japanese was the best of the group, better than Dy's and FAR better than mine. Still, we found on the trip that his limited vocabulary wasn't much help. Occasionally, he had a phrase that came in handy, but by and large we were better off speaking in English. That was the case at this hotel.

After about a half hour of trying to figure things out, we finally got a room...and paid WAY too much for it. I was on a pretty tight budget, and a $100 a night place was breaking me, but the rooms were comfortable, albeit small, and had internet access.

I slept well.

The next day we tried to figure out a course of action. After calling several hotels, and getting several "fulls," we finally decided to go to the tourist information center. Luckily, it was close by.

It took several hours to book a room near Mount Fuji, then one in Kyoto, then one in Hakata. It took even more time to get our ferry to Korea set up and get our train tickets. The day was done by the time we had everything in order and I was a few hundred dollars lighter just from the train tickets. We hadn't even touched the pay for the hotels yet.

We had a Japanese dinner that night, walked around a bit, and then I just headed off to bed.

The next day started out much the same. We had to take a trip back to the tourist information center to get some stuff about the ferry and our finaly hotel worked out. It was already into the afternoon by the time we really got going looking around, and damn, it was hot by then.

The first place we check out were some imperial gardens. The were nice, but rather underwhelming. Luckily, the palace we went to afterward made up for them. It was beautiful, but people were only allowed in two days a year. This was not one of the days.

We walked around and took pictures. We got a guard to pose this us. We watched some turtles in a moat and saw a cool fountain. It was nice--really, the first nice part of the trip. I was happy, but I still couldn't get over all the time we'd wasted already and was still in a pretty pissy mood. I'm sure I wasn't the greatest of travel companions because of that.

After, we headed back to the train station and caught a bus out to Mount Fuji and the second leg of our trip.