My Vietnam Airlines flight to Tokyo (Narita) left Da Nang at just past midnight on 8 October and arrived at 7:30 the same morning. There is a two hour time difference between Japan and Vietnam; flight time was roughly five and a half hours. Narita is some distance from Tokyo, and there are a number of options for covering the distance. Taxi or car service would have busted my trip budget before I checked into my hotel, so they were out. My choices boiled down to an express train taking 50 minutes for around $20 or a limited express train (i.e., a train that makes several fewer stops than a local train) taking about an hour and fifteen minutes and costing about $7.
I opted for the $7 ride, first because I am cheap about expenses like this, and second, during a trip to Japan I would rather spend my money on sashimi than spending an additional $13 to save 25 to 30 minutes on a train ride. A third not unimportant consideration: Whichever train I chose, I would be arriving at my destination in Tokyo a bit before 10:30am and check-in time at my hotel was 3pm. Three o’clock? A bit late in the day for a check-in time, don’t you think? But all of the three hotels I booked in Japan had check-in at 3pm and check-out at 10am. And the place in Tokyo would not cut me even a little slack. Four and a half hours wandering around the hotel’s neighborhood on a couple hours of sleep after an all-night plane ride made for one grumpy curmudgeon by the time 3pm rolled around.
By the way, have I mentioned it was raining? I have lived almost 35 years in East and Southeast Asia, and this was my first visit to Japan. Rain on the first day of that long-awaited visit was definitely not on my wish list. It was not a hard driving rain, but it was hard enough that I used an umbrella, among various reasons, because I didn’t want my new, well-engineered, expensive, water-resistant but not waterproof camera directly exposed to the rain as I walked around waiting for check-in time for my hotel room to roll around. And just to dot this particular “i”, holding a camera and composing a photo while juggling an umbrella is not really my idea of a good time. Grumpy curmudgeon indeed.
It rained on my second day in Tokyo as well. Though after that, with the exception of a bit of drizzle in Kyoto, the weather for my remaining 13 days in Japan was lovely.
