Travelling is all spontaneity right! Whilst in Phnom Penh a few of us decided to book a flight to Japan a week later.. not wild at all. We still had a bit of time in Cambodia, and then had already planned to travel to Thailand in this time so booked our flights from Bangkok and before we knew it, we were off to Tokyo for our first stop on our Japanese adventure!

We had a night flight from Bangkok to Narita so landed pretty early in the morning, and after spending at least an hour clearing Japanese customs (and getting a really cool sticker!) we got a train to the city. We were staying in one of the suburbs, Minami-Senju, as Japan is significantly more expensive than the countries we’ve travelled so far, so right in the city centre was out of the question. We were so tired once we got to our hostel so we had a couple hours kip and then got the train into Tōkyō to meet up with another person travelling Japan on our group trip, wandered around for a little while to explore some of the neighbourhood and then headed for some dinner, which was insane!

We went to a Yakiniku restaurant, a fancy way of saying your meat is served raw and you grill it yourself, but we had so much fun cooking up our beef! We ordered three different flavours as we were super keen to try everything, as well as some rice and kimchi to get the real deal. It was well worth the expense (again, another reality hit that Japan was going to be well more spenny than Cambodia and Thailand!) and we really enjoyed our evening. We then had to scramble to get the train back to where we were staying as we discovered that trains have a midnight curfew here! It really was an early night for us, we definitely hadn’t been home this early in a long time.

Day two, we didn’t get going until late morning / early afternoon but we were keen to make the most of the time we had in Tokyo in the sunshine. We walked to Tokyo SkyTree which was amazing and we saw some proper local culture which was really cool, we walked past a local police station and saw some wanted posters (thankyou to the translate app for helping us), as well as some quaint little streets that really gave us the vibe for the local neighbourhood. We made it to SkyTree in time for sunset which was mesmorising, watching the sun set over the Tokyo skyline really did make us smile, you could just about see Mt. Fuji in the background too which made us even more excited to visit that soon! The SkyTree was part of a big complex of shops and street food restaurants and more so we wandered around here for a little bit and then found a Godiva chocolate shop (spenny!) but I have been craving chocolate, like proper chocolate, for weeks whilst on this trip as you just can’t get it anywhere decent, we grabbed a milkshake, which hit the spot good and proper before carrying on our night!

From here we headed to Shibuya City Centre which is when it really hit us that we were in Tokyo! We walked across Scramble Crossing and saw some of the sights of where F&F Tokyo Drift was filmed. We then saw people doing the Mario Kart racing around the streets and got so excited thinking about doing this when we’re back here at the end of our trip. We found somewhere to eat near the square, but when we got in the menu was proper local (and proper gross to us), like tongue, intestines, horse meat, guts, giblets, you name it. We quickly left without much hesitation at all and found a dumpling and gyoza restaurant so grabbed some food and then explored a little more. I definitely wanted to come back here and spend more time! Annoying part of travelling though, with having just a backpack, it is so difficult to not do all the shopping in the world, it’ll have to wait for another trip.

Day three in Tokyo and it was raining, and we had yet another realisation that we only have shorts and tshirts.. and one hoodie (because it’s warm in pretty much all of South East Asia whether high or low season) and that we were about to get very cold! It was only 19°, but for the last five weeks, we’ve been averaging around 36° each day, so it felt cold to us with the added rain in the air, but we did not want to waste the day here. We looked online to see what we could do that was as indoor as possible so that we could still have a good time, and found a Hop On, Hop Off Sky Bus that had three different routes that we could do over the course of a day, so we figured that would be a good way to see a lot, stay relatively dry (other than when we hopped off) and still have a good time.

We made our way to Tōkyō station to jump on the bus and actually had a really nice day, we got to see so much of the city in just five hours which we never would have seen on foot, and it’s given us some places where we’re super keen to visit properly when we’re back in Tokyo too! We managed to catch glimpses of Tokyo Tower, Tokyo Bay, Shinjuku City Centre, Rainbow Bridge and so much more. Honestly, as much as I’m convinced these things are tourist traps, we actually had quite a fun day which allowed also allowed us to chill out for a bit too.

We finished with Shake Shack for dinner in the evening and then headed back to our hostel to pick up our bags before heading to Shinjuku to catch our overnight bus to Kyoto, we knew we had a very long night ahead of us so was mentally preparing oursevles for the journey about to commence. I’ll be back for a pt.2 in Tokyo as we are coming back for a few more days at the end of next week to finish our trip! For now, we’re off to Kyoto. See you there, Mads x