After we arrived at Haneda we breezed through customs and immigration after being seen by what we presumed was a trainee immigration guard. Well he had a supervisor lurking over him and a supervisor lurking over the supervisor so someone was being monitored. They were polite and didn't ask more than the minimum of questions about how long and the purpose of the trip.
Once through I called the owner of the AirBnB we were staying at who said they'd meet us at the apartment in about 45 minutes. So, it's time to play navigate the foreign city transportation network.
Actually it was simple enough. It took us only a minute or so to figure out how to buy tickets on the Tokyo Monorail from Haneda to Hamamatsuchou station in Minato. This offered us our first ground level (well slightly elevated) view of Tokyo. Not always the most pleasant areas, mostly industrial and old tenement blocks, but some decent views our over the bay to the east.
Upon arrival at Hamamatsuchou we made our way, after a couple of false starts, downstairs to the taxi ranks. I gave the taxi driver the card I had prepared with the address on it, but unfortunately he seemed unsure as to exactly where it was. After a minute or so I managed to convince him it was near Akasaka Sacas (more on that in another post) and we were off.
The drive through Minato was relatively nice. Zoe was amazed that we drove right past some shrines and by the Tokyo Tower. Despite only covering a couple of miles we got to see some sights.
Unfortunately things went wrong from there. The driver managed to get us to Akasaka Sacas but couldn't get us to our destination. My Japanese apparently wasn't sufficient to direct him the route I was sure we needed to take to get to the apartment, so we ended up paying and walking.
Walking in Tokyo at night is perfectly safe, and the Akasaka area of Minato is as safe as any, so performing the walk wasn't an issue from a safety perspective. However we'd been up for seven and a half days at this point (I'm not sure, maybe 27 hours?) and were tired. True the walk was only about 700m, but with luggage that seems further. So off we went, trailing suitcases for a minor walk.
Oh, and did I mention the hills? Well it turns out that Tokyo is actually, like most of Japan, extremely hilly. As luck would turn out, Akasaka is one of the hillier areas of downtown. And yes, you guessed it, our apartment was up one of these hills.
This is the hill. Imagine this while tired, at night, trailing luggage.
So yes, it was an interesting walk. But we did eventually make it.
Finally we reached the apartment and only had to wait a couple of minutes for our host to turn up and show us in. Great guy that he is he had just been to a konbini moments before to get us some supplies to get us through the night. Noodles, snacks, milk, butter, bread and of course beer.
After saying goodnight to our host we unpacked and prepared for our first night.
But first, we made our own trip to the local 7-11.
No comments:
Post a Comment