Japan is supremely well organised so when we got off the ferry there was a shuttle bus waiting to take passengers into town and everything went swimmingly. Even more surprising was that the man on duty in the ticket office of the railway station spoke excellent English, which made getting our tickets to Osaka very easy.
Sakaiminato is a small, sleepy little place famous for GeGeGe no Kitaro characters. There are statues of monsters (Yokai) all along the main street.
One little monster.
And some more monsters outside the railway station.
Monsters on the train.
Japanese train tickets.
The local train from Sakaiminato to Yonaga.
The train from Yonaga to Okayama.
The Shinkansen bullet train from Okayama to Osaka.
Shinkansen travel quite fast as can be
seen from Henry's phone. We did break the 300 km/h barrier but have no
photo. The other thing about Shinkansen is that they are very
comfortable, there is none of the shake, rattle and roll of high-speed
trains in Europe.
GPS map from our Shinkansen ride. The position of the train is the blue arrowhead and the speed is given in the top-right.
From Shin-Osaka station we made our way by metro to our hotel, Hotel Claiton. Why this particular hotel? As mentioned above, Japan is not a cheap country, although by no means as expensive as one might imagine, providing one takes care. The hotel was reasonably-priced and in an excellent location, very close to a metro station. Of course, you get what you pay for, and the room was rather small, but this was no problem for us because we were only there to sleep, and as with all Japanese hotels, it is important to ask for a non-smoking room.
To keep costs down, we didn't bother with the hotel breakfast. We had a rhythm where we drank some juice in the hotel room in the morning (to get going), set off on the day's activities, had a morning coffee and sandwhich somewhere, ate a late lunch in a restaurant but taking care to get the lunchtime offers, which are very reasonable, and then picked up some evening snacks from a local convenience store, for example, Lawson's.
One of the differences between this trip and my travels as a student was that while we were by no means 'splashing the cash' we didn't have to turn over every penny before spending it. This greatly reduces stress levels, and meant we had some room for impulse purchases, like two Japanese peaches we bought from the high-class Daimaru store. They looked like the peaches from Roald Dahl's book, 'James and the Giant Peach'.
Our trip as a whole was not as expensive as one might imagine, although it is not something that I could afford to do every year. The costs were kept down by the fact that we spent so many days on the train across Russia, meaning that there was no need for hotels and limited opportunities for spending money. Costs in Russia are reasonable, at least on a western salary, and we tried to behave sensibly. The reason for the roundabout route back from Japan, we didn't take a direct Finnair flight home, was also to save money. The cost of one-way airline tickets is often prohibitive, generally more than an economy return. However, the low-cost airline Air Asia has a flight from Osaka to Malaysia, and Malaysia Airline's policy on one-way tickets is not as ludicrous as that of many other airlines. Of course, this suited us perfectly since we have relatives in Malaysia and could thus kill two birds with one stone.
