Big Adventures, Little World

Tokyo is nothing like any city in Australia. That is evident before even leaving Narita Airport! Both flights, Adelaide to Melbourne & Melbourne to Tokyo had no problems and I arrived safely. Got a couple of hours sleep to go with the 2 hours I had the night before, so I should have been feeling pretty tired. But with all the excitement I was going strong. After getting through customs and picking up my bag I found the place to rent a Japanese SIM card to keep in touch with Belinda. After about a half hour of the people at the shop changing settings on my phone, it eventually worked, on which I immediately called Bel to her joy, (possibly due to the wine she was drinking, and spilling).

From there I began the daunting task of navigating my way on to the Japanese rail system. See the map below to see if you can work it out. Luckily, Belinda had written me some instructions, and with a few SMS’s and some help from the station attendants, I got onto the right train, and was heading in the right direction.

This would be even simpler if I only had to catch one train, but no, I had to catch 3! And with only a few minutes between changing trains, and me not too sure on what I was doing, I think I missed all the ones Belinda had told me to catch. This wasn’t a problem though as the trains run fairly constantly. It just resulted in me eventually getting to the hostel some 5 hours after the plane had touched the ground!
So I checked in at the hostel about 12:15am Japan time and headed for my room and straight to bed, where I fell asleep for some much needed rest for big day of more train changing and touristy things.