Today we head back to Tokyo and the final part of our Japan trip. Our train left at 9.38 and Miko had told us that they wouldn’t let us onto the platform until about 9.15 as the platform is very narrow so after breakfast we collected our shoes, checked out and walked down to the train station. The good luck I drew yesterday at the temple is obviously working for us as we are going to spend a lot of today on a train and having had a couple of really nice sunny days it is raining today and if we have to have April showers having them on a travel day is a good thing. We arrived at the station about 10 past nine and decided to carry our cases down the stairs to the platform rather than queue for the lift which meant that we were actually first in line to board the train this also gave us a ring side seat for them joining the trains! A train came from each direction and they were then joined together just down the platform from us, then at 9.38 exactly we pulled out of the station and started the first part of our journey. It is interesting that we have only been in the area a couple of days but in that time a lot of new blossom has come out and the countryside looks a bit more colourful despite the low cloud and mist! As scheduled we arrived in a very wet Nagoya exactly on time and we walked round to platform 15 for a our final bullet train journey of the trip. It’s so easy working our way round Japan on the trains, last night we had looked up which platform we would arrive at and where our next train would leave from, all very civilised and as expected with the Japanese efficiency at exactly 12.35 we pulled out of Nagoya bound for Tokyo. As we are on this train until about 2pm we settled down with our books and picnic lunch of crisps, biscuits and a banana which is slightly different to the breakfast the guy on the other train had which was sushi and beer not a bad lunch but he was eating it at 10.00 in the morning! We arrived at the station and for the first time the instructions on how to get to the hotel weren’t as clear as they could have been, not helped by the fact that we hadn’t actually completed our journey, we were not at the station near the hotel we still had one more journey to make! So having got on the final train of today’s journey we then made it to Shimbashi station all set for the 7 minute walk directly to the hotel – didn’t quite work out like that even resorting to using google maps on the phone meant that we had one slight miscalculation but we eventually arrived, Chris survived the ride up to the 25th floor reception in the lift that has an outside view and on the plus side our room on the 30th floor has a fantastic view. We didn’t bother to unpack we just dumped our cases in the room then went back down to the bar for a drink – not sure what it is about these ‘travel’ days that make them so exhausting but give me a 10 mile walk around a cultural town over a five hour train journey any day.
