16.

Cathy and I had been tossing around the idea of where to go for Christmas / New Years for a few weeks. We had considered going down to the tropical southern part of Japan, Okinawa, or maybe driving around Hokkaido, soaking in the wintery goodness. We ended up deciding on something very much in the middle (both on the map and the thermometer), Tokyo! Seeing how we live in Japan, it’s almost necessary to visit Tokyo.

Looking into our travel options, we found a hidden jewel of the Japanese rail company: the Seishun Juhachi Kippu, or youth 18 ticket. (in Japanese, 青春18) The Seishun Juhachi Kippu allows for 5 days of unlimited rail travel in Japan with a slight (maybe major) catch - only local trains. Each day runs from 00:00 to 23:59, and costs ¥2,300 - or just under $20 CAN. As an added bonus, we can both share the same ticket by stamping twice per day.

We spent a few days simultaneously laptop’ing. Cathy was booking hotels in all the best spots in Tokyo (not an easy task as they were nearly all fully booked, and most Japanese online booking systems don’t offer an immediate response on whether or not you’ve managed to book the room.) Kevin was furiously plugging-in individual train schedules into an online trip calculator to find out how on earth we would snake our way down Japan using only local trains. (After all, Hokkaido is a separate island up north.) After a few days of grunting and complaining, we succeded on both fronts and decided on a change of pace for Christmas eve, put our computers away and went outside.

We stayed home for Christmas and had a nice relaxing morning eating breakfast, drinking coffee, listening to christmas carols and opening presents. We had video chats with both our families thanks to iChat / Skype and then we ventured outside to start preparing for our trip to Tokyo. We were to leave the following morning on the first train out of Takikawa, the 6:35 local train to Sapporo.

The next morning, we enjoyed a sobering -15°C walk to the train station at 5:50 in the morning, got our first 2 ticket stamps and boarded the 6:35 local train to Sapporo through Iwamizawa, all before the sun came up.Our (ridiculous) schedule looked like this:

------ Dec 26th
06:35- Takikawa -> Sappro
08:28- Sapporo -> Tomakomai
10:07- Tomakomai -> Higashi-muroran
13:45- Higashimuroran -> Oshamambe
16:16- Oshamambe -> Goryokaku
19:37- Goryokaku -> Kikonai
21:10- Kikonai -> Kanita
------ Dec 27th
05:16- Kanita -> Aomori
06:12- Aomori -> Hirosaki
07:00- Hirosaki -> Odate
08:09- Odate -> Akita
12:12- Akita -> Sakata
14:30- Sakata -> Shibata
18:06- Shibata -> Niigata
23:35- Niigata -> Omiya
------ Dec 28th
05:50- Omiya -> Ueno (Tokyo!)

47 hours, 16 trains and 2 very sore bums.

In reality we had a few hiccups (actually, one big one) on our connection from Goryokaku to Kikonai and blew our schedule. We made it to Kikonai that night and decided to find a hotel. (Our original plan was to hack it in the train station in Kanita, but our missed connection made us strung out and cold.) We somehow communicated to the station manager that we needed a hotel that night. He took it upon himself to call around and he found us a cheap hotel above a small soba shop and convinced the owner to drive to the station in his pyjamas and come pick us up!

The next day, we finally made it off of Hokkaido and with a bit of trickery managed to get ourselves back on schedule. The following night we slept on a train called the Moonlight Echigo that runs overnight from 11:35 to 04:28 that provided us a crappy, uncomfortable sleep.

We pulled in to tokyo on Friday morning on the 5:50 to Ueno station and found ourselves crammed inside a stuffy train in the middle of the busiest rush hour we’d ever seen.We looked at each other and said: “Hey- We’re in Tokyo… cool.”, found a McDonalds, curled up in the corner booth and napped.

to be continued…