Day 1 – Hobart to Tokyo, or is 3 hours sleep OK?

The long slow descent into discomfort. Rugged up to deal with the freezing Hobart and Melbourne weather- but ready to fly

Sooooo, four years later and we’re on our way back to Japan at last. This time around I’ll try and keep the words to a minimum and let the pictures do the talking. We’ll see how we go…

Leaving Hobart to fly overseas always feels more epic than it should, in a bad way. We were too excited to sleep much and were up and into a taxi at 4:45 am. Slowbart to Melbourne and then up and out of Australia at 9:30 am for the 9 hour flight to Narita Tokyo. I must have been over tired because I started to cry during the safety briefing video. All that cheesy fake multicultural Australiana that Qantas does so well. The flight was only about 60% full and it was a daytime flight, but still we were lucky enough to sit behind two people who immediately put their seats back as far as they could go, swilling champagne all the way. I’ll be honest, I wanted to stab them both with my plastic fork.

We landed in Narita about 7 pm local time and took the Narita express into Shinjuku to our accommodation at the JR Kyushu Blossom Hotel. A tiny room (19 metres squared apparently) but perfectly clean, neat and nice. There was just time for a quick dash to Lawsons (a kind of Japanese 7-11) for some ice cold Japanese beers and then the slide into an exhausted sleep.