Friday, May 12, 2006
Back Across The Equator
After an 11 hour daytime flight we were at least arriving without any jetlag, as Tokyo is only three hours behind Auckland. We could have stayed on the plane longer, mainly because I hadn’t had time to watch all the movies I wanted to(!) but also because we were a little unsure how we were going to cope with the language barrier. The excessively jovial (and not as funny as he thought) Englishman in front of us at immigration failed to cause a ‘diplomatic incident’, so the rest of us were let through without too much delay. We may have been lucky, as the queuing system at Narita airport looks a bit like Disneyland, complete with signposts at various points along the queue saying things like “60 Minutes wait from here”!!!The next thing to do was to find our way to the super-cheap (how DO we find these places?!) hotel we had booked. I had read a few things about bag delivery services that will deliver your bags to any hotel by the following morning. We’d normally be perfectly happy to carry our own bags (and too tight to pay someone else to do it), but it sounded quite appealing given the alternative of carrying two fully loaded backpacks through the Tokyo public transport system on a busy Friday evening.
So delivery service it was, and my first proper experience with the language barrier. Thinking that I could blag one of these delivery services for free by simply showing the correct shiny credit card I set off in search of the right desk. At the end of my search I found myself on the top floor at a very quiet end of the terminal. The lady at the counter was very friendly but spoke less English than I do Japanese. However, she obviously had some experience of handling crazy tourists and quickly turned to her PC and pulled up a language translation website. It turned out that this was one of my less successful pieces of internet research, as after seeing my card she confidently typed some characters and then turned the monitor for me to read the translation, which said (roughly) “you’ve got no chance mate”.
So it was back downstairs for Plan B, paying with real cash! All was going well until it became obvious that the guy filling out the delivery form couldn’t really figure out where the hotel was (we had the address written in Roman characters, but not Japanese). So he phoned the hotel and had a remarkably long conversation during which he took lengthy notes..... After all this we still weren’t entirely convinced that we were going to see our bags again, but he seemed happy and gave us a receipt showing a delivery time of between 10am and 12. So we waved them goodbye and headed for the train planning how we’d spend the insurance money.......
The train journey was fairly uneventful and straightforward. The Tokyo metro signage was apparently overhauled for the last World Cup, so all the stations are not only labelled in Japanese and English but they also have a simple coding system based on the name of the line and the station number (Eg. Mitsukoshimae on the Ginza Line is much easier to find when you know it’s G12).
After all that the hotel turned out to be very nice, not too far from train and we can assure you that £15 each per night is a bargain in this city.
..... oh, and the bags turned up the next morning. Early!
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