Japanese Whisky and a Fat Pipe

Approaching Tokyo station we starting to examine the railway maps we had, looking for the station to get off at for our hostel. We couldn't find it anywhere. The instructions they had provided in an email and I had saved on my phone were, of course, only in English, which meant that we couldn't ask anyone for help, or compare the name station name with any of the maps or time-tables, because they were all in Japanese, and none in romanji. Eventually we realised that the digital photo Joanne had taken of the Google map on the computer screen when we booked it did have the Japanese of the station on it, so we tried to get a ticket at the desk by pointing at the name on the map. The man looked very confused, looked up his big book, and eventually understanding dawned on his face. He told us to go to Ueno station and change there for something or other. Unfortunately his English wasn't very good and was not able to pass on his dawn of understanding.

We decided to go to Ueno station and ask again. There we discovered what we were starting to suspect: the station was not on the railway, but on the underground route. The hostel had lied on the directions on their website which stated “5 minutes from the railway station”. Presumably this was deliberate to reel in people like us who have JR rail passes. We had booked that hostel because it was cheaper than most, but the extra we were now going to have to pay for underground tickets would completely wipe out the saving, which was unfortunate after yesterday's financial disaster.

The hostel itself was pretty dismal. We went to buy alcohol as consolation. We still had a “treat” or two in reserve, so I decided to splash out on a bottle of Japanese whisky. We hadn't drunk much whisky here, but apparently a Japanese was recently judged to be the best in the world. It sounded totally unfeasible to me, but it seemed only right that I make my own mind up. The previous day I'd sampled my first Japanese whisky at K's Hostel: a Yamazaki single malt. It was very nice, but I thought it tasted much more like bourbon than whisky: it certainly wasn't superior to Scottish whisky as I'd been told had been decided in a competition. Maybe they make better ones. Anyway this time I bought a bottle of cheaper Suntory whisky, but still a single malt.

Boooooze

We had originally planned to go to Nikkō the next day but re-reading the Lonely Planet it seemed the place was all about temples and given what we had thought so far of Japanese temples is sounded more like torture than anything else and we decided to cut our losses and put all our eggs in the fujisan basket. There had been a couple of accidents on Mt Fuji over the last few days and some people had told us that the snow was not completely cleared so Joanne was a bit nervous about climbing it. I didn't care: all I wanted to do now was see it and get out of Japan.

The whisky wasn't bad, but I'd have taken a Bells instead any day. We stayed up later than we had intended so that Joanne could speak to her sister, Mahri, on Skype, since the internet speed was pretty good. I had started uploading all of our photos to online backup storage and it was bliss to see how quickly it went.

After a slightly late, slightly boozy evening, we were woken at 7am. This time we weren't in a dorm, but we were right next to the common area, through paper-thin walls. Hostels in Japan are a noisy nightmare! We were too tired and too late, after falling asleep again after the 7am wake-up, to make it to fujisan so I just uploaded all day.

written by

The Happy Couple on July 16, 2009 from Tokyo, Japan

from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon

Send a Compliment

comment on this...