Final thoughts on Japan

Monday, 26 February 2024

Japan was great, we all really enjoyed it.  I’m sure it was an easier destination for tourists now than say 10 years ago.

As such there were a lot of tourists everywhere, many doing exactly what we were – tacking a ski holiday onto the beginning or end of their trip. This made the bigger tourist attractions really busy but still manageable – we saw the infrastructure in place ready for queues a lot longer than the ones we were experienced so I’m guessing summer or spring are the peak seasons for the non skiing tourists.

If it wasn’t for the skiing (which was still a lot cheaper than the equivalent in Australia would have been), the trip would not have been too bad cost-wise. Food and subway prices were pretty cheap, accommodation wasn’t too bad (except in the snow).  Surprisingly the bullet train was more expensive than flights would have been for the same trip though.

It was strange how difficult it was to book some things ahead of time – many of the websites were indecipherable even in English. It was a major achievement to book ourselves onto the ski bus that went from Sapporo to Niseko – I guess most of the bookings are made via travel agents but they seemed to be taking an extra $100 per booking so we tried to avoid that where possible – in the end we just used a travel agent for the on-snow parts (accom/rentals/passes & lessons), and we did all the flights and everything else. At times this was exhausting and that was before we left Australia!  Once we were in Japan I was SO glad I had panicked at the last minute and taken a wad of actual Japanese Yen with us as at least half of everything we bought including tickets to tourist attractions, had to be paid for in cash. We got through $1500 in the 2.5 weeks we were there.

Our trip over to Japan was very quick – we went via Cairns both ways. Cairns international airport seems to be almost exclusively being used by Jetstar for their Japan flights – the morning we were there they 3 departing flights in a 2 hour period, all Jetstar, all going to Japan.  While the domestic part of it is fine, the international is pretty shabby and not really ready for such a high volume of passengers within such a short period of time. Both exiting and entering Australia had long long queues at customs and security.  I think there were just 2 of the automatic passport gates whereas Melbourne would have to have more than 30. It made it very slow going.  For us (and many others, coming back from Sapporo was a long haul – it took around 38 hours to get from the resort to home – which included 2 hours waiting in Sapporo, 6 hours in Osaka, 3 hours in Cairns and another 3 or 4 in Melbourne.   Although the Hobart leg added some extra time, from the conversations around us – most people were suffering a similar trip to us.

The skiing was great – it was good that the snow turned to powder halfway through our stay and a shame all of us except Jon got sick for some of it – but we probably needed a bit of a rest anyway.  I had thought this might be the last time I went snowboarding but it was such fun that I’m not going to rule out another trip.   We didn’t take advantage of the Onesens everyone raves about – the kids were totally against it and I guess I wasn’t keen enough to go by myself (they are segregated) although I’m sure it would have been nice.

As I had anticipated and as I’ve mentioned before I found the lack of vegetarian stuff really really annoying.  It makes no sense not to provide a vegetarian option in this day and age.