TL;DR
Step 1: Buy your tickets in the last minute.
Step 2: Hurry up!
In a burst of spontaneity a month ago, we bought flight tickets to Japan on Sunday 9th for a flight departing on Monday 17th from Frankfurt with a stopover in New Delhi. We left home on Sunday to drive down to the airport, stopping by in Leipzig to visit my mother in law, so not a lot of time available for planning such a trip, even less considering I was still fully working that week. So we focused on the essential bits and managed to do the following before leaving:
- get an eVisa in case we would get out of the airport in the stopover in India. We only took the decision once we were in New Delhi, tired from the overnight flight but eager to see at least the Akshardham temple.
- book a hotel in Tokyo for initial 6 days with a rough idea of what to visit and draft itinerary for rest of the days, details to be arranged on the go. We did it through booking.com and we got a free taxi transfer from Narita to Tokyo (which is a long long way). Even better, we got an extremely nice chinese taxi driver who made the trip very enjoyable with her comments.
- buy 7-day JR passes and Suica cards, thanks to this shop in Berlin.
- download a few maps and make sure we had a translation app. As back-up we bought a German-Japanese phrase book in Leipzig on Sunday evening.
- buy one eSim card for India and another one for Japan. This was a very last minute (last second?) thing even by the standards of this trip and turned out to be a lifesaver. We bought them on the day we were flying out and it hugely simplified our life, no need to queue for sim cards at airports, no need to book and return wifi packs, etc. If you travel around the world, check Airalo, great value for money. Plus, shameless plug, you can use JC8079 as referral code to get a few dollars discount on first booking.
- forget the second battery pack for my sixteen-year old camera and, even worse, the charger. The solution was to create an account in Amazon in Japan and have one of each delivered to my hotel (btw, it turns out that batteries and chargers for old Canon cameras are super cheap in Japan!, bullet dodged...)
Although we were each allowed to check in 46 kg plus hand luggage, we decided to travel light and just take a carry-on and a rucksack each, which were not even full! The lady at the check-in desk in Frankfurt airport was amused as everyone else on that flight seemed to be lugging huge suitcases.
Inspired by Molinos and her roadtrip last year, I bought a notepad and managed to write something often enough to keep some of the magical details. Just that she writes about a million times better than I do, however it´s the intention that matters and it will be a nice thing to read in twenty years.
And just like that, we were off to a great adventure!
