Japow Day 1 - Travel Victoria to Tokyo

We're heading on a big ski trip so of course we'd have everything packed and ready to go ahead of time right?

... Nah. Instead we went for a day of ski touring near Nanaimo (read the full story here) so our ski stuff was hanging to dry up until the day before we left. After an evening of madly prepping and packing, the day was finally here! It was time to head off on our next big international adventure to find the best snow that Japan can offer. Check in over the next week as we tell the story of this fantastic adventure in the land of the rising sun!

We flew with WestJet so of course that meant catching an early flight to Calgary from Victoria. Delays left us just a short window on our layover, but we still managed a quick lunch at the WestJet lounge to help prep us for the ten and a half hour flight to come.

Taking off from Calgary at 2pm, we chased the sun westward to arrive in Tokyo just after 4pm... the next day. After clearing customs and getting our bags, it was time to make our way into the city!

Sadly the Narita airport is nowhere close to the downtown core where we were staying for the night, so we needed to find a way to get us plus our giant ski bag to our hotel. The three ways downtown were either to taxi, take the train, or hop on a bus. We opted to take the train, using the Skyline connector into downtown and then switching to one of the JR lines to Shinjuku. The Skyline connector is more expensive than the slower JR lines, but it was worth it for us at the end of a long travel day.

Using the metro with ski bags during a busy early evening rush hour was an awkward feat, but we made it in the end. Our ski bag is wheeled which really helped us be able to navigate it through the stations and also prop it up on end easily without chancing any damage to our precious skis!

After a quick walk from the metro station to our hotel, we headed back out to find a late dinner. We'd spotted a ramen restaurant (@ramenmitaba) close by on the way to our hotel so we headed back there to see if there was space. It was pretty busy, but luckily there were two seats remaining so we were able to walk straight in!

Ordering was easy as the restaurant used a very common method of ordering your meal at an automated till by the door, and then you hand your tickets to the cooks or serving staff. We ordered a spicy miso chicken ramen and a soy sauce based chicken ramen,  plus some sake of course! The meal was cheap (~1000 JPY for each ramen) and absolutely delicious. It definitely set a high bar for the remainder of the trip!

We spent the rest of the evening exploring Shinjuku in the area around our hotel. Despite being mid-winter and close to zero degrees, the night life was in full swing! We saw the giant Godzilla head, wound our way through the Golden-Gai bars, and visited Hanazono shrine.

Exhausted from a 30+ hour day, we finally made our way back to the hotel. Another full day of travel awaited us tomorrow as we would fly to Hokkaido and make our way to Niseko. The snow was getting closer and we were stoked!!!