Central Japan return post

And we’re back, two weeks travelling around central Japan was fun, but taking a 14-month old baby with us certainly made things more challenging and cost us some opportunities. But it was well worth it even if we didn’t get to do all that we had hoped.

Holiday Route

Flying Jetstar and arriving at (and departing from) terminal 3 was already less than ideal, although terminal 3 doesn’t have any of the good shops that terminal 1 and 2 have, so we weren’t able to do any last minute shopping before leaving the country, but at least Jetstar has direct flights. That was a plus considering that the flight was only about ten hours each way (the return flight during the day was much more bearable than dealing with a tired and extremely cranky baby on an overnight flight).

This was the first time that I’ve ever flown Jetstar on a long haul flight (I’ve flown to Tasmania domestic a couple of times) and I’m really not sure that I would do it again, even though they have the direct route to Japan. Once you add in all the extras it’s only slightly less (a couple hundred bucks each) than a full service carrier so in terms of value it’s definitely out the window. The direct flight option is where it has the advantage, Singapore is always the number one option, but Japan Airlines has direct flights from Sydney so that might be a better option next time.

Pond in Central Park, Nagoya

In the end, the main issues we had were that our (sometimes) cranky baby needed to be baby-sat/fed at the most inopportune times, such as dinner time (sunset) and breakfast times (sunrise), the best times to go anywhere because of:

1. Heat, the Japanese summer is blisteringly hot (and stuffy)
2. Lighting, for photography the golden hours and the blue hours are the best times to shoot during the day, but perhaps due to poor planning as well we ended up out during the hottest, brightest times of the day (the middle).

As always though, Japan is so much fun, and so amazing in almost every way, it really is like a giant theme park, the food is delicious usually, and relative to Australian prices for similar food, it’s a bargain. The shopping is endless, and the way that nature, history, and technology come together is something magical (usually). I really hope that next time we can go in Autumn or Spring (cherry blossom) season to avoid the heat, and also see some different colours on the natural side of things. Not sure where we would head next time, maybe Hokkaido, or somewhere else based on further reading. Any way, I’ve got lots of pictures coming so I’ll be breaking those down into several posts over the next couple of weeks.