Back to Winter

As promised, today we work our way back, but we still had half a day to relax a little. And being in the country of trains ... we looked at more trains. Up to now, all the high speed train spotting has all been the trains heading to the West, but it's actually a completely different rolling stock for going east. Not wanting to take our chances in terms of finding some sort of lookout, we just went onto the platform to see them up close. For ¥150pp, you can actually just buy a ticket purely for making it into the Shinkansen system for two hours. It's primarily for people who want to see their friends off, but it suited our purposes just fine (once we managed to get a ticket machine that actually sold those tickets on our third attempt).

Okay, so not a Shinkansen, but you can nicely see that the Shinkansen track (empty on the left) is a floor higher than the normal trains. When they built the Shinkansen tracks, there simply wasn't any space at the existing level.

Once we felt we saw enough train departures we headed back to our bags and found ourselves a nice cafe with an elevated position to enjoy some more last city glimpses. Before finally heading off to the airport. (It's the same flight that I had last time returning me to Australia, only that this time I learnt my lesson about trying to do anything significant on this day.)

While not all of my travel companions see the need for being quite so early, we did arrive with plenty of time, running into zero queues at baggage drop, security, or anything else. Which meant we could also comfortably enjoy the observation deck watching three runways dealing with a non-stop stream of planes.

By the time our takeoff was scheduled though, the sun was thoroughly down. It was a pretty clear day and we figured that our flight path should actually take us nicely past Fuji-san, even on our side of the plane. But unfortunately unlike one of the earlier waterfalls, the night illumination appears to be kind of missing.

Flight was pretty smooth. Arrival likewise. Again almost no queues as compared to last time when I arrived at the same time and it was non-stop queue-town with all the planes arriving just after curfew. What I didn't get a lot of though was sleep (as expected). So while there's only meant to be a 1 hour time difference, I think I'm still going to claim that I have jetlag for the next few days.

Enjoy some more pictures of our arrival.