After an early morning coffee and pastry, and a walk along the Gold Coast beach, I checked myself in, and was duly waiting patiently when Mandy’s flight arrived from Melbourne.
An 8 hour flight on a newish Boeing 787 direct to Tokyo, but it was one of the most straightforward flights I’ve had. To their credit Jetstar left on time, arrived early, got the ordered meals right, and we had a quiet journey on a good plane, so it all worked out perfectly in the end.
Straightforward immigration and customs formalities, and we didn’t hit a speedbump till we had to find the machine (down one floor and along a bit we eventually worked out) to buy a stored value card and load some money on it.
For one of the most automated countries in the world, it’s odd that they don’t like credit cards. No, but they are convenient, so instead of giving in, they invented their own stored value card called Suica (sue-ica). You put money on it, then you can tap onto public transport, buy items at 7-11, order lunch at a restaurant, and all the normal things you can do with a credit card. Go figure!
Anyway, due to a worldwide shortage of chips, they now only sell the cards through a small number of machines that you have to hunt down. Of course you can’t load money onto them by using a Visa card. So first you have to find an ATM, withdraw cash off your card, find the Suica machine and load the cash onto the card (which is non-refundable if you don’t spend it). Then, tired and disheartened, you can now try to find the right train platform for your destination, and work out which of the gate machines take Suica (the pink ones of course).
Then you get to the platform to wait for your Skyliner into town, only to find that you need to also purchase a reserved seat at another machine (using your Suica card – hope you loaded it with enough), then find the door matching your seat number, and make sure you get onto the right train.
So you can see why we were fairly drained when we arrived at our Airbnb around 10:30pm after a 3am start. But it’s a nice room – in a Hello Kitty sort of way.
Narita Skyliner
Tokyo Airbnb Minowa