Tokyo, Japan

We left our home in Winchester at the end of October, our backpacks carefully packed with everything we’d need for seven months of exploring the world, from desert to snow, beach to jungle. Our first stop, however, was none of these.

We landed in Tokyo in the early evening and navigated the metro system to reach our little hostel, the fantastic Plat Hostel Keikyu Asakusa Station. Our room was tiny but spotless, with just enough space for us and our bags.

I’d been to Tokyo once before, with my colleague Pav, on what is still one of the best business trips I’ll ever go on. But since this was Nicola’s first time in Japan, we started off with a few of the Tokyo musts. We scrambled over the crossing in Shibuya. We saw the Godzilla roaring on the roof of a hotel. We played video games in the arcades of Akihabara. We explored the high-end district of Ginza. We admired the sometimes brash architecture of Harajuku. We racked up thousands of steps in the first couple of days exploring this ridiculous city.

Nearly two thirds of Japanese people consider themselves Buddhist, and as a result there are hundreds of temples hidden around Tokyo, as well as plenty of Shinto Shrines. In amongst the busy streets of glass and chrome skyscrapers, you’ll spy little alleyways leading to a wooden temple hidden away in a haze of incense and candle smoke.

One of the largest and oldest temples in Tokyo, which is far from hidden, is Sens?-ji, a few streets away from our hostel. Although we were on a limited budget, Nicola decided that this would be well-spent on finding her fortune from a little kiosk dispensing fortunes for a couple of hundred yen a pop. The first little roll of paper she unfurled apparently “wasn’t a good fortune”, so she paid again, this time selecting a better one. Not sure if that’s quite how it’s meant to work, but there you go.

I’d expected our shoestring budget to be a challenge in Tokyo, but it was actually surprisingly easy to stay within budget. Our hostel was very good value, and things to see are pretty cheap, or sometimes free. One afternoon we were wandering about Ueno park when I noticed a little pin on Google Maps for Tokyo Zoo, and what’s more, the little description reckoned there were giant pandas in there. We don’t usually bother with zoos, but neither of us had ever seen a panda in real life, so it felt a shame not to see one when they’re so near. We paid our £3, went in, and looked at the panda as it munched on bamboo and stared back at us. They barely even look like real animals. We had a quick look around the zoo to see what else they had, and ended up by the polar bear enclosure, where a grey polar bear was sitting looking pretty miserable. We realised why we don’t like zoos, so we headed off to see something a little more Japanese. 

That thing was karaoke, so we hit up our local Karaoke Kan where we spent half the time trying to decipher the remote control, and the other half belting out a terrible rendition of Eminem’s Lose Yourself. I’ve been told not to upload the video here.

Despite watching our budget, we ate well in Tokyo. For breakfast and lunch you can’t go too far wrong with the three big convenience stores — Lawson Station, 7-eleven and FamilyMart — which seem to be on every corner. In there you can find everything from fried chicken to onigiri, fruit sandwiches to steamed pork buns. We also realised you can get a lunch platter of very good sushi from a supermarket for less than £10. Sure, it’s not prime cuts of the finest A-grade bluefin tuna, but to our fairly unrefined palates, it was delicious, and definitely way better than 99% of the sushi you’d find in the UK.

For dinner, we tried everything from delicate crispy tempura, tweezered piece by piece onto an individual plate, to mounds of sticky rice and katsu chicken in the Curryhouse CoCo chain. One day we went to Tasuke Sushi, just around the corner from our hostel, for delicious sushi, another evening we went to Monja Shichigosan for okonomiyaki, an egg and cabbage pancake that translates as “grilled as you like it”; basically using up whatever you can find in the kitchen.

I’d seen somewhere that the best ramen is said to be eaten by hungry businessmen for lunch. So one day we followed the suited salarymen into a little neighbourhood ramen joint and perched at the bar alongside them. And as expected, the ramen was superb. A mix of noodles, onions, egg, seaweed, miso, and slices of pork, all swimming in a meaty, spicy broth. It delivered a sinus-clearing punch with every slurp and it was absolutely delicious. Our limited budget certainly didn’t translate into limited food.

Going out for a beer in Japan is quite different to the UK. People tend to socialise at izakayas, where they sip on ice cold beer and tuck into a menu of cheap food, such as yakitori chicken skewers, karaage fried chicken and even mounds of chips. Which actually makes a lot more sense than a British pub where whole tables of people will drink six pints each, accompanied by one solitary pack of crisps.

We ended up stopping, snacking and drinking in various izakayas across Tokyo, but my favourite was Streetside Bar Santaro Ueno just by Ueno Station, where we sat at a communal table drinking cold Sapporo beers in satisfyingly chunky frozen glasses. We also often ordered a highball, a mix of Japanese whisky and soda water, served over ice. Highballs were often the cheapest drink on the menu, and were refreshing and highly drinkable after a long day of walking about.

And we walked so far in Tokyo. Thousands of steps, hundreds of kilometres. So before we left, the plan was to find ourselves a vantage point and see the true scale of the city from above. And there is no better place to do so than the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building Observatory where you pay a grand total of ¥0 for a panoramic city view. It was a weekday so the gallery on the 45th floor was fairly quiet, and a small queue of people were waiting to play a yellow and black Yayoi Kusama piano, providing the most beautiful soundtrack for a final view over the world’s biggest city. We had arrived late afternoon so waited and watched as day turned to night, and tiny pins of light twinkled to life below as the sun set on the city. And there, in the far distance, was the hazy silhouette of our next stop: Mount Fuji.