The overnight bus

Shinkansen (bullet train) tickets are expensive. A tickets from Tokyo to Kyoto costs ¥13,720. A bus ticket for the same trip (from the only bus company I could find with an English website, which happened to be a discount operator) cost ¥4700, a difference of over $100 Australian. Do you see where this is headed? I thought we could save some money by taking the bus, especially as we had no commitments the next day. Hunter wasn't particularly keen, but agreed that it was cheaper, and worth a try.

We caught the train from Nikko back to Tokyo, found some dinner, and sat in the waiting room for a while. Then we decided to find the bus stop, which was a little way from the station. To our surprise, there wasn't even a bench there, let alone a waiting area, so we moved to a nearby cafe, where we spent more money on food and drinks while we waited.

The trip itself was dreadfully uncomfortable. Space was much tighter than on a plane, and I didn't figure out how to tilt the seat back until about an hour before we arrived. Seeing as nobody else had their seats back, and I couldn't easily do it, I assumed it wasn't possible. For the first half of the trip, the heating was up so high that I stripped off all my layers down to just a thermal t-shirt on top, with leggings under jeans on my bottom half, and was still hot (compared to sub-zero temperatures outside). We had toilet breaks every two hours or so, during which time all the smokers got their fix and came back reeking.

I managed to drift in and out of sleep for most of the trip, but Hunty wasn't so lucky. He tried to read, but the assumption was that everyone would be sleeping, and so the lights were centrally controlled. We arrived back at our apartment a bit before seven, had showers, and went back to bed for a few hours. We did save some money, but I'm not sure that I'd do it again, and I don't think I could persuade Hunty to.