Trains

Related to the whole overnight boat journey/Amber likes to make things difficult for herself in order to save money post,  I would like to take a moment to talk about train travel.

Now in Japan, train travel is expensive.  Bus travel is expensive as well, though a tiny bit cheaper than trains.  It’s hard to explain, but I guess a good analogy would be if you were to travel from Austin to Houston by high-speed shinkansen train, it would cost $100 (that’s a little bit further than I traveled from Fukuoka to Kagoshima).  Contrast that with Korea, where you could travel the same distance for $30-40.  So I was working with quite a big change in travel expenses. Thankfully, I went to Japan during school holidays when they offer a special train pass, known as the seishun ju-hachi kippu, or “Youthful 18 Pass” for about $125 and you can travel anywhere in the country by train for five, non-consecutive days.  You just get the ticket stamped at the beginning of the day, and then you can travel as much as you like during that day.  The only trick is that you have to take local trains, which means, something like a two-hour high speed train trip takes nine hours with five transfers. 

Hm…

I met many people who felt that it wasn’t worth it, that spending $500 on a rail pass that allows you to use the high-speed trains was better, but I rather enjoyed my very slow trips.  On one part of the trip I got to ride in a one-car train that ran on tracks on a cliff overlooking the ocean.  I’m pretty sure people riding in shinkansen at over 200 mph don’t get to see that; actually, I’m pretty sure that people riding in shinkansen don’t get to see much of anything.  And yeah, I’m getting defensive, all those rich kids (or “professionals”) riding around in shiny silver speed phalluses thinking they’re better than me…