Our final day in Japan, and this would be a post recording our experiences of arriving at Narita and leaving Japan!
Firstly, perhaps it’s a Singaporean thing to over-plan and over-compensate when it comes to traveling. But we had been reading a lot of horror stories about the very long snaking queues at Japanese airports where passengers have been trying to complete baggage drop-off and immigration clearance this traveling season. There has numerous Singaporeans traveling home providing real-time reports at Haneda and Kansai International Airports, and that even when they arrived at the departure terminal 3 hours before the flight, they only finish baggage drop-off and immigration clearance just 30 minutes before flight. Interestingly, there were a couple of other persons who shared that Narita, for all its inconvenience of being pretty far from Tokyo central, were not facing such queues.
Nonetheless – and here’s where that Singapore DNA thing I mentioned above comes in – we resolved to arrived super early before our 10AM flight this morning. Our initial planning was for us to take the 7:00AM Skyliner from Keisei-Ueno station for the 45 minute express train to Narita International Airport Terminal 1, and still have more than two hours before flight. We eventually reserved seats for the 6:20AM train yesterday. And early this morning, set our alarms for 4:45AM – amazing that our two kids dutifully complied with wake-up instructions and quickly washed-up and cleared our rooms at APA Hotel Keisei Ueno-Ekimae. And we left the hotel at 5:45AM, and reached Keisei-Ueno Station just 1 minute later, the station being just literally across the road from the hotel. We were so early that the missus changed our 6:20AM seat reservations for an even earlier departure at 6:00AM, and by 6:50AM, we were at Narita Terminal 1.
And that’s where we got held up slightly. We’d neglected to find out which of the two wings at Narita the SQ check-in rows were located. So we went to the North Wing, which turned out to be the wrong one. Thankfully, the South Wing – where the SQ rows were – was a quick 2 minute walk away. The SQ counter rows had those very familiar self-help stations to print boarding passes and baggage tags, after which, we proceed to drop-off luggage. Then it was departure and carry-on baggage clearance, which was likewise speedy: it took us just five minutes, and would had been even quicker if my backpack with laptops, cameras and all manner of gizmos had not needed a re-scan. And finally, the clearance stage that is always iffy – immigration. To our pleasant surprise, it was through self-help automated booths, even for international visitors. And there were at least a dozen booths, and few persons lining up. Each of us took perhaps just 10 seconds, and by 7:25AM, we had all cleared immigration and did the slow walk to our departure gate.
And this is what the departure gate looked like when we got there. Yes, we’d so overcompensated and overplanned: we were the first arrivals at the departure gate at the far end of the terminal, and remained the only passengers waiting for the next 30 minutes! Or maybe this was all a departing on Christmas Day thing haha.
The flight home itself was mostly uneventful. Ok; excepting a relatively noisy family seated 6 rows ahead of us: the family had a baby who wailed for a good part of the 7 hour 40 minute flight, and a boy who yakked so loudly and almost nearly non-stop that we were able to hear his chatter 6 rows behind. And congestion over Changi Airport itself meant that we finally landed at 4:50PM instead of the 4:30PM that the pilot initially informed at take-off.
That’s a wrap for the day by day posts for this 18 day trip. The posts have been written very quickly every night, so apologies in advance for spelling errors, statements that contradicted each other, and bad use of language elsewhere! I’d be cleaning up the posts in the days to come, and also start the cycle of retrospection posts on this trip.