{"id":34288,"date":"2023-12-02T14:43:28","date_gmt":"2023-12-02T06:43:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/?p=34288"},"modified":"2026-03-11T09:27:45","modified_gmt":"2026-03-11T01:27:45","slug":"kanto-chubu-japan-dec-2023-planning-part-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/2023\/12\/02\/kanto-chubu-japan-dec-2023-planning-part-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Kanto-Chubu \u2013 Japan Dec 2023 \u2013 Planning \u2013 Part 4"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s now just a week before we head off to our 18-day-long holiday in Japan. We’ve continued to check, re-check, and improve our long itinerary, and at this point, we’re about ready to go. Since our last post where we presented a completed, if still draft, itinerary, some of the key changes that have taken place include:<\/p>\n

Days 01 to 04: overhauled the Kawaguchiko<\/strong> segment: we dropped the visits to Narusawa Ice and Fugaku Wind Caves, swapped activities from day to day, and added a hike to the Panorama-dai lookout<\/strong>, two opportunities at Honcho Street<\/strong>, and also a boat ride at Lake Yamanaka<\/strong> – all three of which would be additional opportunities to see Mt. Fuji from different perspectives. We also added a visit to the Shinobi No Sato Ninja Village<\/strong>. It’d be a pretty packed stretch, so there’s a good chance we’d end up dropping a few places in actuality.<\/p>\n

We also spent a fair bit of time looking into arranging private transportation on Day 01 from Narita to Kawaguchiko and for Kawaguchiko sightseeing, but the proposed charges we were presented with were off-putting: somewhere in the region of SGD700 for just one day, and with a lot of caveats too, including having a pick-up in Tokyo instead of Narita and excluding parking charges. Sure, having a private guide to pick us up at Narita and bring us around to selected places in Kawaguchiko would have made the first day of travel so much easier, including removing the need to arrange for any luggage forwarding, and also making that first day of sightseeing so much more relaxed. It was a hard decision to make, but we decided to be prudent, save ourselves a fair bit of money, and opted to risk hustling with everyone else jamming up the public bus network in Kawaguchiko!<\/p>\n

Day 04: dropped our scheduled visit to Ghibli Museum in Tokyo because we couldn’t get tickets, and filled the now available afternoon with other spots in Tokyo city.<\/p>\n

Day 10: populated our Tokyo Day 10 itinerary with a visit to a Japanese garden (because I’m fascinated with these compact gardens!), an Insect Museum, and nearby shopping street spots.<\/p>\n

Days 13 and 15: amended our Matsumoto Days 13 and added a visit to the Daio Wasabi Farm<\/a> on Day 15. The farm is one of Japan’s largest, and in itself also a popular tourist attraction, albeit largely for domestic visitors apparently.<\/p>\n

Day 14: dropped our planned visit to Shinano in Nagano Prefecture on Day 14: we weren’t certain how we’d manage exploring the town on foot in winter. We added a visit to the Norikura Kogen<\/a>, which would include a snowshoe hiking experience.<\/p>\n

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Days 01 to 09<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Days 10 to 18.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We’ve also been tracking the weather in the four areas we’re visiting: Kawaguchiko, Tokyo, Nikko and Matsumoto – and temperatures have expectedly been cooling and approaching 0\u00b0C<\/span> at night. Based on forecasts during our actual days in these cities, the weather at Kawaguchiko, Nikko and Matsumoto would be going under 0\u00b0C<\/span> at night too.<\/p>\n

Oddly, the Japanese yen is still continuing to weaken. Sure, it’s great for international travellers visiting Japan, but that has in turn led to Japan now reaching pre-Covid tourist numbers, and overtourism is starting to show in several popular places. My Facebook and YouTube feeds have been showing (pretty scary) pictures of massive morning crowds queuing up to be admitted into Disney Resort and Universal Studios in Tokyo. And Arashiyama Bamboo Forest in Kyoto is experiencing huge crowds even at 9AM. Thankfully, we’ve done the latter already early morning last year – and benefited from no one about – and we’re not visiting the two theme parks this year in Tokyo. Still, we’re expecting a lot of people at Kawaguchiko and at the major train stations in Tokyo. It’s what it is, so we’d have to adapt.<\/p>\n

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Beyond that, the itinerary is about where we need it to be, and we’ve already picked up all the travel items we’re going to bring along. I’ll probably do one more post just before we leave to observe the camera gear I’ve decided to bring along for this trip. Till then!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s now just a week before we head off to our 18-day-long holiday in Japan. We’ve continued to check, re-check, and improve our long itinerary, and at this point, we’re about ready to go. Since our last post where we<\/p>\n

Read More Kanto-Chubu \u2013 Japan Dec 2023 \u2013 Planning \u2013 Part 4<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":34289,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[677],"class_list":["post-34288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-traveling","tag-chubu-kanto-japan-2023","wpcat-17-id"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/blog-japan-2023-currency-conversion.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34288"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34288\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38235,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34288\/revisions\/38235"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34289"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}