By the time I got on the plane to leave Bangkok, I was ready to go. Thailand had been getting hot—record-breaking hot—and pollution was starting to sneak back into Bangkok.
And it was the holiday weekend of Songkran, a water festival where spraying anyone and everyone goes. I hadn’t ever been in the country for that before so I wasn’t sure what to expect. But I was worried about either me or my bags getting soaked on the way out of the country.
In the event, I had little to worry about. My neighborhood, not a touristy area, remained quiet—except that everyone decided to go to the mall on the second day of the holiday. That wouldn’t have affected me at all, except that I met Maxx and Kay for lunch that day, and that’s where we went! Kay drove, but it would have been faster to take BTS (though with more a chance of getting sprayed—not on the train, which doesn’t allow shenanigans like that, but between stations). We probably spent a half hour just finding parking.
But it was a good meal and as an added bonus they ran me all the way out to the airport so I didn’t have to lug my luggage around on the train!
My flight went through Manila, where I had never been before. I didn’t think much about it when making the booking, but as I read up on it afterward, I been to question my decisions. Apparently it regularly tops lists of the worst airport in the world—rife with corruption, poor services, and a confounding structure where there are no connections between terminals. You might, in some cases, literally have to clear customs and take a cab to get a connecting flight!
But in the event, it wasn’t so bad. My flights were all in the same terminal. It was small, disorganized, and crowded, but seemed safe and had plenty of services open at all hours.
I killed some time chatting with a Thai guy who had been in the Philippines for a wedding and was just flying back to Bangkok. He was retired from a position with the Interior Ministry, and now spends his time reforesting the area around his home village. He told me how many trees he had planted and while I don’t recall the number it seemed crazy high to me, based on my limited experience of putting in a hundred or so as a Boy Scout once.
Arriving at Narita, even somewhat late at night, was an entirely different experience from Manila, or in fact any other airport I’ve ever been to. It was very quiet, which seemed odd, but still had a lot of staff on duty. It was the most efficient process I’ve ever been through when clearing into a country… quarantine/vaccine check, immigration, customs, boom, boom, boom. The longest part of it was waiting for a local cab.
I spent the first couple days in a shipping container hotel near the airport. It was inexpensive, though a bit off the beaten path. Mostly I picked it so I could say, hey, I stayed in a shipping container! But the room was actually pretty nice.
I had to get a cab there on the first night, which was expensive—maybe outweighing the cheapness of the hotel. To get to a train station after I checked out, I figured I would take a bus.
That was a challenge. Google and Apple Maps are both excellent at routing for public transportation here, but the signage at the stops is all in Japanese. Translator apps can help a bit, but also introduce confusion. For example, running the bus route through the translator gave me such poetic stop names as “Flying hill,” “mountain of cherry blossoms,” and “south middle.” But those are of little use when looking at a map.
Anyway, after I figured out what side of the stop to stand on, I had a while to contemplate Japanese society. The first thing that leapt out at me was a backpack sitting on the bench at the bus stop. There was no one else there—someone must have forgotten it when they got on an earlier bus.
But from what I have read, the bag would likely remain there, untouched, all day and perhaps more than a day, until the owner returned to collect it. Such random theft as would be commonplace in the US is all but unknown here. And such is the respect for privacy that it’s equally unlikely a good samaritan would rummage the bag and attempt to locate the owner. Instead, it would just sit, perhaps attracting a police officer called by a concerned local if it were there long enough.
I also spent a lot of time watching traffic go by as I waited. It didn’t take long before I realized I had not seen a single vehicle with a dent on it. Nor dirt, for that matter—all were sparkling clean. And this is an industrial area near the airport—so there were vehicles of all sorts going past. Semis, dump trucks, cement mixers, garbage trucks… it didn’t matter. Every single one of them was clean enough to eat off of.
Tomorrow I head north, through the mountains and toward the last limits of the annual sakura blossoms that spray across the country.
