flight to hiroshima

when my work was finished in seoul, i wanted to get going again as quickly as possible. i would only have about five weeks to head to japan, travel around there, then hop over to china again, cover a couple thousand kilometres there, and get through laos and thailand to finally reach bangkok on the 12th when my friends would get there for my birthday.

it's a pretty tight fit, but i really wanted to make japan work, so i already had a flight booked from tokyo to shanghai. normally, i could do exactly that route by ferry, but they didn't run anymore. there was a ferry from korea to japan that i had counted on, but it turned out that you had to book that one far in advance for some reason. no wonder ferries are dying out. a flight is about 15 times faster and way cheaper, so with the time pressure, i spontaneously booked seoul-hiroshima for the next morning.

i then realized that i would have to pay 20€ for an airport shuttle if i left in the morning since the subway doesn't run that early, so i packed up in a hurry, said goodbye to everyone at the hostel, barely caught the last metro and found me a nice little sleeping spot behind some dividers at the airport. money.

wearing all my heavy clothes to make the weight limit, i boarded the next morning. i made good use of my window seat the whole time and before i knew it, i could already see the japanese shore below me. i still had some time to kill until check-in at the hostel, so i just napped for an hour or two in the airport lobby and then encountered the first piece of quintessential japanese cultural heritage: the vending machine. you can just choose a cool looking drink and then tap your card, it's that easy. but the special thing aren't the vending themselves, but rather how many there are. absolutely evereywhere you go, even in the villages, you're guaranteed to find a vending machine no more than 100 metres away.

to make the 90-minute journey to the city, i could've paid for a shuttle again, but who am i to do that, so i walked outside into the scorching heat and tried my luck hitchhiking. hiroshima is a surprisingly tiny airport, so there was barely any traffic, but after about half an hour, i was picked up by a super friendly guy. he spoke english, gave me a drink and plus a few tips on what to do and eat in japan, before dropping me at the memorial building just a couple minutes away from the hostel. honestly a great introduction to japan.Read more