Japan Day 9: Kyoto to Tokyo… and Where Is Our Airbnb?

Day 9 was another transfer day, this time from Kyoto to Tokyo. As usual, I hadn’t planned any activities for the day other than getting from one city to the other.

And, well… this day was a perfect example of why.

Goodbye Kyoto

We left our Kyoto Airbnb at around 10 AM. At this point, we were travelling with our three carry-on suitcases and three backpacks, plus one of the foldable bags we had brought from home for anything we accumulated along the way.

Getting to the train station could not have been easier. I booked a taxi using the GO Taxi app, and it arrived within about five minutes. After some of our previous adventures figuring out transportation in Japan, this part felt almost too easy!

We had allowed ourselves plenty of time, so we arrived at the station early enough to buy lunch before boarding the Shinkansen. We picked up some bento boxes and desserts, while kid 2, apparently concerned that we might somehow run out of food during the journey, bought even more snacks and desserts while we waited for the train.

Priorities.

Our First Shinkansen Ride… Well, Theirs

It was kid 1 and kid 2’s first time riding the Shinkansen.

I thought they might find the famous Japanese bullet train exciting.

Their reaction?

Basically: It’s a train.

Maybe the Shinkansen just didn’t feel as novel to them as I expected. They had already travelled on regional and high-speed trains in Italy, as well as several trains in Japan by then. So apparently, even the famous Shinkansen was just another train to them!

I, on the other hand, had specifically chosen our seats on the side with a view of Mount Fuji. I had pictured us looking out the window and finally seeing that famous silhouette as we travelled toward Tokyo.

Unfortunately, the weather had other plans.

It wasn’t raining or stormy. It was simply cloudy—cloudy enough that Mount Fuji remained completely hidden.

So much for my carefully selected seats!

Kid 1 had another problem anyway: motion sickness. Eating her bento lunch while travelling on the Shinkansen wasn’t going particularly well for her.

Thankfully, we eventually made it to Tokyo without incident.

And that’s when the real adventure began.

Welcome to Tokyo! Now Find Your Airbnb.

We arrived in Tokyo with all our luggage and took a taxi to the address of our Airbnb.

The taxi dropped us off.

Except… there was no Airbnb.

We were close. Very close, as we would eventually discover. But we didn’t know that yet.

I checked the address. I checked Google Maps. I looked around.

Nothing seemed to match.

That’s when I contacted our Airbnb host and explained that we couldn’t find the building. She sent us some instructions and told us that we were close enough to walk there.

So we started walking.

There we were, trying to find the Airbnb in the Tokyo summer heat while dragging three carry-on suitcases and a now-filled foldable bag, on top of our three backpacks.

We hadn’t been walking for even five minutes before I decided it was worth calling another taxi. With all our luggage and the Tokyo summer heat, this wasn’t going to be fun.

Time for taxi number two.

I also stopped taking many pictures around this point. My phone was doing a lot of work: I was using it for navigation, messaging our host and as a hotspot since we didn’t have Wi-Fi. With no idea how much longer it would take us to find the Airbnb, saving my battery was much more important than documenting the adventure!

Unfortunately, taxi number two didn’t solve our problem.

Instead, we ended up somewhere completely different.

The driver tried to help us, but we were still lost—and by this point, my anxiety level was definitely going up.

I even started wondering whether the Airbnb could somehow be a scam.

You hear stories online about travellers arriving at an accommodation only to discover that it doesn’t exist. Logically, I knew there could be a perfectly reasonable explanation. But standing somewhere in Tokyo with two kids, all our luggage, and no idea where we were supposed to sleep for the next twelve days, those internet horror stories suddenly didn’t seem quite so theoretical.

I contacted the host again.

And finally, something clicked.

English Address vs. Japanese Address

I realized that when I entered the address in English and in Japanese, Google Maps was pointing me to two different places.

That explained a lot.

Fortunately, we were near a large hotel with a taxi stand. We gathered everything again, got into taxi number three, and this time I showed the driver the Japanese address.

His reaction immediately made me feel better.

He seemed to know exactly where he was going.

And, of course, the Airbnb turned out to be very close to where we had been in the first place!

The building was on a small street where taxis couldn’t stop, so our driver dropped us at the nearby intersection. Our host had also sent us pictures of the building by then, and with those plus the correct Japanese address, we finally found it without any more problems.

There it was.

Our Tokyo home for the next twelve days.

At Least It Wasn’t a Scam!

Opening the door was a huge relief.

The Airbnb existed. Always a plus.

It also looked like the listing. It was spacious, well equipped and looked like it would work very well for a twelve-day stay.

There was a washing machine but no dryer, which turned out not to matter at all. We had a balcony, and Tokyo was so hot that our clothes dried outside within just a few hours. Being able to do laundry every day was incredibly convenient, especially since we had packed relatively light for a three-week trip.

There was just one small problem.

No hot water.

Seriously?

Fortunately, this one was easy to solve. I contacted the host yet again, and within minutes we figured it out: the water heater had simply been switched off, probably by the previous guests. I turned it back on and we had hot water.

The other issue wasn’t going to be fixed quite so quickly: there was no Wi-Fi.

That would take another two days to resolve.

Thankfully, I had plenty of mobile data and could use my phone as a hotspot, so it was inconvenient rather than disastrous.

By then, I was mostly just relieved. After three taxis, several messages to our host and a lot of luggage hauling, we could finally put our bags down.

Not exactly the smooth introduction to Tokyo I had imagined.

But this is precisely why I don’t plan anything else on transfer days!

Coming Next

Our first real day in Tokyo: crowds, shopping, and a luggage situation that was about to get considerably more complicated.