What a day! We travelled for quite a long time, just to go a distance equivalent to traveling from Colorado to Minnesota. Beth and I left Our apartment on Jeju at about 9:00am for our 10:40am flight to Seoul.
Last week, my coworkers, William and Matthew, told us about some free parking areas on the outskirts of Jeju-si. They did a great job of explaining where to go and how to get there. The parking lot was on the south side of the city which is easier for us to get to, and we took a 7 minute taxi ride into the airport. At the airport, we checked in and went through the Korean version of security and still made It to the gate twenty minutes early for our flight.
We were flying a Korean budget airline (JinAir) for our first leg to Seoul. The picture below is me getting ready to walk up the stairs onto out flight. Boh of us like the green and maroon colors of JinAir.
everything was uneventful in our flight to Seoul. We landed on time, after about 50 minutes in the air, at Gimpo airport and had to make the usual ground connection to Incheon International. We luckily walked right on to an Air Korea transport that was just about to depart. Before we went on our cause ok trip, we bought these TMoney cards that we heard would let us pay our fares on local busses. It turned out that they did not work on that trip but we have been trying to use them since then. Our TMoney cards worked to pay the fair between Gimpo and Incheon (we were psyched) and we sat down and relaxed for our 40 minute bus ride.
Once we were in Incheon, we checked in with Jeju Air and got out to our gate. We relaxed for about an hour and a half until we started boarding. During that time, we both checked out the airport and I was happy other a sausage Danish from the Korean bakery before we left.
The flight from Seoul to Tokyo was breathtaking! We were doing the tourist thing and snapped a couple of photos along the way:
When we finally made it to Japan, things were relatively uneventful. We breezed through customs, got our Japan rail passes, and struck off for Nikko (in the northern mountains).
Our first Japanese meal was bento boxes from the Tokyo Train Station that we ate on the way to Nikko:
They were delicious! I had the wonderful meal above: Teriyaki fish with a pork cutlet and a bunch of other fixings. Beth had a barbecued chicken box.
By the time we got in to Nikko, it was almost 10pm. Some nice JR train reps helped get us a taxi and guide us to our hostel, the Nikko Park Mountain Lodge. We got in and almost immediately crashed from our long day.