A newer travel related obsession of mine has been the art of travel hacking. For those to whom this term is a new one – travel hacking is the art of earning frequent flyer points (or hotel group points) with the goal of redeeming those points for near free flights and stays.
In the months leading up to our honeymoon, I was obsessed with the earning of these points! Being based in Australia our ability to earn and redeem points with airlines isn’t quite as easy or diverse as it is in places like Canada and the US, but with effort and planning you can still score some great deals.
We had chosen to accumulate Qantas points and when it came time to redeem them, it proved borderline impossible to redeem rewards flights in premium cabins for flights that depart Australia. The higher your status, the earlier these flights are available to be booked which means that the business and first class rewards seats get snapped up by those with higher status long before us mere mortals would even have the ability to see that they exist.
As we were flying to Europe, I desperately wanted us to be able to fly in business class – it was our honeymoon after all! After many hours of research I found that while these seats were very hard to book departing from Australia, once in an overseas location they became much more abundant. By hopping on a comparably short flight to Bali, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur or Tokyo so many seats would suddenly become available to us.
So after much discussion, we opted to fly to Tokyo and spend a few days there before flying onwards to Europe. As an added bonus, one of the credit cards we had each opened to earn points came with a $450 Qantas travel credit and so our economy seats from Sydney to Tokyo became even more affordable with cash. Oh, and as an added bonus, this flight had a 2-4-2 configuration which meant that we could have our little row just to ourselves.
Our flight started off delayed (classic Qantas things) but as it turned out, this would actually be a good thing. The flight itself wasn’t anything the special, the food was really bad (something that was surprising to me, Qantas are usually pretty good with food), I watched some movies and had a little cry about already missing our dog. But in the last few hours of our flight I noticed that the ‘time to destination’ section on the flight map kept appearing not to update and our total flight time seemed to be growing.
Eventually, the captain made an announcement that there had been ‘an incident’ at Haneda airport and we were circling while waiting to see if we could get clearance to land. After circling for around 30 minutes we were notified that we would instead be diverting to Narita. As soon as we landed I switched on my phone and a whole bunch of ‘are you okay?!’ texts came through.
We soon learned about the collision of the two aircrafts at Haneda that resulted in the deaths of five people. As more information came through I quickly realised that if our flight had left on time we would have been scheduled to land at Haneda within five minutes of the collision occurring.
It really shook me up.
Being delayed and landing at Narita meant that we didn’t arrive to our hotel until well after midnight. We were absolutely wrecked and both felt quite shaken up. So it was quite a pleasant surprise after the day we had had to find that our hotel was so lovely and spacious. We paid around $550 AUD (~$360 USD) for three nights in this hotel and given how scarce space is in Tokyo, I feel like that was a fantastic deal.
That night we had a huge and much needed sleep. The next day we were in no rush to get up and about, we slept in until around 10am and didn’t even leave our hotel until lunch time. When we did eventually manage to drag ourselves from the comfy bed, we first set off in search of food. Our hotel was located right next to a train station which meant that we had an abundance of convenience store options available to us. After a sugar free redbull (necessary) and one (or two) of those delicious beef croquettes that are in every Japanese convenience store we were off and exploring.
We started off by heading to Harajuku. I took one look at the insanely busy Takeshita Street and immediately noped out so we instead decided to walk to the Shibuya area to do some shopping. We didn’t take a tonne of photos on this day but we did take a lot of videos so you can have a better look at what we got up to on the TikTok below.
@adventurous_elle
The next day we awoke bright and early so that we could visit Team Labs Planets. if you’ve followed me since the pre covid era you may remember that I have visited this spot with my friend Ethan back in early 2020. Unlike that time when we rocked up without tickets and got straight in, now you have to book your slots in advance and you can pretty much guarantee that they will be fully booked.
Team Labs is a company that specialises in interactive and immersive artworks – the kinds of which are designed to amaze and experience with all senses.
Some rooms involve lots of light and sound, some are quieter with water to wade through, squishy balloon type things to play with and otherworldly landscapes to get lost in.
Tickets to Team Labs cost 3800 yen (~$38 AUD/$25 USD) and are available to be booked several months in advance. I highly recommend booking as far in advance possible and either booking the first or last time slots of the day.
From there we decided to head to the Capybara Cafe. Ella is beyond obsessed with capybaras and this was the thing she wanted to do most whilst in Tokyo. We took an uber to the cafe and found that despite the fact that they don’t take bookings online or via phone, once you get there in person they have a very old school pen and paper style time slot reservation system, and they are busy – so much so that you won’t simply get a table when you arrive. We arrived at 11am and the next available time slot was around 3pm that afternoon.
Since we had a bit of time before our reservation, we headed off to Akihabara to do some window shopping!
Ella was really in her element here! She has worked in the development of video games for well over a decade and unsurprisingly, she is a lover of games and all game adjacent media.
We then had a delicious steak house lunch before we jumped in an uber back towards the capybara cafe.
We arrived and were seated in a small area home to two cute little capys. We ordered drinks but honestly we were too excited to drink them – look at this cute little guy.
*insert nails emoji here*
You have the option to purchase pellets or food for the capys and this is definitely the way to go. These little cuties are even more food motivated than I am!
We had had a fun two days in Tokyo, it wasn’t long enough but if you need a place to stopover en route to Europe, this is definitely a fantastic option. Just make sure you leave some space in your suitcase for the inevitable purchases!
@adventurous_elle Day three of our 7 week honeymoon! #tokyo #japan #vlog #travel #fyp #travelvlog
THE LOWDOWN
The Gate Hotel Ryogoku: Such a great value hotel that is well positioned for public transport and has super spacious rooms
Team Labs Planets: Book your spot for Team Labs as far in advance as possible
Cafe Capyba: The cafe isn’t open every day so make sure you check if it is open on the day you plan to visit, then go first thing in the morning to reserve a time slot
Remember: Eat your body weight in beef croquettes, sushi and ramen while you are there!
Fantastic, thanks for the great write-up! I will be visiting Tokyo for the first time later this year and found a lot of the info here useful for my planning.