Yokohama is less than a half hour away from Tokyo by train and is Japan’s second largest city. Since it is a harbor town, it was one of the first ports that opened up to foreigners and was Japan’s gateway to the western world during the Meiji Era. It also has some great tourists spots, including the world’s largest Chinatown (outside of China), a beer factory with guided tours that include free samples at the end, and a ramen museum built to look like a Japanese market street from the 1950’s.
Kamakura is a much smaller town that is located only a few minutes from Yokohama. It is a very ancient city filled with shrines, temples and the Japan’s second-largest Buddha statue (don’t ask me why, but I have this thing for checking out overly large statues). The shrine that really appealed to me was Zeniarai Benten, a shrine located inside a cave where, according to legend, if you wash your money there it will double.
Unfortunately, we would not get the chance to see any of this. Well, all most all of it. Remember how I said that Golden Week is the busiest travel time in Japan? This day we learned just how true that was.
The plan was to go to Yokohama Station and leave our suitcases in one of the large coin lockers and then continue on our adventures. At the end of the day, we would be taking an overnight bus from Yokohama Station to Kyoto, so this seemed like a simple plan that would make our trip easy and worry free.
First snag in the plan: when we got to Yokohama Station, there were no lockers left. Okay, no worries, we can adapt. We decided to take our bags to Kamakura and leave them in the station there. Once again, no lockers. We asked around and found out that a bike rental shop beside the station had cleared out all their bikes and were using the empty lot to hold luggage for weary travelers such as us. But there was a catch; you had to pick up your bags by 4pm. We had spent so much time running around looking for lockers and being squished on trains, and we ended up on the wrong train at one point, that it was already 2pm. Okay, we wouldn’t have time to do everything, but maybe we could still check out the giant Buddha statue. Nope. Kamakura was so busy that it would take over an hour to get there by any mode of transportation because of the long line ups. But, if we wanted, we could try walking there. It would take about 30 minutes. We decided to walk. We got lost. We ended up just hanging out on the beach and enjoying the ocean.
It definitely wasn’t how I had hoped the day would go. Did I learn a lesson from all of this? Oh yeah. Never plan so much in one day, and don’t try to travel long distances during Golden Week. Those trains were packed beyond packed. The Japanese may be a really polite group of people, but all of that goes out the window when they’re trying to get on a train. They will push and shove as if the other people on the train were made out of play-doh.But the day wasn’t completely lost. Once we returned to Yokohama, we were able to find lockers for our suitcases and explore Chinatown. We ate some amazing food, watched a few lion dances complete with firecrackers, and did some shopping. I don’t know if all that made up for the day we had, but it definitely made it better.
At the end of the day, we found our luxurious overnight bus. We tucked ourselves into our seats, wrapped ourselves into our blankets, and pulled down the “cone of silence.” It was a really comfortable and interesting sleep that lasted until we arrived in Kyoto.
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