Asian Adventure - 5 weeks in Taiwan and Japan/Oct & Nov 2024 Taiwan Japan Another trip for Asia? After a wonderful trip to Japan in 2023, would we do this again? M has been learning Mandarin for a long time and wanted to use it in his travels; we had scheduled a trip prior to the pandemic to mainland China, but for many reasons, we were a little uneasy about traveling there now. So he suggested that we travel to Taiwan. The more I thought about it and the more I read, including the great trip report by my friend, yestravel , I thought, “why not?” And then I realized that the distance between Taiwan and Japan was a very easy and very short flight! And so, the trip was born.We are now in our 70s and while there are many folks whose energy impress me at that age, we’re not that couple! So what we do in 5 weeks, many accomplish in half that time! We cover a lot but we take it very easy during the day, going out for a few hours, returning to the hotel to rest and then going out again. And while I do a fair amount of research, I find that many of my detailed plans often fall by the wayside when we arrive somewhere since we tend to follow our nose and enjoy the surprise element of discovery. We’re not foodies, so don’t tend to go out of our way for a particular restaurant; this has worked well for us, and we’ve often discovered fun hole-in-the wall places.Planning for both Taiwan and Japan was an interesting challenge. We generally prefer to stay longer in places, taking day trips, rather than moving from place to place. I also like to mix up our stays between larger and smaller cities and getting some sense of the countryside. Planning our second trip to Japan was also a challenge; I didn’t want to repeat last year's trip, although we did want to return toand our favorite hotel,. So going back and forth between planning the itinerary for the 2 countries, I kept Taiwan relatively simple, staying in 4 different cities, taking day trips when appropriate. And we focused our Japan trip on, a more rural and slightly less touristed island region than Honshu, which is the most popular region for first-time tourists.And a few extra details we’re at that point where biz class has become essential, but we used all our miles last year for our trip to Japan. After much searching, I found that Turkish Airlines Business Class was by far the cheapest (though not inexpensive!) and so, we flew Newark>Istanbul>Taipei and returned Osaka>Istanbul>JFK. While the flights themselves were very good and the lounge was the BEST, if there is a problem with flights beforehand, customer service is terrible. With multiple changes over the months since I booked the flights, and many seat changes, I ended up with many headaches. Just a week before we were to go, we had one flight in which the reserved seats disappeared and no one could resolve this. lt all worked out once we were at the airport, but for a week, I stressed that we wouldn’t be on the flight!- Okura Prestige Hotel (5)- Gaya Hotel (3)Lakeshore Hotel (4)- Silks Club (3)- Nikko Fukuoka Hotel (3)- Yamamizuki ryokan (2)- Nikko Kumamoto (2)- Candeo Hotels Nagasaki Shinchi Chinatown (3)- Daiwa Roynet Tenmonken (2)– Minshu Yakusugi Sar (3)- Hotel Mume (5+)
