RTW TP Run in Jan 2026: Day 175 – Tokyo

After arriving into Gate 149, I was first off through door 1L and headed off walking along the long travelators heading to Immigration.

Immigration was empty, but what an amazing experience. I had prepared my customs and arrivals declarations online, so I had a QR code ready to go.

I could see about 15-20 members of airport staff wanting to help me. I was personally escorted down to the next available QR scanning machine.

A guy stood next to me and helped me scan my QR code, scan my passport and finally to scan my index fingerprints. He even held my phone so I could interact with the kiosk.

Everyone was so friendly and welcoming.

I was escorted to the next immigration agent who was very helpful and happy to share some smiles. Nothing too complex, just rescanned my QR code.

Into the baggage reclaim hall and straight through and into the Customs check area. Another scan of my QR code and I was through.

So 15 mins from walking off the aircraft, I was heading to ground transportation.

I had looked at various options for travelling to my hotel at Ariake Gardens, south of central Tokyo. The easy answer was to pick up an Uber, which provided detailed instructions as to how to access the pickup point.

My Uber arrived just as I did. The vehicle was a premium van, capable of carrying at least 5 in comfort. It was beautifully cool.

The driver spoke no English, so when I asked whether I could take a photo of the inside of his taxi, the driver stopped the car in the middle of the road and found a translation app.

Eventually we shared a smile and I took my photo and we were back on our way.

It was warm and there was a feeling of humidity in the air, although it wasn’t that bad at 7am.

At around 7:30am, there was no chance of a room being available, but the hotel accepted my rucksack and I decided to go and explore.

The Kokusai-Jenjijo Rinkai Line station was just next door.

By time I reached the hotel, it was just that little bit warmer, and the humidity hit me harder.

None of the local Starbucks’ opened before 10am, so ChatGPT recommended I take the train and then a 20 min walk to a Starbucks Reserve Roastery experience. Sounded like a great plan!

I consider myself fairly intelligent but even I struggled to work out what to do to get a ticket at the train station. Although a lot of signage is also in English, sometimes it feels like they have missed something out.

In this day and age, especially in Japan, I expected to either be able to use an app to buy a ticket, or pay using contact less.

But no, after speaking to someone, I had to use an ATM to get some cash out and then feed in a 10,000 Yen note into a machine, for which it spewed out a lot of worthless coins and the smallest ticket you have ever seen.

It got me on board a train heading to Shibuya, which took at about 20 mins. From there I followed Goigle Maps directions heading west to the Starbucks Reserve Roastery in Meguro City.

By the time I got there, I was sweating like a pig. I felt sticky and was in desperate need of a shower. I cannot imagine what the locals thought of me!

Anyway, wow – what a place. It spanned four floors with something interesting to look at in every direction.

I embarrassingly asked for my normal caramel macciatto. I received a confused look in reply and I had to order some poncy tall coffees instead.

I took my little tray containing one hot tall caramel latte and one cold tall caramel latte up to floor three and enjoyed the air con. No one came to sit near to me!

The cold caramel latte was just what I needed to cool me down. The now just warm caramel latte woke me up.

ChatGPT suggested I could walk back to the hotel visiting interesting tourist attractions on the way. Blow that. I decided to go back on the air conditioned train and see whether I couldn’t bag an early room.

Now I had some cash and I knew what I was doing, getting back to the hotel was a doddle. When i got back at 10am, I was a tad hungry, and hot, so I decided it was worth going to McDonalds for a snack and a milk shake.

After being guided all round the houses by Google Maps I found a McDonalds close by and ordered a Japanese speciality and a strawberry milkshake. That did the trick.

By 11am, I was back at the hotel smooth talking my way into a room. The lady I spoke with was very friendly and gave me most of the normal Diamond member benefits even though I had booked through a travel agent.

They proved to be quite valuable.

I finally got into room 1314 by about 11am and I so enjoyed a refreshing shower. I was quite sure that the Japanese locals would have been mighty relieved as well.

I’m not sure I have ever sweated so much and felt so disgusting as I did walking through the humid streets of Tokyo. It was lovely to see what I saw today, but that was likely to be the extent of my Japanese adventures for this trip.

After a broken series of snoozes in the afternoon, I decided to make use of happy hour at Bar33, which started at 5pm and ended at 6pm.

It was popular, but got in early and found a comfy table in the corner. They laid on special drinks and nibbles for Diamond members.

I ordered a fried chicken starter, a Japanese cheese pizza, which was smashing and 4 Asahi beers. In the end, the whole meal cost less than £10. The beers were free.

I retreated back to my room and planned out the next day. It was going to be a challenge. England were due to kick off at 6am, my flight was due to leave at 10:35am and I had about an hour’s travel to fit in.

The reason this was a challenge was due to public transport not starting early enough for me.

I needed to be at the airport before the start of the match, which meant I only really had one option: Uber and that was going to cost me £100.

After securing approval from a higher authority, the only issue left was that of getting some sleep and that proved to be a challenge of its own