You know, something about spring really makes you want to go to Kyoto. Well if you know Kyoto even just a bit, it's an awesome place to visit at the peaks of every season.
Anyway. I used to live in Osaka so Kyoto was only a stretch away. It was a tiny excursion. But in the past 3 years ever since I came to Tokyo, I only visited the ancient capital just once.
It's not that cheap you know. If you take the shinkansen (the bullet train) it easily costs you more than 10,000 yen which is not cheap at all. It's a big trip. You can't be like, "hmm, maybe I wanna go to Kyoto over the weekend for hanami" anymore.
But the other day I happened to come across this unbelievable number Y3900. Wow was I surprised. Tokyo - Osaka for only 3,900 yen! And what's the transportation? Bus.
I knew about the overnight bus services even before I got to know about this Y3,900 service, but those were somewhere around Y5,000. In fact, I used it a lot cuz it's cheap, but the presence of this Y3,900 one really knocked me out.
If you take the shinkansen it takes only a bit less than 3 hours, whereas you'll have to see a good 10-hour-ride if you take the highway bus. Time is money, if you want to make it cheap, you have to take time I guess. So for a 10-hour-ride I actually think 4,000 is quite decent.
But as many of you probably know, these kinds of long-distance-buses run only during night so as soon as you hop on, all you have to do is to fall asleep... which for some people may be the hardest part.
I hear that the seats are nearly full if not completely full even on weeknights. It may be hard to take a ride right after landing in Japan, but for those backpackers it may be an efficient and cost-saving way to travel around. Keep it in mind ;-)
...but I can't guarantee the comfort level of your sleep.
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