7 November 2026
OMG so many hotel photos
Toyama to Tsuruga on the bullet train
Now I am in Tsuruga, the smallest city I have ever stayed at during all my travels in Japan. Will I starve? Probably not, there is a Coco curry downstairs, but there are not a lot of westerner friendly looking shops around.
Getting here took 1 hour and 20 minutes on the bullet train, but then the trouble started.
I had to pick up my next train ticket from the JR West (not East) office. I do this when it is too early to check into my hotel. So I exit the station which was a long way over many tracks shared by bullet trains, private railways, and JR lines... which is part of the issue here. There are tap off points to transfer manned by a girl (see what I did there), and different coloured exit gates. I go out a gate with my IC card. Apparently that was wrong even though it let me out.
No ticket office. Now I need to get back to the other side of the station, there's no road as it is on the side of cliff, so I tap back into the station, then the real trouble started, phone calls, stamps, getting yelled at... read on for the rest of the story!
Anyway, now I am in my hotel, with my train tickets and no clue how to get back into the station correctly.
Raining again in Toyama this morning, somehow I did not get wet on either hike even though I mainly remember Toyama much like Niigata as raining.
Inside the station and it is an Italian wine festival, with live tv.
Outside it is a rained out Italian food festival.
A train is a train, they are all the same.
OK lets complete the station saga. To get to the ticket office on the wrong side of the station, I was supposed to get one of these vouchers from one window, and get it stamped at 2 more. I did not. I used my IC card. This required me to go back, get that undone at a machine and then someone ran across the station with a voucher for me. Which I then followed them back to get it stamped, and then after collecting my ticket from the poorly located ticket office, I got escorted out by a guy yelling at me in Japanese, and yet another person stamped it on the way out. By the way, this was on top of not being able to collect my ticket from a machine, because collecting with a credit card (as you are told to do) does not work with foreign credit cards. Note this is not paying with a card, this is collecting, I had already paid from Australia a month ago.
Can I point out at this point that in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong you just need your phone and nothing else? Across the whole country.
Here is the Tsuruga station, you will see it again before I leave, it is much bigger than you can tell from this angle.
Now for all the hotel photos, first the entrance area. This is a Dormy Inn again, under $100 a night. Dormy Inns appear to all have the extra entrance area.
The main part of my room, inside the second door. There is even a little desk and chair around to the right. I am starting to dislike Dormy Inns, mainly because the lift ALWAYS stops at level 2 on the way up and down, because of the hot spring.
The bathroom is standard, I enjoy the seal yourself in shower cubicle because you can really fill them with steam.
And now for the view. That is water between the town and the mountain, the ocean in fact.
And up that small mountain is another mystery pole, I will go up there and check it out on my non hiking day.
Now to figure out how to get into the train station without causing another national incident so I can get to my hikes tomorrow.