Soon Tod & I will be taking our autumn holiday. This year, we're staying in Japan and touring cities that begin with O--Oita, Onomichi and Osaka. We'll fly to Oita, then take trains on the way back towards Tokyo.
Having just paid for our tickets and hotels, and thinking that it was an awful lot of money for domestic travel, I was wondering what a comparable itinerary in the US would cost.
So using Pittsburgh as our starting point, I priced a trip to Chicago, Indianapolis and Cincinnati with 8 nights in hotels similar in quality to the places we'll stay in Japan.
| Japan (yen) | USA (dollars) | |
| Airfare | 60,600 | 344 |
| Trains | 56,740 | 362 |
| Hotels | 141,000 | 900 |
| Total | 258,340 | 1,606 |
If you convert the yen to dollars, then it's easier to see that our Japan holiday will cost about $750 more than a comparable trip in the US. Pretty crazy...but the experiences will be worth the money. I love getting away from Tokyo and seeing other parts of the country.
And of course, if we wanted to travel to the US, it would set us back a few thousand dollars, so in the end, it's less expensive to travel domestically for our holiday.
i've only been in tokyo for a month, but my plan from the beginning (and I'm going to stick to it, too, if i can) is eventually to take a weekend trip to somewhere outside of tokyo once a month. right now, I'm still dealing with moving expenses, blah, blah, blah. I'm jealous. Have fun!