Thursday the 11th of July – finally in a couple hours I would be on my flight to a trip that I’d been looking forward to for the past two months. The last couple weeks for me had been hectic as I was making my way to the shops almost everyday in order to buy all my travel necessities – as I kept forgetting little things here and there. However, after a million shopping trips and sleepless nights, I was finally ready to say good-bye to my house for two weeks and hop on the trip of a lifetime.

The first leg of the trip (from Perth to Kuala Lumpur) was quite easy going and stress free. The only slight problem was that our flight was delayed by 40 minutes from Perth because of an unknown issue, however this wasn’t too serious as this didn’t effect our connecting flight. However, as soon as we landed in Malaysia – the troubles began (for me personally). Shortly after landing – my travel buddy Andy and I made our way to the other side of the airport to a different set of boarding gates as we thought we would be catching our flight from there. However, upon further critical inspection (information centre) we discovered that our flight was actually from the gates that we had initially landed at – and there was no need for us to change our gates. Because of this, I had to make a hectic run through from one side of the airport, to another within 20 minutes as I was super close to missing my flight. After this happened, I thought that my troubles were over and that the rest of my travels would go easy – but that was far from it.

We landed at Narita Airport around 6:10pm on the 12th of July, after making our way through customs we went towards our baggage carousal for luggage pickup where I had another surprise waiting for me. Turns out my luggage was never put onto our flight (she explained that there was a very short amount of time transporting luggage from one flight to another) and well .. I didn’t have my suitcase. If almost missing my flight wasn’t bad enough, I had another situation here to deal with, the case of the missing suitcase. After an hour of going back and forth with the Narita Airport representative I was told that my suitcase would reach my hotel room the next day around 6-9pm. To say that I was upset, angry and confused was a major understatement, however I understood that this had happened to many other people on the flight and that I wasn’t the only one suffering with no luggage and no clothes, which made me feel slightly better. My only other issue now was figuring out what to wear for the next 24 hours until my suitcase gets delivered to my hotel.

After leaving the airport we used the Narita Express to go down to Shibuya from where we caught the den-entoshi line which takes us to Kajigaya (where our hotel is). This whole train ride was a bit of a struggle, mainly for Andy as I saw how troublesome it was carrying around a suitcase through the station – which made me feel slightly better about me not having my suitcase. Walking towards our hotel we noticed there was a family mart a 100m away from us. After settling in to our rooms we decided to head down to the family mart to buy some necessities (and a pair of pyjamas for me), which somewhat acted as my outfit for the next day.

So far this travel experience was more than what I had bargained for to say the least, and at no point was I expecting it to go like this. But I guess it was more of a blessing in disguise that I didn’t have to carry my 25kg suitcase down multiple sets of stairs around a very crowded train station.