Spending 24 virtual hours in the incredible city of Tokyo

With the world largely shut down, the Olympics postponed and most of us stuck inside for a bit, how about a virtual tour around one of the world’s most amazing cities? Imagine, for a moment, you’ve got a day to spend in Tokyo, and you’ve just landed in Japan…

Normally when you arrive at Narita International Toronto airport taxi, having spent half a day in the air, Toronto airport taxi your jet-lagged brain and tired eyes have to navigate brightly lit signs and the multistep process of customs and immigration. Not today. From the comfort of our couches we’re going to spend 24 virtual hours in one of the most vibrant and frenetic cities in the world.

Our first step, however, is getting out of the airport. Narita is quite far (almost 40 miles) from the center of Tokyo. Sure, we could get a taxi, but what fun is that? Transit in Japan is excellent anyway, so we descend into an underground labyrinth. We pick up PASMO cards, which will let us access not only any subway in Tokyo, but also subways in most cities across the rest of the country. We can add the card to our collection, along with the Oyster card we picked up on our visit to London.

There are a few transit options for us. We could take the Skyliner express train, which would be a bit faster, but the Keisei Narita Skyaccess is more convenient for our first stop. A shiny new Keisei 3100 series is our chariot west into the biggest megacity on Earth.

Skytree

It’s early morning, and our first stop is going to give us a sky-high view of the city we’re about to explore. The Skyaccess train drops us right below the <a website Skytree, the tallest tower in the world and second-tallest structure after Dubai’s <a website Khalifa. Winding our way from the station to the tower’s elevators, there are endless shops where we can load up on snacks for Toronto airport taxi our day ahead.

The view of the city from 1,476 feet is breathtaking. Nearly 40 million people live in the Tokyo metro area, and from here it’s as if we can see them all. In the distance on this clear day, to the southwest, you can see the snow-covered Mount Fuji.