Day 26 - 22/01/1998: Thank you for flying Air Nippon: It was a busy day of packing and last minute shopping before going to Kagoshima Airport (which is not that far from Kobayashi) and checking in to our domestic flight to Fukuoka. For a domestic airport Kagoshima airport is pretty flash. We ate dinner at Kagoshima airport then we boarded our flight to Fukuoka.
I was the only gaijin (foreigner) and Ritsuko was the only woman (apart from the stewardesses) on the flight, all the other people were businessmen. This was my first time on a Japanese Airline and even for a short hop domestic flight the service was excellent. The longest part of the fight seemed to be taxing out for take off and before I even knew what happened we had landed in Fukuoka.
It was easy to get our luggage from the arrival conveyor belt because we were the only people on the flight who'd checked in anything. After picking up the luggage there was security check where the guy checked that our baggage tags matched our boarding passes. It seems strange to me in a country with so little crime they have this kind of check. They certainly don't do checks like this in Australia.
After getting out of the airport we caught the train to a business hotel where we stayed the night, we were too tired to go out anywhere.
In the above photo you can see the ANK (Air Nippon Koku, a subsidiary of ANA) Boeing 737-500, which flew us from Kagoshima to Fukuoka, at Fukuoka airport.
Epilogue
We had to get up early on 23rd to catch our flight to Kuala Lumpur so I didn't have time to take any more photos of Japan, but I remember being woken by the sound of election campaigners who were driving around a Mazda "Bogo" van with three big loudspeakers on top of it.
The departure lounge at Fukuoka airport didn't have any windows so I didn't have the chance to take any aeroplane photos even though it was a nice sunny day. I noticed most of the people were going on group tours and lamented the lack of adventure of the Japanese traveller. I certainly had an adventure and I have been back to Japan twice since. I hope to put up the diaries of those trips sometime in the near future.
Thank you for coming along on the journey of this website, I hope you enjoyed it!
