Our tour… or yours? (Both!)
For all the effort we put into sourcing great tours for our customers, there are some things you just need to research and manage on your own. Here’s what I mean: I was in Tokyo a little while ago, my first time, and was blown away — as most people are — by this incredibly busy, colourful and crazy place. To get myself oriented I took the Tokyo Morning Tour and from the Tokyo Tower got a good idea of the scale and “shape” of Tokyo…
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| Looks like something else, but it’s the Tokyo Tower |
And that’s all great, I enjoyed it, but there was another side of Tokyo I wanted to see, and I couldn’t find it in any of our tours. I wanted to find out how a city this big works so well; to see the infrastructure that makes it all come together. That’s not the stuff of tours, so I had to start asking cab drivers…And eventually I came up with the goods.
The Tokyo Fish Market (Tsukiji) is an amazing place that jumps into life around 5am each day, and by 6am is definitely the only show in town. Every day millions (well, maybe thousands) of fresh and frozen tuna and other fish are sold here using the most theatrical and fast-paced auction system you can imagine.
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| They’ll all be gone in 20 minutes, and tonight… sushi |
This is live theater at its best, and there’s no tour that takes you here (the liability insurance would be a killer… men on bikes and scooters with trailers carrying 80-kilo bluefin tuna are racing by constantly, and if you’re in the way, tough luck!) but your cab driver will understand when you hop in at 5:30am and say “Tsukiji!”
What’s the point of all this? No matter how deep Viator gets you under the surface of a destination, you’ll always have room to dig deeper with your own “private” tours, and they can be just as much fun!
-Rod Cuthbert
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January 27th, 2008 at 12:47 pm
[...] Somebody at the Sydney Morning Herald obviously won the lottery last week; features on Brunei (home to the world’s richest person, Bill Gates eat your heart out) and around-the-world private jet tours leave me feeling economically challenged in the travel department. Luckily the Herald keeps it a little real with tips on visiting NYC museums for less moolah. They also do a nice job profiling the Tokyo fish market (also check out Rod Cuthbert’s tips for visiting the Tokyo fish market). [...]