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We're going to Japan to ride the Shiki Shima train and I've booked the long legs of the trip : New York to Hong Kong and then Taipei to New York (we're bookending the trip to Japan with long weekends in two of our favorite places). But now we need to book the short legs between those two places and Japan. One of my weak spots with booking award travel is doing crazy-but-legal routings and stopovers. I'd used British Airways points for the Hong Kong leg, and BA prices all award travel by leg so there were no points to be saved by spending an hour on the phone with a call center trying to get an agent to book me a single flight with a multi-day layover in Hong Kong en route to Japan. ( TIP: There's a great online Avios calculator here ). Hong Kong to Tokyo I priced out the flights and found a lot of Ultra Low Cost Carriers (ULCC) offering this flight for US$150-ish (a.k.a. $350 once you pay the surcharges for seats, bags, oxygen, and toilets ), but we wanted t...

(UPDATE May 2024) We had a long layover in Taipei on our first trip and we got to try a whirlwind 72 hours of recommendations from friends who'd been before. We loved that visit so much we actually went back again in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2023, and 2024! Here's a few of our Taipei tips: First off, the airport is quite far from the city and traffic can be horrendous. The subway to the airport opened in Spring 2017 and you can get a deal online for airport rail fare + 48 or 72 hour Taipei Metro pass. We've also taken the bullet train into the city just for fun. Download and  watch  Anthony Bourdain's video  about Taipei on the flight there (ca 2013). He's always good for a laugh and a tip or two.  Subways and bullet trains are cheap . If you're going to be there for more than a couple days, get an Easy Card from the staffed window at the subway station. You can also use it to pay at most convenience stores. If you're not, single-...

pros beautiful lounge with a full buffet toto washlet in the lounge  brand new 737 with sky interior excellent staff on the ground and in the air decent food  cons fairly expensive  no jetway; bus out to remote stand instead no priority security line no wi-fi how i did it I just paid a bunch of money (US$450 per person, one way TPE-KLO). Since China Airlines is Skyteam I should earn some Delta miles, so there's that. I'll also get the airfare 3x bonus from Amex. We really didn't want to fly Taipei to Manila and then on to Boracay, just because this under-two-week trip already had too many legs on it. But, t his flight was kind of a unicorn – when I first started planning this trip it appeared to exist but didn't seem to be bookable anywhere. Eventually I found it by booking directly on China Airlines website. arriving The Taipei airport is quite far from the city , and given that we needed to be at the airport by 5am for a 7am...

From Pokemon to Neko Atsume to shuinchou temple books , Japanese people love collecting things. If you've ever taken a ride on the glorious shinkansen bullet trains or ridden one of their extremely clean and punctual urban lines, then you know there's also a national obsession with great trains. The Eki stamp ("station stamp") is where those two obsessions meet . Most Japan Railways stations (including urban metro ones like the Yamanote line) have a unique stamp reflecting that station's history. Kids and train nerds (called "Tetchan") buy cute little books to collect the stamps of all the stations they've been to. The USA has a similar program with the national parks . One of my favorite stamps… All train-nerdiness aside, an Eki stamp book makes a great souvenir : it's flat, small, cheap, and light... and shouldn't take but a few moments to do when you're out and about. Special Eki stamp books are usually available at booksto...