Plan your transit in advance, it will save you.

I went to Japan with my partner and friends a few months ago and I was reminiscing about the trip when I remembered a really unfortunate event when we were traveling throughout Gifu prefecture.

If you plan on traveling outside of the golden route, please look at the time tables, research how to get the tickets in advance, and give yourself a strict time to take some of these JR trains. Don’t make the same mistake we did.

We were finishing up a 2 day stay in Takayama and had a one night ryokan stay planned in Gero. We were planning on taking the JR Hida line south to Gero. We ended up missing the train we were supposed to take, and we were running out of time to make it to Gero. We essentially missed it despite getting to the station early, as we couldn’t figure out how to get tickets, for some reason this was a lot easier in Nagoya. Buy a round trip ticket if you know when you’re leaving.

Restaurants close a bit earlier in Gero, and our ryokan’s shuttle to take us from Gero station was going to stop service for the night if we weren’t able to get there in time.

So what did we do? We took a bus. We remembered that someone had mentioned on here that there was a bus available from Takayama to Gero. What we didn’t know, is that we essentially shared the entire bus and we were packed like sardines with presumably high schoolers or middle schoolers. We felt very out of place.

Also, these aren’t buses where you can comfortably bring luggage with you. We should’ve utilized luggage forwarding more, but we had only forwarded our luggage to Takayama and had planned to take it back with us to Tokyo as we were jumping through Gero for only one night. I regret that. We didn’t have very large luggage’s but with two people it had made that bus even more uncomfortably packed and we felt extremely guilty.

So just as a recommendation from our mistakes, double check train schedules, purchase tickets in advance if you can, and if you have luggage try to avoid buses.