One of my most favorite and exciting time during my trip to Tokyo lasted only 20 minutes, but what an exhilarating 20 minutes it was.
I am talking about my night time helicopter ride over Tokyo, set up by Matt, my wonderful tour guide. After a full day of visiting temples, we take the train to catch the helicopter company’s shuttle bus. One thing the Japanese are is prompt, we were told the bus would be there at 7:20 pm, we arrived with about 5 minutes to spare and the bus came exactly at 7:20 and left at 7:21 pm, so if you are late (which we found out later some people were), you had to wait.
We arrived at Urayasu Heliport, where Excel Air is located and partake in the night cruise
I’ve never been in a helicopter before so I was pretty excited and I mean, how cool is it to say you took a helicopter night cruise over Tokyo in one of these
We are first brought into a lounge where other people were waiting for their turn to either go up or head for the shuttle bus to take them back. While we waited, we were told we were very close to Tokyo Disney (and we were, we could clearly see the Disney train that goes around the amusement park) but it was really dark and I only took one photo (you couldn’t really tell it was Disney anyway but here it is
besides, I wanted to make sure I had enough room on my camera to take photos while up in the air. While we waited we had tea, I had Jasmine and Matt had some unusual version of green tea mixed with something else. Anyway, it was our turn to go up and it turns out the people who were late were supposed to ride with us, so we got the entire helicopter to ourselves – we each got our own window seat.
And this is what we saw – simply breathtaking. I must warn you though, the photos are not the best. We were not allowed to use a flash for fear of blinding the pilot and crashing………and we definitely don’t want that.
After we landed, we took some photos with the helicopter and was escorted only to see the nightly display of fireworks over Tokyo Disney
A good end to an amazing experience.
