Our first stop today was Izu Animal Kingdom (we had also planned to go to Izu Shaboten Zoo as well but due to the rains from the typhoon we decided not to go). We caught the shinkansen from Tokyo Station to Atami Station and the Ito Line to Izu-Inatori Station. There are trains that go from the Tokyo Station straight to Izu-Inatori but we wanted to ride a shinkansen. On the Tokaido Shinkansen line, only the Kodama shinkansens stop at Atami, the Hikari and Nozomi shinkansens don't stop at Atami, and JR pass holders can't ride the Nozomi shinkansens either. After the Ito station, the rail becomes a private line and the JR pass won't cover the any fares after Ito. This information is covered within the JR rail pass and even has details on how much the fares are. The fare came out to ¥1,620 per person each way between Ito station and Izu-Inatori station.
There is a bus that runs from Izu-Inatori station to Izu Animal Kingdom, it cost ¥300, but we didn't know where the bus stop was or when the next bus would arrive so we just took a taxi. The taxi fare was ¥1,750.
Izu Animal Kingdom was nice. I loved it because I got to pet and play with capybara which was like my goal for this trip, but at the same time the were some exhibits that were just entirely too small. There was also an amusement park as well although it looked pretty run down. To make things better, there was also a typhoon rolling up through Japan so it had just started raining when we arrived at the park. This also meant that the petting zoo had a lot of wet animals... Most of the smaller animals were under cover or in their shelter, but some like a few rabbits and capybara were running around in the rain. I think I'd come back here, only if I knew it would be a sunny day and I was using the JR rail pass.
There was also a good sized gift shop with lots of capybara stuff!
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| Right side of the lion exhibit |
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| Left side of the lion exhibit... Way too small. |
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| Food you could buy for ¥100 to feed the animals |
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| The guinea pigs are stuck lol |
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| I wanted to hold the anteater but he was sleeping :( |
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| I have no idea what these animals were. |
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| The capybara's took over the turtles little house and ate all it's food lol. |
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| Capybara!! |
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| Their fur is actually very coarse. Kinda felt like cat whiskers lol |
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| Game center, the outside was very weathered down as was the appearance of most of the amusement park attractions. The games inside were pretty dated as well. |
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| The capybaras we got from Izu Animal Kingdom along with what we got from the Pokémon Center the day before. |
We caught the bus back to Izu-Inatori Station and we had originally planned on stopping at another zoo with capybara that was about 3 or 4 stations up from Izu-Inatori, but with the typhoon we decided just to head back to Tokyo. Instead of stopping at Atami Station again to catch the shinkansen we just decided to catch a Limited Express Odoriko that goes straight from Izu-Inatori Station to Tokyo Station (we could've also caught this train in the morning to Izu-Inatori). The Odoriko Line was about 2 hours and the green car costs ¥5,200 per person.
After resting for a bit back at the hotel, we headed out to Akihabara. I don't know how I forgot how big the crowds are in Aki... Stopped at Animate and I was completely disappointed at how sad their character goods sections were... We tried our luck with some crane games before heading back to the hotel.
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