Logistics for Worldcon 2007

[fivemack]

I've got a membership for the Yokohama Worldcon, and am starting to wonder what else I need.

The flights seem to be either £600 on the hopefully-not-bankrupt-by-then Alitalia changing in Milan, or £500 on Aeroflot changing in Moscow (bringing with that all the delights of Russian transit visas); I suppose that's unavoidable since Japan is relatively distant and aviation fuel relatively costly. I've tried being flexible about mid-week departures and returns but it doesn't seem to reduce the cost; I presume NRT is the right airport.

There's obviously no point going to Japan for a five-day con; I'd plan to take a fortnight or so, so would be interested to know if people going are tending to take their extra time pre-con or post-con ... I'm sure there are likely to be fannish trips to places like the Tokyo Science Museum. I'm completely decision-paralysed by the long list of hotels on the con website, and so would like to appeal to people I know who are going to tell me which hotel they're in and I'll aim to use that one.

I get the impression Yokohama may not be the right place to stay for touristing in the Tokyo region: would it make more sense to book the central nights of the con in the con hotel (anyone prepared to share a room? five nights at the £120/night single-room rate is a lot more than I'm comfortable with, I can provide references that I'm not an axe-murderer) and get a travel-agent in England to book me a cheap hotel somewhere in the metro area for the rest of the fortnight?

Comments

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

A number of my friends are thinking of that, but it does add another week to the trip even if you go straight through, there's a rather fiddly bit of scheduling to get the weekly Vladivostok-to-Niigata ferry at the end, and it would seem silly to take the trans-Siberian and not spend a few days in Moscow at the beginning, a few days in Irkutsk and by Lake Baikal in the middle, and maybe even a few days in Vladivostok at the end (see rezendi's log of a trip on the Trans-Siberian recently).

Also, I'd feel distinctly hypocritical spending much time in Putin's Russia, even in transit, after vowing for regime-related reasons not to visit Bush's America, even in transit.