Scheduling an itinerary

When I worked in the travel industry one of the hardest things was to schedule an itinerary that pleased the clients.

You must always remember that clients can often arrive exhausted after their air travel and the last thing they want is to tramp around a crowded tourist site. You therefore need to be flexible.

The travel agents here are running two tours and the other mutinied against the shrine visits of Kyoto.

We took most of them in comfortably seated in a rickshaw.

You never can predict a client reaction because people are so different. Our group is happy one. For the third time the same couple wandered off, delaying everyone enormously, but no one complained – at least not publicly- and the couple became the subject of good-humoured banter.

However our good nature was tested by some strange planning yesterday.

We were travelling back from Kobe to Tokyo for the Bronze match between New Zealand and Wales.

This was labelled by some of little consequence but the All Blacks don’t do trivial internationals and nor do their fans, all of whom were dressed in the famous shirt. We made an early start, our bags were sent on ahead and we took the bullet train to Tokyo.

At the station we were met by the bus and taken to the Ginza area, high end shops in the style of Fifth Avenue or Bond Street.

There a group of us had a meal in a Spanish restaurant and the bus met us to take us to Tokyo stadium for the match. A more obvious course would have been to go to the hotel first where we had stayed last weekend, checked in, rested up and leave from there. Poor Bob need his afternoon nap as he regularly is up by 4.00.

After the game there was the now inevitable occurrence of the couple getting lost, chaos as there is no dedicated pick-up or collection point, and we finally returned from the match to the hotel at 10.00pm.

Wayne was suggesting a few beers but the Rusters wanted to unpack and get themselves ready for the big one the following day.

Poor Wayne was originally charged with giving a few sessions on rugby not herding a group around, often in difficult situations.

However, such is our appreciation that there was a whip-round which raised enough for Wayne to be given a fine steel pen in red Kobe Steelers colours and his effervescent wife Trish, a landscape gardener, a Bonzai tree.

We did not forget our guide Amigo who was given a pendant of Kiwi art and craft as a good luck symbol.