Greetings from Tokyo, Japan (おはよう ございます)

Is travelling with a toddler a terrible idea?

It’s a beautiful spring day here in Shibuya, Tokyo. The sky is cloudless blue, the temperature a crisp 16°C, and the cherry blossoms are starting to emerge across the city. I’m here with my husband and two-year-old daughter, and we’ll stay a lazy two weeks.

I’m writing in a state of shell shock. In search of nappies this morning, we went into a four-storey, all-purpose store called Don Quijote, where you can purchase cheap crap of all descriptions. It was a satanic assault on the senses. Plastic cherry blossoms descended like demons from the ceiling. Coloured lights and whirligigs flashed from all directions. Hip-hop thumped from a speaker while scattered TV screens blasted chattering Japanese voices. Our toddler may as well have railed a line of coke. Pupils dilated, she ran from row to row, grabbing John Lennon sunglasses, chintzy cake toppers and plastic orchids, screaming OPEN! OPEN! OPEN! Then she retired to a skincare display and promptly shat herself.

“Travelling with kids is still good, it’s just different.” This is the line I heard over and over when we told friends and family we were riding off into the sunset, toddler in tow. We have no return ticket or exact end-date, and only a loose itinerary: Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore and Sydney. Two backpacks stuffed with the bare essentials. The stuff dreams are made of.

My dreams, anyway. In my 20s, my most passionate and enduring hobby—aside from digging up music on the internet—was travelling, and I did a swag of it: by the time the big three-oh rolled around, I’d visited Turkey, Russia, Morocco, Belize, Cuba, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, the US, the UK, the UAE, France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Portugal, Poland, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Hungary, the Netherlands, Australia, the Cook Islands and Fiji. I lived for four prime years in London and Berlin. It would have been easier to settle for cheaper and less disruptive sources of novelty, like drugs, but nothing hit the same as getting on a plane for me.

My husband, on the other hand, had never set foot on a plane when we met, save for the one time he immigrated from Samoa to New Zealand when he was nine years old. He listened to my on-the-road tales with envy, locked down by the pandemic, then locked down by a newborn baby. We hoped travel would be an activity not foreclosed by having a kid, so we wrangled her to India and Singapore at 18 months old, and now we’re wrangling her through Asia at two.

Is it different with kids? It sure is. Previously, in a foreign city, I would look up a park or shop my phone told me was a six-minute walk away, and it would take me roughly six minutes to walk there. Now, the same trip is a 45 minute affair, because our toddler needs to kiss every road cone we pass, take her shoes off, and lie down on the ground.

Is it still good? Yeah, it’s still good. Having a two-year-old in tow sometimes means fraying my nerves down to the roots, like with the discount-store ordeal this morning. But sometimes it means watching her stand on the streets of Tokyo—holding a lychee juice box covered in Japanese script—and howling like a wolf, because animal sounds are her thing now. Owww, owww, owwwwwww. Sometimes it means everything is better.

Some pics of our trip for paid subscribers below ❤️‍🔥