You Can Travel Across Japan for Just $21 a Day

If you aren’t too concerned with your travel time, you can get all the way across Japan for less than the price of dinner. The East Japan Railway company is offering a ticket package that allows unlimited rides on local trains for 2370 yen a day, or about $21, as RocketNews24 reports.

The Seishun 18 ticket package (it’s called “Youth 18,” but you don’t need to be a youth to use it) is good for five days of unlimited travel. Though you do have to plunk down the $107 for all five tickets at once, the package can be split between multiple people, so it can also be used for one day of unlimited travel for five people, as long as they’re all traveling together.

It’s good for all Japan Railway lines, including some rapid-transit buses, from the northern city of Hokkaido to the southern city of Kyushu. But it can’t be used for express trains or sleeper cars, so if you do want to travel the entire country, it won’t be quick or comfortable. There are also limited dates when you can use the tickets. This travel period ends on April 10, but there’s another window from late July to September and from December 10 to January 10.

The RocketNews24 team took advantage of the package to travel from Tokyo to Kokura, about a 685-mile journey. It took them 19 hours with some tight transfers between trains, but they did make it on that $21 ticket. For a cross-country vacation in a notoriously pricey place, that’s a bargain that might be worth suffering for.

[h/t RocketNews24]