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Japan cruise - availability of non ship excursions

Hello. We are going on a Japan cruise in May. We recently booked it so some of the ship excursions are either sold out or very expensive. I was wondering if places in Japan are similar to the Caribbean and Alaska cruise ports where vendors are available when you get off the ship and offer either small bus or mini-van tours. I am curious about Aomori, Hakodate, Hiroshima, Osaka and Shimizu.

I have looked at a few websites with personal guides but for two people some were $800-$1000 a day which is too expensive.

Thank you for your assistance.

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We are not tour people but we visited Aomori and Hakodate on our own when we stopped on a transpacific cruise to Japan. If this is your first visit, I mention this only to say that we did very well moving around independently in Japan. It was much, much easier than we had anticipated. And less expensive as well. I’m sure a tour would have been quite informative but we had a wonderful time and I hope you do as well.Japan and the Japanese are terrific .

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If you go to Kyoto, be sure to take a tour, it is hard to get to all the great places by walking.

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Another thought…We once hired a guide from toursbylocalsdotcom and we had a good experience. We communicated by email to make arrangements and noted both things we were interested in and things we did not want to include, e.g., shopping, meals etc. We arranged to be met at the ship. It worked very well for us in Europe. Our experience was two days in St Petersburg a few years ago and was much less than your numbers, but that was then. Good luck.