TravelCharika

East Asian cities

Four cities a short flight apart, each with a different year. 4 stops, 3,464 km end to end as the crow flies.

Taipei
Photo by CEphoto, Uwe Aranas, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
February and May are a sweet spot at 3 of the 4.

The stops, in order

Month by month

Place JanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDec
Tokyo 9° 10° 14° 18° 22° 25° 29° 31° 27° 21° 16° 11°
Seoul 2° 4° 9° 14° 18° 23° 27° 28° 25° 19° 12° 4°
Taipei 19° 20° 23° 26° 29° 31° 33° 32° 31° 27° 25° 20°
Hong Kong 20° 21° 24° 27° 29° 30° 31° 31° 30° 28° 25° 21°
Sweet spots 231231110101

Each cell is that destination's own verdict for the month — sweet spot, ok or avoid — with its typical daily high, from the same ten years of climate readings its page is built from. A dot marks a busy month. The last row counts the sweet spots, and the best months are marked.

Between the stops

Tokyo → Seoul 1,194 km, about 2h 22m in the air
Nonstop, about 3 a day · 3 airlines
By road: 1,723 km, about 26h 25m
Seoul → Taipei 1,464 km, about 2h 42m in the air
Nonstop, about 14 a day · 9 airlines
Taipei → Hong Kong 806 km, about 1h 54m in the air
Nonstop, about 40 a day · 8 airlines

Distances are great-circle and the flight time is estimated from them. A road, train or bus line is listed only where it was measured — flights from AeroDataBox, roads from OpenRouteService, trains and buses from public timetables via Transitous — and none of it is a fare; the searches on each stop's page are where prices live.

Every verdict here is the destination's own: ten years of climate readings, the public holidays that crowd it, and what the flight costs. Nothing is said about East Asian cities as a whole that was not first measured at each place in it.