Japanese Noodlings

Beginning of July, 2006

And so on to Japan. My lodgings in Japan took a decided upwards swing in quality compared to most of the preceding locations on my trip, largely because the concept of "budget hotel" or "guest house" does not exist there as we understand it. So I found myself in a cost-effective business hotel in a quiet part of Tokyo, where my bathroom contained the most technologically advanced toilet I have ever seen.

First off, the seat on my techno-toilet had a hydraulically-assisted raising and lowering mechanism. No bang from a carelessly let-go loo seat in this hotel to jar the nerves of the hard-working Japanese business clientele. Then, there was the arm rest with integral control panel. Mastery of the flushing functions, along with the temperature and pressure of the integral front and back bidet jets, was entirely available there such that the user could complete the whole process with the press of a few buttons. No need even for any of that messy toilet paper stuff! However, unfortunately I managed to end up with no photo of the wonderful contraption. A great shame, as I could have added "The World's Most Technologically Advanced Toilet" to my gallery of "The World's Nicest...", (Ko Phi Phi, Thailand) "The World's Nastiest...", (Varanassi, India) etc.

As I was to discover, such a high-tech approach to an ancient ritual is quite at home in a nation where the almost pointlessly high-tech sits alongside the quaint and traditional. Tokyo combined these elements gracefully, and was a great place to spend a few days. As well as the neon-draped shopping areas, there were older quarters to explore including the Emperors Palace, (although you can't go in because he's in there).

Yoyogi Park was famous a few years ago for the kids who used to hang out there in rockabilly garb, offending mainstream Japanese sensibilities by dancing to old rock 'n' roll played on ghetto blasters. At some point the authorities put a stop to this, but their place has been taken by a

new generation of kids who come from all over the city and suburbs to gather and indulge in a kind of fantasy dress-up, influenced by the various Japanese comic book styles, goth and a hotch-potch of other things. They come to see and be seen, and are very happy to pose for the tourists who also come to observe this distinctly Japanese phenomenon. Some of the old rockers are still hanging on, however...

Special mention has to go to Magik the Jack Russell, who I also came across in Yoyogi Park with his owner Mark. Magik was quite the soccer star. He would never tire of chasing the football you had just booted halfway across the park, trapping it dead with incredible skill and then tearing back, dribbling the ball under perfect control right to your feet. Then he would insist that it all happen again. And again. I think that he would actually have liked to bite the ball, but it was deliberately just a little too large for him to get his jaws around. Mark told me that he could normally get Magik so sing like Michael Jackson by simply saying "Michael" to him, but it seems that Magik was a little too excited to perform at the time.

After three days exploring Tokyo, I set the clock ticking on my seven-day JapRail pass and headed west. First stop was Lake Kawaguchi near Mount Fuji, where I stayed for one night to plan my assault on the summit the following day. There at the hotel I witnessed for the first time the Japanese mania for rules, and their absolute horror at the idea of working outside the system. The hotel had a check-in time of 2pm, and the staff seemed genuinely confused by anyone turning up before then, (it's easy guys, you can just sit them in the lobby if the room isn't ready!). They also made you order dinner when you checked in, and sat you where they wanted in the dining room rather than let you choose! All done very politely, of course...

The lake was pretty and the area was beautiful and quiet, but it was really all just a prelude to the big climb the next day. I spent a few hours visiting what they call The Bat Cave nearby. A bit confusing really, as there are absolutely no bats there. It was, however, a very interesting series of underground caves created by lava flows and other volcanic activities. Some of it was very low, but you could walk (or crawl) through quite a lot of it, and most of the time I was in there totally alone which lent it an interesting atmosphere.

So the next day I set off climb Mount Fuji, or Fuji-san as the Japanese deferentially refer to it. The classic climb is to take a bus to 2000m and start at the visitor centre there at around noon, climbing to a mountain hut near the 3700m summit before dark, then resting before getting up at around 3 am to be on the summit for sunrise. This I did in the company of a teacher from Minnesota, and some students from Brazil.

The climb was a bit tough in places, but there are stations at which you can rest your burning thighs and calves, and buy over-priced water, Snickers bars and pot noodles! In fact the further up you got, the worse the over-pricing became. I suppose they would argue that the further up the mountain they have to bring your Snickers bar, the more you should pay for it...

Whilst it was sunny and warm at 2000m, up the mountain it got progressively colder and windier, (there's a reason I am holding hard to that chain in the picture at 3000 meteres!). By the time we reached the highest hut, after five hours of climbing, I pretty much fell on my knees in front of the tiny fire the hut staff had lit. I also suspect that I was feeling a little short on oxygen, as the hut is only a few hundred meters short of the summit. Following some food and few hours lying down, (but failing to sleep), we got up again around 2:30 am to climb the last part in the dark.

Climbing Mount Fuji is very popular with both foreign and Japanese tourists, and I realised this no more than when I woke up and looked down the pitch black mountain to see an impressive procession of torches, mostly electric but some of flame, zig-zagging down the switchback trails on the mountainside. We geared up and joined them in the slow trudge to the top, but from a good clear start the cloud and rain soon descended, and upon reaching the summit there was no sunrise to be seen. The climb, however, had been a great experience.

After saying goodbye to Fuji-san, I hauled my aching bod on to a classic Japanese bullet train bound for Kyoto. Without realising it, I was visiting this most picturesque of Japanese cities just before the culminating day of the city's Gion Festival, which involves ornate floats parading through the streets and everyone wearing the traditional dress of yukata and geta. Even in the days leading up to it, the local people were dressing the part, and the floats were being prepared and displayed in the streets. At first I was a little confused by the number of people in the streets looking like they had arrived through a time-warp..!

In Kyoto I stayed in a ryokan, a traditional Japanese guesthouse which is often part of someone's home. With their tatami mat flooring, low tables and chairs, futons on the floor for sleeping and sliding paper doors, they are quite different to Western hotel or guesthouse rooms. My hosts were a very elderly couple who were incredibly attentive, polite and helpful, as indeed were most of the Japanese people I met.

Kyoto has an abundance of beautiful temples, palaces and pebble gardens in which I spent much of my days in the city. Next stop, and another bullet train ride away, was Hiroshima.

I suppose it is predictable that Hiroshima's history should dominate any visit to the city. However, while the world's first atomic bomb victims are never far from your mind, you find that the city itself has grown back into a vibrant, likeable, friendly metropolis without any overhanging feeling of the morose.

But of course the reason most people go to Hiroshima is out of a sense of history, and my visit was a very powerful experience from that point of view. The first place I visited was the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, also known as the A-bomb dome. This building had previously been the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, and was the closest building to the hypocentre that was left in any way standing after the bomb was dropped. The hypocentre was in fact above a hospital, a short distance to the southeast of the intended target, a bridge. Apparently the only reason they were trying to be so accurate with the aiming of such a massively indiscriminate weapon, was to increase the accuracy of their scientific study of the effects of the bomb.

In the park next to the dome are several monuments, memorials and a museum all reflecting various aspects of the effects of the event, including the continuing effects on the people in terms of the high incidence of leukemia and birth defects in the area. There is quite a lot to see, and by the time I left the museum I really felt that I couldn't study any more harrowing effects of the world's first use of an atomic weapon.

So then on to Osaka on another gleaming white bullet train, (which like most things in Japan run perfectly on time, and without a hitch). Osaka turned out to be a bit of a wash-out, as pretty much the whole time that I was there, it poured and poured. However, I was mainly there for two reasons which the weather didn't interfere with: to catch my flight out of Japan, and to spend one night in a capsule hotel!

In a capsule hotel you don't rent a room, but a plastic capsule in which to sleep. These are stacked two high in long rows in large dimly-lit rooms. You enter the capsule from one end, and it is just long enough to lie down in and just big enough to sit up in. It contains bedding, with a light, alarm clock radio and a tv all integral to the wall of the capsule. Showers, toilets and entertainment relaxing areas are all communal, and the hotels are generally only open to men. They are used by travelling Japanese businessmen who don't have expense accounts that will stretch to a full hotel room, but they can also be useful if you get stuck in some post-work karaoke and whiskey bashing situation, miss the last train out to your suburban home and need a place to crash until it's time for work the next day...

It was also in Osaka that I noticed again how rule-abiding the Japanese are. Standing in the pouring rain at the side of a deserted road, they will wait for the red man to turn green, (or actually white in this case), so that they can cross. Not one person will cross on the red man, no matter that there is no traffic on the road or the incliment weather. Having said that, people in Kyoto ride their bikes on the pavement and regularly have hairy near misses with pedestrians. I suspect that there's probably a law that says that's OK, so it's OK...

My last night in Japan was spent in a Mexican restaurant, testing out my Spanish on the Peruvian staff in advance of having to do it for real during the last five months of my trip! Then I flew from Osaka to Vancouver for a little relaxation in North America, visiting friends in a nice, easy, first-world, English-speaking environment before diving into Latin America...

Hong Kong to Beijing

End of June to mid July, 2006

Leaving Uncle Ho's Vietnamese fun house, I boarded yet another Cathay Pacific aircraft bound for Hong Kong. I didn't really know what to expect from the former British colony which sits at the southern end of its big bad new boss, China. What I found was an incredibly vibrant and very modern city, much glass and steel scraping the sky and most of it dedicated to the biggest financial institutions you can think of, (and lots more that you will never have even heard of). At least to the casual outside observer, the Chinese authorities really seem to have left Hong Kong alone, and it seems to function as the Western-style financial hub it was before it was handed back to the Chinese in 1999. The streets of Hong Kong Island, where the main financial activities go on, really could be those of any major North American financial centre.

Across the bay in neon-draped Kowloon, where I rented a tiny room and bathroom from an old Chinese lady on the top floor of a dilapidated tower block, the feel was very different although no less commercial. The streets were full of Indian immigrants, many of them stall holders at the indoor markets which take up the ground floors of the tower blocks like the one I was staying in. Some hung around on the building entrances, trying repeatedly to interest me in "Rolex" watches; maybe they thought my "functional" traveler fashion needed some sprucing up. Anyway, it was interesting that in the entire time I was in Hong Kong I didn't once see a Chinese trader hawking on the streets - only Indians. Sometimes it felt like being back in Delhi. Having said that, not all the purveyors of fine jewellery were from Mother India. The owner of King Fook Jewellery, for example, turned out to be a British ex-pat from Bolton...

In my view, unless you want to shop, Hong Kong is not much of a tourist city but it is none the less interesting for that. The only touristy thing that I did during my stay was to go in the cable car up to Victoria Peak, a point on Hong Kong Island 500m or so above sea level that overlooks the bay and the mainland, and offers some great views. The rest of my time was taken up with just being in the city, getting to know it and getting to really quite like it despite its horrendous cost. Actually things are no more expensive there than they would be in London, (in fact travel and tourist accommodation are cheaper), but after four months or so in southeast Asia I was used to getting away with it big time! At least the internet access was free at Hong Kong's very impressive central library...

So to see perhaps another side to China, I booked a flight to Beijing and stayed there for a week. Beijing was an interesting place, and the signs of the recent changes in China were everywhere. McDonald's had at least a couple of branches on the main shopping street, and the stores on that street reflected many of the consumer brands that we are used to in the west. This was not the stark, austere city described to me by people who had visited ten or so years ago.

There is much to see in Beijing, and although at first I wondered if I had been a bit enthusiastic by planning to spend a week there, it proved to be just right. On my first night there I became "adopted" by Li, who said that she was a student who wanted to practise her English. As the week wore on, I found that there were many such "students" looking to "improve their language skills", but they were also usually looking to sell you a tour or some tourist tat at the same time. However, Li never tried to sell me anything so I guess maybe she was just what he said! Li's English language skills were not that bad, but if she didn't understand what you had just said she would turn to you and snap "WHAT?!?!", as if you had just suggested something hugely improper. She seemed totally unaware of how abruptly this came across, and since I found it highly entertaining I decided it would be a shame to guide her towards the more polite expression of "pardon?".....

Li took me to Tiananmen Square at sunset, when they have a flag-lowering ceremony with much slow marching of soldiers etc., but the place was so thick with tourists it wasn't possible to see very much. Then, after a very good and really cheap meal in a local restaurant where Li's ability to order in Mandarin was an obvious advantage, we parted company but not before she had tried to interest me in starting up a business importing music CDs to China from the UK..... ahhhh! There you go!

I was to return to Tiananmen Square quite a lot over the next week. The square itself is quite impressive, but the buildings surrounding it are equaling interesting and include The Gate of Heavenly Peace, Chairman Mao's Mausoleum and the entrance to The Forbidden City. As I observed in my last posting on Vietnam, no visit to the capital of a socialist state is complete without viewing the wax-like remains of a former great leader, and so off I went to doff my cap to Comrade Tse-Tung. The funniest thing I saw that day was the sight of hoards of Chinese visitors buying expensive flowers at the entrance to lay at the prescribed place just outside the room itself. These were periodically collected up by staff, and returned to the same stall for re-sale! Well, I suppose at least that's recycling.

The Gate of Heavenly Peace and the Forbidden City were impressive enough, although the impending 2008 Olympics in the city means that the authorities have suddenly become very fond of covering major historical buildings in scrim and scaffold for restoration. This also included buildings in the Temple of Heaven Park, although most of the park was open and included a very good museum of music.

The presence of state security and police is very high profile, especially around Tiananmen Square. They don't take any nonsense either. On a couple of occasions I saw the police deal with unauthorised traders of tourist tat near the Square. The traders leg it as if their lives depended on it; apparently they can go to jail for selling little red plastic flags. One time I witnessed the bizarre spectacle of a young, fat, sweaty copper on a bicycle literally being given the run-around through the crowd by a sprightly old bird who must have been about 70, and who was carrying a bunch of said flags. It was extremely comical for the crowd, and even the old woman was grinning. However, the mood changed when he eventually ditched the bike, caught her and started screaming in her face. I would have taken a picture but more cops, soldiers etc. suddenly appeared out of nowhere, and instinct told me to keep the camera in the bag.

The best thing about Beijing, by far, was The Great Wall. Well, that and Beijing Duck, which I think I ate three times during my visit! I made two visits to the wall. On the first I walked 10km along it from Jinshanling to Simatai in the company of Canadian Diana, and the second time I visited Huanghua and just walked a small section high above a beautiful reservoir. The same day as the second visit, I also went to see the Ming Tombs, (nothing special), attended a "tea ceremony" which turned out to be a "tea hard sell", and also a jade factory which was pretty much the same as the tea experience!

Anyway, The Great Wall is just incredible. It is the most amazing thing to see it snaking into the distance across the hills near the Mongolian border. In some parts it has been meticulously restored for tourism, in others it has just been left as is, but in either case the wall is an amazing construction. Not very good at keeping enemies out though, apparently. As Genghis Khan is supposed to have observed, the effectiveness of a wall depends on the courage of those defending it. (Hmmm. Never thought I'd quote Genghis Khan in this blog.......)

So then after Beijing, and another brief stop in Hong Kong, I continued on to Japan.