Hong Kong to Tokyo – First impressions of Japan

An easy start to the day today as we re-packed the small amount of gear we had taken out of the suitcases and took a leisurely stroll from the hotel on to the departures level at the airport. Check in was painless as we checked the bags and walked the guitar case over to the outsize baggage counter.

They were kind enough to put on a “Fragile” label, but the green spangly case is starting to pick up a bit of character from the journey.

I’m sorry to keep comparing BA unfavourably to Cathay Pacific but, once again, the service was perfect. We even received a text while sitting in the lounge informing us that the flight would be delayed by 15 minutes. BA doesn’t even regard 15 minutes as a delay.

Anyway, we were loaded and away not too long after the scheduled departure time for the quick 4 hour hop to Tokyo. That gave me enough time to watch Deadpool 2 on the huge screen that is so much better than BA. Sorry, but it is.

Landing in Tokyo, we were quickly through immigration and the bags were waiting for us when we got to baggage reclaim. Then we were straight out through customs and facing, once again, a land where we don’t speak a word of the language or read a letter of the alphabet. Not quite true. We now recognise one character, which is the same in both Chinese and Japanese: 人 means people. OK, not all that helpful, but it’s a start.

We knew that our target was Akasaka station, on the Chiyoda line of the Tokyo underground system. The nice lady at the airport ticket office sold us a ticket for the Skyliner express train, which would take us to Ueno where we would change to a train to Nishi-nippori, where we would change on to the Chiyoda line to Akasaka. Easy peasy, Japanese-y.

And then a strange thing happened. As we struggled on to the Skyliner and tried to stow all our bags in the limited available space, we were helped by a young man with a Scottish accent. It turns out he’s been living in Japan for the last two years working in robotics. Also, he’s a Glasgow University graduate, and studied Computing Science, just like I tried to do back in 1977. We had a lovely chat with him on the ride in and he gave us his business card so we could contact him if we needed help while we were in town, which was really nice of him.

We completed the rest of the journey safely, although I was constantly confused by escalator etiquette here (stand on the left, walk on the right) which is the opposite of the London Underground. I think we just managed to avoid the start of the real rush hour as we emerged from Akasaka station and took possession of our AirBnB. It’s a charming little place that the landlord has set up to look like a post-industrial loft. All bare wood, exposed brick and concrete.

We then had the interesting task of figuring out how to flush the toilet. I had been warned about this in advance by a colleague who had recently visited Japan but any pearls of wisdom he provided had since deserted me.

A combination of Google and trial and error got us there in the end.

Having settled in to the apartment, we decided to stretch our legs and get in a couple of necessities. Tea bags and milk, primarily. It turns out that we find ourselves in quite a lively part of Tokyo. Bearing in mind that this was about 8pm on a Monday evening, there was a remarkable number of significantly pissed-up salarymen roving the streets in large groups. Dark suits and dark overcoats are still the standard uniform – it doesn’t look like the permanent dress-down or business casual approach has yet been embraced over here.

The other surprising phenomenon was the cycling culture. We have always assumed, perhaps in an ill-informed and stereotypical kind of way, that the Japanese respected order and rules are expected to be obeyed. There is a significant number of cyclists who don’t play that way. A lot of them are cycling on pavements at speeds that don’t seem safe for them or us.

Anyway, we found a little supermarket where we acquired the requisites for a cup of tea, and also food for breakfast the next day. That will be the first meal we’ve prepared for ourselves since the 16th of December in Johannesburg. It’s a tough life.

The pretender to Vegas’ gambling crown

After our Friday exploration of Macau’s rich pre- and post-colonial history, we decided we should take a look at the activity for which this place is most famous: gambling. We’ve been staying at the Hotel Lisboa which is in the heart of Macau’s oldest inhabited area but there’s more to the former Portuguese colony than just the peninsula.

macau map Across the water, there’s the old settlement of Taipa and the area where there appears to be a concerted attempt to reconstruct the Las Vegas Strip: Cotai. We think of ourselves now as experienced Vegas visitors so we decided to head over there and see what all the fuss was about. There are a number of free shuttle buses that run between casinos in the same family group, so we walked over to Wynn (which is built to look exactly the same as its Vegas namesake) and hopped on the bus to Wynn Palace in Cotai.

Ishbel’s hopes of spectacular shots of the Pearl River Delta from the bridge as we crossed were thwarted by a lingering humid haze. Arriving at the Wynn Palace, we spotted a cable car ride that went out over their (Bellagio-like) fountain show, so we took that to escape. To be fair, I rushed Ishbel on to it before she had time to think. Only when we were on the ride was she able to demonstrate her famously happy-go-lucky attitude to heights.

We walked from there to the Venetian which was remarkably similar to the Venetian in Vegas, neither of which bear much resemblance to Venice. Not nearly enough of a smell.

Old school Vegas visitors will tell you that the Strip isn’t real Vegas and that it lacks the life and vibrancy of old Vegas. Having now visited Cotai, I would say that they’ve managed to replicate the Strip but have sucked even more soul out of the experience.

As we walked from the Venetian to the Parisian, Ishbel and I engaged in a lively debate about whether the Macau Eiffel Tower was bigger than the Vegas Eiffel Tower. It turns out they’re both roughly half the size of some kind of homage tower in Paris.

By this time, we’d had enough of dealing with these second or third generation pale imitations of what were in any case poor copies. We headed for the free shuttle bus from the Parisian back to the Sands. On arrival back in Macau peninsula, and since we were in the area anyway, we once again joined the queue for the custard tarts at Margaret’s Cafe e Nata.

Close inspection of this photo will reveal two things: one is my (relatively) towering presence at the back of the ridiculously long line; the other is the astoundingly cavalier attitude of Macau residents to electrical wiring, and cable management generally. So much so that it merited a close-up.

In the evening we picked up our laundry, which we had dropped off on our first day here, and had a relatively sedate meal in one of the small hotel restaurants. We have necessarily become much more adept in our use of chopsticks on this journey than at any other time during our lives. It’s amazing what a little practise can do.

We leave from Hong Kong for Tokyo on Monday and had decided that we would stay near the airport on Sunday evening. We had hoped to be able to take the new bridge from Macau to HK, but there’s no way of doing that without transiting through China. We’ve already used up our single-entry China visa, so the bridge is a non-starter for us. We’ll be taking the ferry to Hong Kong tomorrow before our Japanese adventure starts on Monday.

Mandarins and Temples

We haven’t done much advance planning for our stay in Macau. We had been hoping that there may have been a poker tournament taking place that we could have entered but there’s an odd dynamic around poker in Macau, as compared to Las Vegas. The authorities impose a table cap on casinos which limits the number of gaming tables that each establishment can have operating at any one time. An open poker table counts against that cap, so casinos would prefer to have a real gaming table running than having to allocate ten or twenty tables to support a poker tournament where all they’re going to receive is the one-time rake against the entry fee (usually 10% – 15%). It also means they have no incentive to offer low limit cash games in poker, since they will rake more from each pot in higher stakes games. All this adds up to there being no poker for us here, so we started looking for alternative entertainment.

The Macau Tourism website was helpful in this respect and we picked a couple of their recommended sights to visit. First stop was the Mandarin’s House. This is a typical mid-19th century Chinese residential compound that once belonged to a gentleman named Zheng Guanying, who was an influential writer on economics and political affairs.

The house is really interesting with a number of design elements that would eventually come to be featured in 20th century Western architecture as well as more traditional aspects such as a central atrium with a pool to catch rainwater to help cool the building.

There were many decorative features both internally and externally. Friezes were obviously a major theme of architecture during the building’s heyday, and we liked the way the clay drainage pipes were cast to look like bamboo.

We spent quite a while wandering around the maze of rooms within the compound, and would definitely recommend a visit here if you find yourself in this part of the world.

Afterwards, we walked on to Barra Square (nothing to do with the Scottish island in the Outer Hebrides) to visit A-Ma temple, the oldest part of which dates back to 1488, just 4 years before Columbus set off for the New World. This appears to be very much a working temple as the complex was filled with supplicants praying and, presumably, making requests of the relevant deity. The incense smoke was fairly thick at the bottom of the stairs.

And it just got thicker the higher you walked and, presumably, the bigger the requests in the prayers became. The lampshade-like objects are all incense sticks.

And there must be a pretty big request associated with the telegraph pole sized joss sticks at the top of the hill. By this point, our eyes were starting to water and the air was catching in our throats with the overpowering incense smell so we descended and left the temple.

We walked back to the hotel but not quite directly. We decided that we would brave the queue at Margaret’s Cafe e Nata to pick up a custard tart as a little treat. The queue was long but it moved quite quickly and we acquired four of these tasty morsels for the equivalent of £1 each. And they were delicious.

That staved off our hunger for a while so we spent a couple of hours playing our instruments before heading out for dinner. We ate at a place called Ali’s Curry House. If it had been in the UK, the name would have put me off but it was actually very good food and they sold local Macau beer which was very tasty.

Despite the disappointment around the poker, we had a splendid day in Macau.

China to Macau

Thursday rolled around and it was time for us to leave China and the next stop on the itinerary was Macau. Advance research and planning for this part of the trip was a bit sketchy as information on how to get from Jiangmen to Macau wasn’t readily available on line. Not in English anyway. You may remember from an earlier blog that we had been down to the Shengli Bus Station earlier in the week but gave up on trying to garner any in-depth knowledge due to linguistic incompatibilities with the ladies at the ticket counter. However, we had the presence of mind to photograph the banners that we hoped showed the timetable.

Armed with our photos, we asked the hotel concierge to help us decipher what we were being told. The bottom section – starting at 6:45 – was the list of times of buses to Macau, costing CNY 40 one-way and CNY 68 return. All our worries were over.

We were awake early and decided to have a light breakfast at Starbucks next door to the hotel before leaving. Starbucks had, overnight, removed all of the Christmas decorations that had been in place and replaced them with a variety of Chinese New Year paraphernalia for the upcoming year of the pig.

This company knows its audience no matter where it operates.

So it was that we checked out of the hotel at around 9:30, taking a last look around the lobby. Despite being a Chinese domiciled entity, they hadn’t yet been cynical enough to strike all their Christmas decorations so we were able to get a shot of its festive flavour.

From here, we took a taxi to the bus station. The taxi cost, as always, about £2.50 and we bought our tickets for the 10:20 Macau bus for CNY 40 – about £5 – each. I have resisted including amusing Chinese signs despite the large number we have encountered, but I used the toilet in the bus station before we left and there was a sign in there that, I think, includes words by which we can all live…

The bus started loading about 10 minutes before departure and everyone was in place as we rolled out of Jiangmen and headed south along the Pearl River Delta. It was a completely smooth journey and nothing could have been simpler. Until we pulled into an underground bus station and everybody got off the bus.

Being clueless anglophones, we waited till the end to make sure we had to disembark. We then had to get our luggage out of the hold and, by the time this was done, nobody else from our bus was in sight. I had seen them pass through a curtain up ahead so we went in there, but all we could see was a range of bus stops with Chinese destinations on them. There was an opening up to the left so we went in there. Success! Arrows pointing to a shopping centre and Macau. We followed them, and they then pointed upstairs. Up we duly went, fully laden with suitcases cameras and instruments. On the second floor landing, there were two signs. One pointed upwards for Macau, and the other said “Staff Only”. I was in no mood to go back downstairs with all this gear so we went up one more flight and encountered an unpromising door. We opened it, and found ourselves in the lingerie department of a large department store.

We scurried through the underwear and out of the store into a corridor where we once again found signs for Macau. We followed them for quite a long stretch and, eventually, arrived at the Chinese emigration formalities. We passed through them and then had to go through Macau Immigration formalities. Another queue but we successfully negotiated this obstacle and were finally in the Special Autonomous Region of Macau.

There was a tourist information booth just outside immigration where we were able to establish that there was a courtesy bus available to take us to our hotel, the Lisboa. We once again loaded all of our luggage into the hold of the bus – everyone else was travelling lighter than us – and settled into our seats. Finally, we had reached our destination.

We had to check our bags as our room wasn’t yet ready so we went for a brief walk around Macau just to get our bearings. The most interesting thing we encountered was the huge queue of people outside Margaret’s Cafe e Nata waiting to buy Portuguese custard tarts. I’m a sucker for those things, so we will be joining that queue at some point over the next three days.

After our wander, we went back to the hotel and checked into our room, on the 14th floor and overlooking the signage outside.

The blackout curtains in the room are, I’m pleased to say, highly effective.

An interesting border crossing today but we’re hoping to take some time to explore Macau tomorrow.

Last day in China

The second day of January was our last full day in China so we decided to celebrate by, once again, walking miles. Ishbel had found a park – Baishuitai – that featured a major Chinese pagoda at the top of its main hill, so we decided to go and take a look.

It was a fair distance away, so we decided to take a taxi there and walk back. Ishbel had taken some screenshots of the layout from Google Maps and saved them to her phone so after paying the taxi driver the customary £2.50 that most fares here seem to total, we had a look at that. Or tried to. Ishbel had a frenzied check of her pockets before determining that her phone had fallen out of her pocket in the taxi. This had the makings of a major disaster. As we were trying to work out whether I could use my phone to call the hotel and get them to call the taxi company and have them contact the driver, the same taxi went past us in the opposite direction. He seemed surprised when we waved him down again, but laughed when Ishbel reached into the back seat and retrieved her phone that was nestling there. Disaster averted and heart rates back to normal, we pressed on into the park.

We had walked about halfway up the hill that led to the pagoda when we were able to catch a quick glimpse of it through the trees. Something didn’t look right. A little further on we had a fuller view of it in all its splendour.

It’s been a theme of our stay in Jiangmen that there is a huge amount of public work underway and the pagoda had obviously been included in the work orders. We’ve been trying to figure out if there’s some kind of state visit or major international sporting event scheduled to take place but haven’t found anything. Anyway, this view of the pagoda was enough to convince us not to travel all the way to the top of the hill. We did carry on to a temple on the hillside which, as luck would have it, had a tiny model of the pagoda outside.

So that’s what we missed out on.

Thwarted by the remedial pagoda works, we determined to enjoy the park anyway and headed back down hill to take the route around the lake. This route has a number of statues positioned on it, and I couldn’t resist emulating one.

We’re really getting the hang of making our own entertainment here.

After circumnavigating the lake, we did see something that will always brighten our day.

There’s nothing quite like catching sight of a kingfisher. The photo is the best we could get with a small lens. We had decided not to wander around China with the huge telephoto lens and binoculars. I’m sure you’ll understand why.

After the park we had a long walk back to the hotel. A good part of the walk was on the road because we again encountered public works projects that blocked off pavements on both sides of the road forcing us to walk into oncoming traffic. This was a little bit of payback since we had already experienced on multiple occasions being faced with bicycles, scooters, motorbikes and, on two occasions, cars on pavements as we walked along. Now it was their turn to get out of our way. Hopefully.

We safely negotiated our way back to the hotel and by the end of the day we had covered another eight miles. The iPhone is good at preserving walking data and I decided to take a look at my 2018 statistics. It turns out that I really did lead a sedentary life before retiring.

June and July was when we were on holiday in Vegas last year, and those are the only two months at the same level as December. It will be interesting to see how 2019 compares as we continue the journey.

The China adventure ends here and Thursday is our first day in Macau. Stay tuned.

New Year’s Day – a quiet time around the world

I know that we had a quiet day here in China and I can infer that everyone else had a quiet day too, since this blog enjoyed a record number of views on the day.

It was so quiet, in fact that we have very little by way of information to share. We decided to relax for the early part of the day then headed out in mid-afternoon with the intention of walking down to a restaurant that had been reviewed well on Trip Advisor. One of the few Jiangmen establishments to even be mentioned in that illustrious site. As we left the hotel, we encountered large crowds heading into what appears to be an exhibition centre just across the road from the hotel. There was an intricate piece of wood carving on display outside so we decided to head in and find out what was going on.

It turned out to be a cross between an end of year student art show and an Ideal Home Exhibition. We were again treated like novelties and as we were admiring some jade carvings at one of the stands, a young lady came over to us to explain how they were made. Nothing unusual in that, of course, except two other people also arrived to film the entire exchange. At another point, I turned around to see someone with a camera in my face. I checked behind me to see what he was photographing, but it was me. I think it may be a combination of my size and my facial hair. Maybe they really think I’m Santa.

We continued our walk towards the restaurant and discovered how they transport all of the blue Hellobikes from place to place.

We eventually reached the restaurant we were headed for, called Red Garlic and enjoyed an early dinner. The staff in that restaurant speak excellent English so if you’re in Jiangmen and want a break from all the miming, or pointing at pictures of food, this is the place for you.

After dinner, they were kind enough to order a taxi for us. They warned us that there would be an extra holiday surcharge because it was New Year’s Day, but that we shouldn’t pay more than CNY 30 as the fare. In the end it was CNY 25 – about £3.

New Year in China – not Chinese New Year

31st December 2018 – Hogmanay – started cold in Jiangmen. This was to be our first New Year experienced in Asia but we had to fill our day before we got to whatever festivities the evening may hold.

It was my turn to do some research and I had decided we should explore the Changdi waterfront which my research had led me to discover was an area where some fine examples of old colonial architecture still survived. As an adventure, we decided to take a taxi down there and walk the six miles back to the hotel, stopping en route at the bus station to check out transport to Macau, our next destination.

The concierge organised a taxi for us and gave us a card with the address that we could hand to the driver. The drive seemed a little longer than we were expecting but we duly arrived at the correct destination and paid the princely sum of £2 as fare. Sure enough, there were several terraces of older buildings along the waterfront.

They’re not maintained as valuable architectural monuments and are still being lived and/or worked in but it’s an interesting contrast with all the new construction in the area around the hotel. The area around Changdi as we walked up Chang’an Road away from the water is altogether more vibrant and lived in than most of the spots we’ve visited so far. The population of Jiangmen is 4.5 million – almost the same number of people as the whole of Scotland – so we had expected to hit a crowded commercial centre at some point and this was it.

Despite the thronged streets lined with shops, there’s always time for an oasis of calm and we decided to take a flight of steps off to the right of the main road just to see where they would lead. They climbed quite steeply and gave us an interesting view over the rooftops of the low rise buildings in the area.

At the top, we encountered a memorial to Dr. Sun Yat Sen. If you’re wondering who that is, we were wondering the same thing, especially when we saw this quote attributed to him.

‘Nationalism, People’s Rights and the People’s Livelihood embodies the essence and spirit of Abraham Lincoln’s saying, a government “of the people, by the people, for the people” and French Revolution’s “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”. ‘ He had a fascinating life and it would be impossible for me to do justice to his achievements. If you get some time, look him up.

Ever onwards, we managed to locate the bus station from which Macau buses depart. We had a small amount of communication with the staff there but decided it would be far too complex to mime a requirement for two tickets to Macau with lots of luggage in three days’ time, so we deferred that challenge.

We then continued our stroll back to the hotel, passing various locations on the way that Ishbel deemed worthy of a photo.

One thing I’ve noticed about commercial areas here is that competitors in the same field tend to cluster together, much as they used to in London (think Savile Row for tailors or Harley Street for doctors). This makes for an assault on the senses when you encounter the street of mobile phone vendors.

Apart from Apple and, of course, Huawei there are another two equally ubiquitous brands: Vivo and Oppo. This street had a minimum of ten specialist shops for each brand. I assume they find some way of making it work commercially, but it seems unnecessarily over-competitive.

Back at the hotel after 16,000 steps, according to our iPhones, we decided to relax a little so out came the instruments again. We didn’t want to eat too early as we wanted to stay on the go until midnight to see in the New Year. Eventually, we went down to the hotel’s buffet restaurant and enjoyed a delicious mix of western and asian foods and a couple of glasses of wine. We got talking to the assistant manager, Paul, whose English was excellent. He advised that there would be some entertainment on the plaza across the road at midnight, so we went over there at around 11:15 and enjoyed a concert extravaganza featuring pop singers and what looked like a local high school’s ukulele orchestra. And we found out what the Chinese call a ukulele. Ukulele.

There was an impressive light show on all the buildings around the plaza, which we’ve attempted (and failed) to capture with the photo at the top. And that’s how we ended 2018.

We’re more than a month into the trip and still have seven full months to go. Happy New Year to everyone following along on the blog.

Brian and Ishbel