Archives for January 2004
Hong Kong and home
Here we are, day 37 and the last of my trip. Sitting in the lounge at Hong Kong, waiting for my 0045 flight that will take me back to London.
Not much to report. Managed to take in the main sights of the city, without looking in too much detail – who knows when I’ll be here again, eh? – but the weather has been crappy, such that when I arrived yesterday I couldn’t even see the Central city from the end of Kowloon. I hoped that things would improve today, but it remained cloudy and hazy, as this picture from the top of Mount Victoria shows.
HK is a fascinating city, difficult to appreciate in such a brief visit that this is part of China. The streets are teeming with people, the skyscrapers are astonishing, and although my guidebook complains about visitors’ expectations of the city being cliches – well, my cliched expectations where met.
Bobbing across the harbour on the Star ferry is something that I’ve read about, seen, and finally had a chance to do. That’s what going on holiday’s about, I suppose.
The weather was so bad that the light from the buildings took on a luminescent quality. The light from the International Financial Centre was so bright that I expected Batman to be on call.
As I was getting the ferry for the last time this evening, back to Hong Kong station and the train to the airport, for reasons I did not discover many of the buildings had their Chinese new year decorations turned off, and searchlights appeared from their roofs. Music was played across the harbour and the the lights and lasers moved around the sky, topped off with fireworks launched from the top of the towers. Okay, it wasn’t Sydney at New Year, in fact I’ve had better rockets in my back garden, but the effect was still very pretty.
My last chance to exploit the free food and drink in the lounge, so I’m off. See you all soon. Thanks for reading.
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Tokyo
I may not be the world’s best swimmer or runner, and have more chance of hitting a fly than a tennis ball, but I am champion at one international sport – power sightseeing. You may have tried this but given up after a couple of hours; I can keep going for two days straight. It’s not as easy as it looks. You need stamina, a good sense of direction, a low attention span and comfortable shoes. You must ignore any feelings of waste or a belief that you should be sitting back and enjoying your trip. This is a challenge. Hence my attempt to see all that Tokyo has to offer in 48 hours.
I was surprised that a major airline deliberatly flies in circles rather than getting its passengers to the airport as quickly as possible, but that’s what Qantas does when flying from Sydney to Tokyo. As the plane has to leave before the Sydney curfew at 11pm, and cannot land until after the end of the Tokyo curfew at 6am, the pilots fly slower than usual and still do a couple of circles over the sea to waste time before making their final approach. We landed at 6.01, so guess the pilots were chuffed they’d dawdled so well.
I’m not sure I completely understood Tokyo in the short time I was there. On the surface it seems like many Western cities, just with different looking people and confusing signposting. But I know that deeper down there is a chasm between life in London and Tokyo.
For example, imagine you wanted to take the train from London to Rainham but didn’t know the fare. You’d have to queue at the ticket office, have a frustrating encounter with the ticketperson and probably miss your connection. If you got to the ticket barrier in Rainham and had the wrong fare, you’d be charged a fine.
In Tokyo, you’d have bought the cheapest ticket and gone to the fare adjustment machine at your final destination, paying the difference. In Japan there seems to be an unspoken sense of trust and honesty. Like I say, I didn’t really get much of a feel for Japan as I was busy power sightseeing, a particular challenge in Tokyo as there aren’t really any ’sights’, but it was fascinating nonetheless.
I’ll be honest that, alongside Beijing, Tokyo is probably the most challenging city I’ve been to, because of the language barrier. Although subway signs etc. are in English as well as Japanese, very few people speak much English and my Japanese is sadly lacking. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it, just that it was not as easy as wandering Sydney. Things were made worse when I had a major falling out with the Time Out guidebook, which insisted on providing scant information and rubbish maps. Bearing in mind that addresses read, say, 2-4-13 Shinjuku-ku – which means the fourth building of the second block of the thirteenth chiome of Shinjuku district (or something like that) – rather than a simple number on a road, the book could have been a lot more helpful.
Spent most of Wednesday wandering the streets, checking out the Imperial Palace (except there’s nothing to see as the public are not allowed anywhere near it), browsing the malls and getting confused. I especially liked these giant bonzai trees:
Two interesting places I did stop… firstly the National Museum for the Advancement of Science and Technology which had a brilliant range of interactive exhibits. Definitely the best was one where I got to sit by myself in a motion simulator (but like a flight simulator) with two playstation controllers, which controlled a live ant-like robot outside the room. With 3D glasses, thumping sound effects and the simulator moving at my command it felt like being in something from Star Wars!
Secondly I went to Tokyo Disneyland. It was rubbish, hardly any rides and nothing new, but my geeky side is delighted that I’ve now been to all four… I was struck by how few Western faces I saw in Tokyo as a whole, even at Disneyland. Apart from inside my Ryokan I must have seen no more than a dozen. Indeed, I was a bit of an attraction myself at Disneyland, being asked to appear in photos a couple of times.
Oh yes, the Kimi-Ryokan (or as I like to call it, the Kimi Raikannen). A traditional Japanese guest house with futon and tatami mats, this was fine – and cheap in a very expensive city – but was left stuck by the curfew. Not getting back at night, 1am was a fine deadline, but trying to get out. Although the front desk had said they’d let me out, when trying to leave at 5.30 this morning I spent ten minutes waiting before busting out the fire escape.
And with that, this morning it’s onto my final destination: Hong Kong
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Sydney
Left Vic on the doorstep at 0545 in Wellington and headed to the airport. My flight to Auckland was cancelled but luckily made it onto Air New Zealand and just made my connection.
A brief stopover in Sydney to catch up with a couple of familiar faces. Nothing spectacular to report, except that it felt like a very big city after a couple of weeks in Wellington. If only there was a place that combined the charms of Wellington and the dynamism of Sydney. I don’t know, it’s probably called Vancouver. Oh dear, but they’re all dull Canadians…
Although I didn’t realise it until I arrived, Monday was Australia Day. This is a bank holiday for Australians to celebrate that they are not British, by drinking beer. The Prime Minister also announces the Australian of the Year, who will act as representative of the year. Each state nominates a candidate – for example Western Australia chose a burns specialist who worked with Bali Bombing victims, Queensland put forward Steve Irwin (who blew his chances feeding his baby to the crocs) – and there was grumbling in the press when retiring cricket captain Steve Waugh was the winner. They were annoyed that he was, I think, the fourth sportsperson to win in seven years. But what do we associate with Australia? Sports, tans and Tim Tams. So makes sense that Waugh now represents Australia.
Took the ferry across to Manly through the flotilla of boats, the harbour looking great through the spray of the fireboat.
Bite me, Bryson
‘I had read [some] now carry laptop computers and modems, so that they can file daily reports to their family and friends. (If you are considering doing this yourself, here’s a tip. Nobody cares that much. I’m sorry, that’s not true. Nobody cares at all.)’
Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods
He might be right, but hey, you’re reading this so who’s the fool now? But seriously folks, thanks for reading. I’ve put quite a lot up in the past couple of days and it’s all in reverse order, so you’ll need start at the first post yesterday, about Wanaka.
And don’t forget there’s more in the archives! Links on the right.
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Wet, windy, wet Wellington
The parents of one of Vic’s friends, Mike and Sue Scott, have kindly put us up. They have a lovely house in the hills just above the city, and Mike has a boat moored about 20 minutes away. I must say that if I had a life like this in twenty years time, I’d be very happy. You can see the view I have right now, and a bit of the house, here:
Oh yes, and the house would probably cost around the same as my flat in London. Ridiculous.
We’ve not done a great deal in town, apart from a little shopping and sight seeing. Mike kindly took me to the end of a very exciting one day international game between NZ and Pakistan, which came down to the last wicket in the final over, but the weather has been pretty miserable in the past few days.
Wind speeds of up to 100km/h were recorded in the city (newspaper story on the weather)
So I’ll hang out here before heading off back to England. I’m amazed I’ve been away for four weeks now, and still have another week off, but am already beginning to dread the return to work. Ah well, that will be next week’s problem.
I’ll post more when I’ve been to Sydney. But my final word is that NZ is a great country, with lovely people, and an absolutely stunning landscape. I’ve enjoyed my trip. Wish I’d seen more.
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Christchurch
And finally we drove north to Christchurch, dropping off the car on Saturday morning and touring the town before our late afternoon flight. There’s not much to say about Christchurch. It’s famous for being more English than England, has a nice park and a river full of punts, and is rather dull. We’ll leave it at that.
One thing I didn’t realise about C’church is that it’s base for several of the Antarctic missions, including the US, NZ (of course), and Italy. (In fact there are more than thirty countries with bases on the ice continent, even little ones like the Netherlands and Uruguay. It’s not really clear what they do there apart from get a great tan.) There’s an expensive but rather interesting visitor centre where life in the bases is explored, and one can go into a giant freezer to experience an Antarctic Storm. We were provided with a warm coat and giant rubber overshoes, but a windchill of -15C is quite something in a t-shirt, shorts and flip flops. Oh, and we also saw the planes that fly out there in the summer including USAF Hercules. Plane fact – the first Hercules flew fifty years ago this year. Didn’t realise the design was that old.
I include this picture as I think it’s cute to have the ‘passenger terminal’ here. Most of the buildings on the base are clothing stores, understandable when you think how much is required to keep you warm in temperatures of -50 and below.
A short flight back to Wellington and our tour of the South Island was over.
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Flat, straight and true
Think of New Zealand and what pictures come to mind? Mountains of course, perhaps glaciers, probably Jonah Lomu and maybe kiwi birds. But not the Canterbury plains, although this area was something lodged at the back of my mind from school geography classes.
Until it was shafted by the mother country when we joined the EEC in 1973, NZ’s economy was intimately bound with Britain. It was the main export market, primarily dairy and meat products. Without gay abandon we snuggled up with the frogs and the huns and closed the door on our colonies, who no longer had preferential trade deals with Britain. NZ went from having the worlds highest standard of living – I’ll say that again, the highest IN THE WORLD in the 1950s – to economic decline in the 1970s. Nowhere was this seen more clearly than on the plains, a long thin stretch of flat land on the eastern coast of the south island. Here is the focus of the country’s agriculture industry, so you can imagine the scenery for the next few hundreds kms. Small towns with one pub and a pie shop along the main state highway interspersed the dry yellow fields. There’s no clearer demonstration of the impact of the Southern Alps than the drought the east coast is currently suffering: whilst in Fox we saw some of the highest rrainfall for years, just a couple of hundred kms furhter east on the other side of the mountains farmers are desparate for rain as they fight forest fires.
Maps can be deceptive, a prominent location on the map turning out to be a one horse town. Take Cromwell for example: pretty much a regional capital according to the maps but little more than a stopping off point between Queenstown and the coast. Envious of the prosperity of its neighbour, the council wanted to build an attraction that would make people stop off a while. What better idea than some giant fruit? Nothing, so here we have the Cromwell soft fruit memorial:
Indeed, the council were so clever they built the fibreglass fruit on the main road outside the town so passing tourists can take the picture from their car window before moving on. Now even less reason to visit the town.
From Cromwell we drove through several more towns, really villages, before stopping at Ranfurly. In the centre of a large plain, the town’s redeeming feature is a series of attractive art deco buildings, erected following a serious fire in the late 1920s. There are only a handful of buildings but each has been carefully restored, including the ‘refreshment rooms’ that now house a mish mash of art deco-ish objects.
There is also a pair of overpriced shops where Vic was astonished to see much of the old furnishings from her childhood now command high prices. Indeed, she remains convinced that a plastercast of an Indian is the very one from her family home.
Back in the car, following more sheep transporters taking little animals to their deaths and smelling of, er, slurry…
…before we hit the east coast and our first sight of the Pacific Ocean. Whilst the landscape of the east coast is less dramatic than the westlands – although the mountains can still be seen from the beaches – there are some geological oddities, most famously the Moeraki Boulders.
These are almost perfectly rounded, honeycomb centred rocks, concrete Maltesers I suppose, formed not by wave action but by the accretion of minerals around lime crystals. As the sea eroded the mud cliffs within which the boulders formed, the rocks fell to the beach where they remain to this day.
The Maori have some alternative colourful explanations for how the boulders came to be here, but regardless of their origin they’re a peculiar sight. And around 40 million years old. Some are quite big, as Vic’s failure to climb them shows.
We headed further up the coast to the town of Omaru where we finally managed to stay in a Bellavista motel (we’ll save that epic topic for another day) and admired another quiet coastal town.
The one thing to mention about Omaru is the quality of its buildings, all made from local stone following building regulations determind after a fire in the 1870s. The stone is a crisp white that has aged well despite the biting coastal weather, but these grand stone buildings seem a little out of place in a small NZ town. Their facades have little behind them, giving the impression of a Hollywood backlot.
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Queenstown. Eurgh.
I’m getting old, well, older, and I’m a wimp. Queenstown proved it to me.
Queenstown bills itself as the adventure sports capital of NZ if not the world, in fact it’s a tacky Disneyland of cheap thrills. The man to blame is AJ Hackett who started bungy jumping here about twenty years ago. (Fact: the first bungy jump was NOT in NZ, in fact was from the Menai Straights suspension bridge in Bristol by some members of the Oxford University Dangerous Sports Club. Take that, Hackett.)
From QT one can go rafting, sky diving, luging, jet boating, skinny dipping, paragliding, handgliding, anything that you can spend money on can be done here. As a result was was probably once a nice lakeside town is now a commericalised pit. Our old but excellent guidebook says that ‘most travellers leave wishing they’d stayed longer’. Er, maybe fifteen years ago, but not now.
We stayed in a slightly crummy hostel that described itself as a hotel but the reception closed at eight and there was no parking. The cafes were expensive and the people less friendly than elsewhere on the South Island.
As I say, I’m a wimp, and a tightwad, so we skipped most options except the jetboating and luging.
Twenty years ago NZ’s only tourist attraction was jetboating, specifically the Shotover Jet, which burns up and down its own piece of river. Jetboating was another invention by bored kiwis who, having nothing else to do, wondered how to get a boat through shallow water at breakneck speeds. The result was the Hamilton jet which pumps water through a nozzle to deliver an impressive level of thrust. The twin jets of the shotover boats delivered a combined output of 800 litres of water… a second. And since there are no propellers or rudders – the nozzle direction controls steering – the draught of a boat with 12 passengers is less than 10cm.
So Vic screamed and I laughed as we came remarkably close to rocks and got sprayed during the ‘famous’ Hamilton 360 which delivers a complete rotation in a boat length. Yes, it was good fun, although we didn’t buy the pictures to prove it.
The luge was good fun too except the really steep bits and the tiny line between drive and park on the sledges – the local A&E department must get a steady flow of injuries from this attraction – although the steepness of the cable car to the top was enough of a thrill for Ms Parry.
Probably the best fun of all was at the Caddyshack Minigolf, a wonderous set of handcrafted scenes incorporating 18 holes of what the less informed would call crazy golf. For the record I lost, but had a lot of fun doing so. Here’s the winner:
After that, and my sulking around sunglasses shops trying to find a new pair I liked, oh how I hated that, what more could Queenstown offer us? Goodbye mountains, hello Canterbury plains.
Manapouri and Doubtful Sound
After a couple of days in Wanaka it was time to move on, and head the furthest south I’ve ever been; we were going to Fiordland.
We drove South, over the stunning Coronet Pass, stopping in Queenstown just long enough to book tickets for the Shotover Jet before crossing the Alps again to reach the village of Manapouri. It’s an empty region, mainly populated by sheep and trees, and must have taken a hardy type of person to live there. We drove through a small settlement called ‘The Key’, where early last century local landowners tried to keep their labour under control by buying the local liquor licence and closing the pub early. This backfired on them when the workers instead walked 30k to the next settlement on went on the piss, staying there for up to a month at a time.
Manapouri and its neighbour Te Anau sit on glacial lakes of the same name, each a beautiful deep blue and stunningly cold waters. Not surprising since each reaches more than 400m deep in parts. We checked into a classic 1960s motel, with breeze block walls and chintzy bed spread, and settled down to watch the sun set over the mountains. It’s easy to become blase about the landscape around here, but sitting on our porch I had to keep reminding myself it was real, not just a Peter Jackson special effect.
The Lake View Motel and Backpackers had it all thought through though; the only restautant and takeaway in town, it did also provide a fully equipped kitchen… well, apart from a tin opener for our soup. You can guess where we had to eat that evening.
Next morning we rose early, packed our bags – by now I had a highly developed system for squeezing everything into the boot of the MX-5, based around me sitting on the lid – and drove down to Pearl Harbour to board our first boat of the day. This launch – a jet boat, but not of the sort you’d see in Queenstown – took us on a hour long trip to the far side of Lake Manapouri where we hopped on a coach. The coach then took us down a 2km winding tunnel deep into the mountainside to show us the belly of Lake Manapouri power station. I won’t go on about the project here, except to say it’s a bit of a crazy idea given that it was developed by the government of the 1960s to power one facility – an alumnimum smelter that refines Australian rocks before the product is shipped out of New Zealand again – which was meant to demonstrate the country’s standing as a global economy but seems like rape of natural resources to me. Anyway, the journey down the tunnel was quite interesting, especially the part at the end where the bus driver nearly got stuck in a Austin Powers situation.
Then back to the surface and across the Watts Pass, the most expensive road in NZ that goes from nowhere to nowhere (it was built to ferry supplies from one side of the mountains to the other), and down to Doubtful Sound. Oh yes, we were in coach tour hell, and whilst I’m a keen snapper myself I was getting peeved by the many people who seemed unable to look at the landscape through their own eyes, rather than a viewfinder. At least I got that lovely warm self righteous feeling and an undeserved sense of smugness.
We boarded another boat and set sail. Doubtful Sound is beautiful, stunning, silent, gorgeous. Words can’t describe, really, except that it’s exactly how you’d expect it to look. It stretches 20k out to the sea and has a resident pod of dolphins and a seal colony. The vegetation has never been touched by humans, one of the waterfalls would be the highest in the world if it wasn’t viewed as a downhill river, and best of all the rain cleared to provide a sunny, calm afternoon cruise.
Now it’s a little understood fact that Doubtful Sound is a fjord – or fiord as Kiwis doubtless spell it – not a sound. A fjord, children, is the result of erosion by glaciers, creating the dramatic landscape of, say, Norway. (Well I’m told it’s dramatic, not seen them myself.) A sound on the other hand is caused by the erosive action of rivers and the sea, for example Plymouth Sound. So Captain Cook got it wrong when he named this feature Doubtful Sound: he thought it would contain a good harbour but was doubtful that, with the prevailing wind, he’d be able to sail out if he’d ever gone in to take a look.
Indeed, Cook got quite a few things wrong on that voyage. When sailing past Fox Glacier he just noted that there was ‘low cloud in the valley’. But he did find New Zealand and sail around the world, so on balance he scores more positives than negatives.
The photos speak for themselves, although can never capture how it really felt to be there. This was by far the most expensive thing we have done, at more than NZD200 each, but it was worth it.
Paradise(o) in Wanaka
Oh, what have we been up to, so much to tell. Vic and I are now staying in Wellington with Mike and Sue Scott, parents of one of her friends, who are excellent hosts and even have broadband internet. So now’s a chance for me to briefly update you on what we’ve done since the West Coast.
Once we’d flown over the glaciers we hopped back in the car and headed down the coast towards the Haast Pass. Surprisingly this is the youngest of NZ’s roads across the Southern Alps, finally completed in the early 1960s and not tarmaced until 1995. It’s yet another beautiful trip up and over the hills, through the mystically named Gates of Haast and onto the plains and lakes in the centre of the South Island.
Although we planned to spend some time in Queenstown, the adventure sport capital, we’d heard little praise for the town so chose to base ourselves in Wanaka for a couple of days. This is the little sister of QT, around 50k over the hills, and has a cosier atmosphere with a handful of useful shops and lots of good cafes. Judging by the views from the top of Mount Iron (another great name) and the number of real estate agents, Wanaka is growing rapidly, but it remains small enough to retain a peaceful atmosphere on the edge of the lake.
I don’t remember actually doing much in Wanaka apart from finally admitting defeat in a three way battle between me, the elephant super glue and my sunglasses. Perhaps the thing I’ll remember it best for is the Cinema Paradiso. Yes, we went to see Lord of the Rings again, since we were close to where much was filmed and it was another rainy afternoon. And now I have a cinema to rival the Oyster Cinema in Whitstable as my favourite.
This is how small town cinemas should be. Run by three friends, the Scottish chief of whom likes to introduce the films (this time he ran a competition to spot Peter Jackson), it’s a converted shed that seats eighty people on old sofas, armchairs, even in an old car. It’s great! They even have an interval in every film where you can pop outside, get a can of pop and take a breather, before the film continues.
Their only booking information is ‘If you arrive 15 – 30 minutes before the movie then you will have a better choice of the couches’. Their limited website is here and background to the story of the cinema is here.
