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Published: March 16th 2011
Wow! Where to start?? I did receive a message from an old mate this morning asking if we had paid extra for this exciting trip and telling me Disney were already on to it. 2 earthquakes and one Tsunami all on the same ride!
Guam was beautiful, much more than we expected, and we are just hoping it still as we left it, as we heard it was in line with the tsunami but haven’t heard much about the island since – will check when we get back on line (We have no internet within 5 miles of Japan which is where we have been for the last 36 hours) When we arrived at the island, there was massive queuing time again, being such a small island and docking in a US Naval Base with its accompanying tight security, the transport was all very slow. We decided instead to take a taxi straight to the beach, which was truly wonderful. Paddled along the beach for a while, stopped to watch a wedding taking place on the beach (it was only 9.30am) and then watched a man fishing – standing in the sea and using seaweed for bait to catch “rabbit
fish”. Apparently they are called this because they burrow into the sand. We then caught a bus to the local mall and had a walk around there – it had a very American feel to it, even a Macy’s and a KFC!. Caught a taxi back to the Hyatt hotel, which was where Cunard had arranged for its shuttle buses to be and spent a while on the beach. Swam in the clear sea – only a bit, as I wasn’t keen on was the fish swimming in the same bit of sea. I don’t mind looking at them but I don’t like sharing the same water. The coral reef was beautiful too but once again a little on the scary side for me. We then met up with another couple and had a few drinks in the beach bar before getting a cab back to the ship with them (queues for the shuttle buses were, once again, massive. Also using the taxi we could stop off at the supermarket and replenish our bottle stocks!!)
Once back on board it was the usual sail away, which are always nice, music and dancing and singing and waving goodbye to the
people lining the shoreline.
Two days at sea were to be had between Guam and Osaka – the first day of which was sunny and warm and spent sunbathing, with a few quizzes thrown in there for luck! The second day at sea the weather changed dramatically becoming quite chilly and quite windy so stayed indoors most of the time. Once again, we pub quizzed along with our team mates , the “boys”, Michael and John, winning the music quiz and then being joined at the next one by a “mad Jock” who treated Scott like a long lost comrade and informed us other three that we were actually of German origin, as was anyone who came from South of Hadrian’s Wall. He then regaled us with very many uninteresting facts about his life, christened our team with a new name, “Way Hae the Scots”, Our friend John did ask if we could perhaps have a swastika added to the team name, to represent us German people!! At the end he informed us that we had to be there promptly for the quizzes coming up and him and his wife would join us if we kept them a place
– Fat Chance!!!
10th March we arrived in Osaka, the weather was very cold indeed; we were back in winter clothes and boots! The greeting from the people of Osaka was great – really really friendly, all gathering to show us their local crafts and culture and insisting on giving out lots of presents. None of us spoke any Japanese and none of them spoke any English but we all managed and did a lot of bowing – really really great experience. Scott and I went for a walk in the morning in the port area, through its shopping malls and side streets arriving back on the port where we went on a massive big Ferris wheel (much taller than the London Eye) where Scott took many photos of the top of the QM2.
In the afternoon we took a Cunard trip to a Golden Temple in Kyoto. The weather was very cold and, in fact, it tried to snow. This was a very very busy tourist spot as the gardens held one of the oldest temples in Japan. You can just imagine the amount of cameras there!!! There was a whole school of Japanese boys on a
trip just to add to the mayhem. Overall though it was a very interesting place. Our guide for the trip was a delightful lady (Eiko) who spoke very good English, who also sang us several Japanese folksongs as we drove through Osaka and its surroundings.
After the temple we went to a silk painting/dyeing factory, which made the most beautiful kimonos and other silk items. We all had a lesson in a big classroom and painted our own handkerchiefs before continuing with the tour of the factory.
After this, we then had a bit of sightseeing tour before arriving at the oldest restaurant and tearoom in Kyoto (400 years). Here we were greeted by bowing ladies in kimonos and shown through to the restaurant, once we had taken our shoes off, where we then sat at very low tables albeit on small chairs (better than the floor). This was the point when Scott realized he had different coloured socks (M&S of course) on with one sock with “Wednesday” printed on it and one with “Sunday” – definitely lowering the tone! We were offered different wines or Saki and then began our Japanese meal – Scott found this great
fun …….. hahahaha. Lots of sushi, lots of veg accompanied by very very hot and spicy stuff.
Then it was boxes of raw beef to be cooked in boiling pans of water, which were on the table along with the lettuce and roots. It did actually taste nice although Scott may disagree a little. Eating it with chopsticks took some doing because it’s hard to cut strips of beef with a chopstick. When this was all gone, and thank goodness we had some very hungry Australians on our table, the next dish arrived. This was a very unexpected plate of deep fried prawns, pork balls and chips – the smile reappeared on Scott’s face! Japanese tea was then taken. All of this was followed by a Geisha show and we were told all the differences that there are between trainees (from 15 years), and the fully qualified Geishas (at around 21), but unfortunately I can’t remember them. They were very beautiful and looked like porcelain dolls, who danced and sang a bit then had their photos taken, as you can see from the attached! After this we took a walk around the historic garden and then it was back
on the coach and back to the ship.
After over an hours drive and feeling a bit on the exhausted side (come on!!! …. This type of life is very very hard!) We had a couple of drinks on board and then to bed. The sound of the ship’s horns woke me up and let me know we had set sail again on our way to Nagasaki.
11 March. Awoke to the fairly appalling news of the Tsunami. All I can say is we were totally oblivious to it out at sea. It was like a millpond!! We did become quite worried as there was a team of 34 passengers who were going overland between Osaka and Nagasaki and who were spending the day in Tokyo and news of them was fairly scarce. However, thankfully, in the evening they managed to get in touch to say they were all ok. It’s all been a bit weird. It has begun to feel a bit like we are a floating “Jonah”. We were supposed to have been arriving in Christchurch the day after the earthquake hit them, there was a major mud slide in Perth after we left there,
the Japanese earthquake and tsunami is devastating and we had been there the day before it struck and were due again the day after. I do hope that is it now, although we were told today that there has been an earthquake (6.3) in Beijing, which is where we are off to next, and we still have to get through the Suez canal to get home so who knows?
12 March. Spent the day sailing around the bay of Nagasaki, as we were not allowed to berth there. Unfortunately there was one passenger who is quite ill (need to find out from the ship’s jungle drums what that’s all about) and who had to be taken off the ship and hospitalised so the tugboat came alongside to take her and her fellow passengers off. Also the hotel manager and some staff got off as the passengers on the overland tour had managed to catch a flight from Tokyo and they were going to meet them in the port and then the tug brought them back out to the ship. It was a relief to see them all again!
With little to do, as the weather is quite
cool we have done quizzes and played scrabble today (I whopped Scott). Also we went to see a film called “On The Road” which was really really really awful!! This was a very poor substitute to visiting Nagasaki but all on board are very understanding and I think very grateful and very lucky.
As I write this we are still sailing along the coastline of Japan and it looks very beautiful. All we can say is we found the people very welcoming and very gentle and we do wish we had been able to see more of their country.
13th March – Still a day at sea and then we arrive in Beijing tomorrow. Today is cold and thick fog so not altogether interesting although have already done two quizzes, (by the way we managed to ditch the Mad Jock – guess who got the job of telling him?) won neither, and had lunch so am just doing a bit of sorting of photos with a hope that somewhere in China I can send this update. Tomorrow we have a tour booked which is lasting 12 hours taking in the Great Wall, Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square with
a stop, much to Scott’s delight (I don’t think) for an authentic Chinese lunch. Never tasted dog or cat before!
WOW! What can I say?? We arrived in the port of Xingang early yesterday morning …. And it was exactly that … a port. Nothing more, nothing less. It is still under construction so there was a huge state of the art concrete building in acres and acres and acres of baroness – no local greeting, no bands, no dancers, no nothing at all other for a few unsmiling officials in very smart uniforms. We had been told to meet our tour group in the Theatre on board at 7.00am so there we were up at 6.15 prompt, ready and down on time …. And there we still there at 8.15am. Apparently officialdom was taking place very very slowly and very very officially and, although our passports had been with the onboard Chinese Customs men for two days and every single passport on board (including the staffs) had been photocopied – all 4,000 of them (they love using huge amounts of paper in this country I believe) apparently the ship and its contents were not deemed altogether safe enough.
It was hilarious listening to their requests as we sat patiently (some a little less patiently than others) waiting to get off. We were requested not to take with us onto Chinese territory the following items: guns, bombs, ammunition, hand grenades NOR anything at all of an explosive nature, opium, cannabis, marijuana NOR any other illegal narcotics, livestock or …… fruit. So there you are we had to leave almost all of our stuff behind! None of those contraband oranges or bananas to be taken on shore …. Far far too dangerous to the People’s Republic!!!
8.30a.m made it onto the coach after wending our way through said large monolith where we met our guide Michael. He was a man who liked to do his job thoroughly so as we went our way through the unmade roads out of the port he spent the next half hour counting us – it was a 53 seater bus which wasn’t quite full!! He then gave us all a number – not individual ones of course because that would have been too difficult for us to remember therefore couples shared a number – and we were no. 17 – I must point
out at this point this was apparently to prevent us getting lost en-route. There was no reference made to the unmade road, the miles of dust and the fact that the coach had become jammed in the middle of hundreds of trucks waiting to make deliveries of building materials on said unmade road.
Beijing was over a 100 miles away from the port and once on tarmac the coach driver picked up speed (with Michael still going over the numbers and making us practice shouting them out). Mile after mile after mile of nothingness – it was such a bleak landscape. Buildings were going up and apparently they were to be high rise flats but I am not sure what the people will do who ultimately live in them and also the building of roads to these new towns. In the middle of this vastness was the odd peasant hoeing the ground (maybe it was a field but it certainly didn’t look like one) by hand. An hour into the journey Michael reminded us all of our numbers as we were about to make a toilet stop and he was worried that we might not be able to get
to the toilet and back on the coach without getting lost! To be fair to him there were 7 coaches in our convoy and all of these had a different number so it was possible we might stray on to the wrong one without paying enough care and attention. Off we got, once again in an area of nothingness, only a small concrete toilet block which was maybe erected in the 1960’s but I think the toilets may have been older!! I became a camel – the ship had warned us that they might not be so good as western toilets are not de-rigueur here and that we should take our own toilet paper as they don’t seem to have it (probably using the paper for photocopying and ticketing!) – unfortunately the ship had undersold it …… disgusting! So remembering the No 17 and the Bus No. 10 much to Michael’s delight I was back on board totally unscathed – but not daring to drink very much.
After three and a half hours, including the sightseeing along the Beijing Ring Road, which is full of KFC’s and McDonalds amongst the shantytowns, we arrived at the Great Wall. It was
amazing to be there even if we were not alone!! I think most of the ship on their various tours were there along with all the other visitors. Anyway it was amazing to be right on a Wonder of the World. We climbed up a little way as it was difficult negotiating the uneven steps and the steepness as well as making our way around all the other people who were doing the climbing, had photos taken and then returned to the bottom. The mountains in the bit we were in were very beautiful and would probably have looked even more scenic if it had been a nice day but unfortunately it was freezing, grey and windy …. But hey…. It was still fab to be there.
Onwards and upwards ….. Time for a re-count and all present and correct so off for our authentic Chinese lunch!*!*! Seven buses pulled up in convoy outside a factory on the outskirts of Beijing – once again a scenic mix of grey dust, shanty housing and blocks of flats in the making. After being counted off the bus we were given very thorough instructions to follow Michael (I think he would have
preferred it if he could have tied us to a long rope) through the entrance to the factory shop where we could stand and watch quite a lot of workers hand paint pottery through glass windows. The conditions in these rooms were pretty dismal with very little light, electric or natural, and very cramped. We then arrived in a massssssive hall/room full of stuff for sale and then taken upstairs into an equal sized room full of round tables and chairs where we were to be served our lunch. Scott and I sat down with a group of unknowns on a table for 10/12 who were very uncommunicative – the table had a “lazy Susan” in the centre absolutely jam packed with bowls and plates of food and the staff kept bringing more but there was nowhere left to place it. Some of it looked quite tasty, some of it looked quite familiar and some of it looked really frightening. Anyway had a few tastes of different bits and pieces and then Scott put a morsel into my bowl of what he told me was a pork ball in sweet and sour ….. IT WASN’T. It began to attack the
inside of my mouth as it was full of sharp bits and I was unsure as to whether it was chicken which had included its feet and beak or crushed fish head bones so unfortunately it had to be removed from the mouth by way of a pretend cough into a serviette by which time the uncommunicative table were all watching. It did break the ice a little but not much. The “lazy Susan” was turned at a rapid rate of knots by an elderly couple at the other side who were obviously worried they might miss out on something and as the “lazy Susan” spun around little bowls would come shooting off landing on other peoples plates or knocking drinks over. This was the time when we decided a stroll around the salesroom might be easier so bidding a cheery farewell we left our fellow guests at the table and escaped to calmer places. I was particularly happy that, at least, this place did have one western style loo and I got to it before the other 400 people had finished eating. We wandered around until the allotted time of departure and arrived outside to be greeted by a
very concerned Michael as he had considered us missing because we had not kept with the rest of the group and had not been there to shout 17 in the correct place. This being said we were there but the coach wasn’t.
Off now for a visit to the Forbidden City and, once again, a drive through a vista of endless apartment blocks, masses of litter and the sights of the very poor conditions that the majority of folk have to live in.
However, the Forbidden City was awesome. It was enormous, packed to the gunnels with tourists (mainly from the ship) and just awe-inspiring. The colours of the buildings and the shapes were beautiful – they certainly knew how to do big!! And it so took us back to seeing the film “The Last Emperor” that we are definitely going to watch it again and this time we will know exactly what it’s like!! Unfortunately the visit was rather dominated by our guide’s need to keep counting us and the fact he made us all stand together and wait outside the toilets whilst those who needed them used them. There was so much to see and we
were standing outside a toilet!!!! By this time my sense of humour was beginning to wane, but Scott felt very sorry for the chap as he was just following his instructions to the letter. We felt that the culture of the Chinese people is probably so different from that of the western world and that they just follow along exact lines and we question them far too much that when the two meet it can get a little nerve wracking for both parties so I was made to behave!
One memorable part of this visit for me and for the rest of the group was when, whilst standing outside of the grand palace, I offered to take a photo for Sally (Personnel Manager from the cruise ship and a very nice girl to boot) with the backdrop of the entrance to the City. Whilst lining up the perfect shot I took two steps backwards – my back towards the central entrance to the Palace – my right heel hit a kerb and I flew gently backwards, completely flat with legs out straight and raised delicately in the air. Camera was fine tho, I was OK and everyone else had
a good laugh.
We made our way, altogether, and being counted from time to time, to the other side and exit of the Forbidden City. It would have been good to have spent more time just strolling and discovering stuff for ourselves but unfortunately, down to the guide’s paranoia it all felt a little bit rushed.
Getting back to the buses was a little distance away and I was amazed by the amount of street traders trying to sell stuff and people begging – I guess that I just hadn’t thought China would be like that. We were also told by Michael, the guide, that the average annual income in the city was 5,000 American dollars and for the people who work in the countryside it is 900 American dollars per year and with property prices at 5,000 dollars a square meter it does make you wonder how they get by and who earns all the money to buy the property.
It was then back on the bus – No 17 were present and correct along with the rest of them – for a drive around the inner part of the capital and to Tiananmen Square. This
was an amazing sight; we had imagined a huge square but not the buildings that surrounded it – mindboggling!!
We were then taken to the train station where we caught the Bullet train back towards the ship. The station was new and immaculate – I think a lot of the surrounding area had been done for the Olympic Games – and very very organized and as usual …. huge. It even had somewhere in the region of 50 cream silk sofas surrounding a grand piano in the centre but not sure why as this bit was roped off.
Once we had a few more counts we were on the train, which was, just fab and we got up to the speed of 327 kilometers an hour (Scott was very happy as he had surpassed his land speed record). We were on the train for around 35 minutes before being counted off and then counted on to a bus to take us to the port. By this time most people were showing signs of exhaustion but it had all been well worth it.
I really think that if we were to come back in three years all this
scenery would look very, very different, especially around the port area as up until 3 years ago this was all salt flats. They are busy building all the infrastructure for the future and have planted thousands of trees.
Once back on board we collapsed in a heap and after a drink in the bar were in bed by 10.30 – didn’t hear or feel the ship leaving the port and knew nothing more until Scott’s alarm went off at 6.15am this morning (he had forgotten to switch the alarm off from yesterday!).
Today we have taken things easy. A late start as there was little to get up for and we heard there was ice on the deck and it was only 3 degrees Centigrade at lunchtime. The tropical tans are fast disappearing and I firmly believe it’s time we were getting back to warmer weather.
Tomorrow we arrive in Shanghai where I believe it will still be fairly bloody cold but have been told the shopping is excellent so there is one redeeming feature. Also I will try and post this blog from there but not sure if time will allow – if not it can
go from Hong Kong which is the next port and hopefully a warmer one. Also we are there for two days.
Right. Off to get ready for a fun filled evening – invite to a party before joining our mates for dinner. Toodle pip! xx
Sending this from Shanghai Starbucks with the help of a very nice chap sat next to me!!! Shanghai is fabulous - but will write more later
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Julie
non-member comment
Ooh Su, this blog would be a great start for a novel! You are both looking fab despite all the natural disasters going on!X