Moving On

I ride the Shinkansen (Bullet Train) from Tokyo to Kagoshima, tomorrow. Actually, it is four trains. The distance is half the length of Japan!

I revisited Ginza, Shinjuku, and Shibuya today. One word of advice: if you are a compulsive clothes shopper, do not go to Tokyo! You will quickly become broke, for two reasons:

1. There is so much choice. Anything you want to get, you can find a boutique or department store selling it.
2. It is all expensive. Whenever I flipped over the tag on a nice looking shirt (even sweatshirt), the price was around $400!

I have only bought one t-shirt. Partly because I don’t want to spend much money, and also because I don’t want to carry more stuff for another two weeks.

Also, most of the stuff is international brands, so you can buy it all at home. Tokyo just groups it all together into a few shopping districts, so it is very easy to troll.

Tokyo is Great!

Out of all of the cities I’ve visited on this trip, Tokyo is by far the best.

Tokyo is the city that Shanghai wants to be. It has a long way to go. The big difference is: Tokyo pays attention to the details, and it keeps working at them until they are 100% correct. 99% is not good enough. Shanghai, on the other hand, often stops at 80%.

Sunday is Shopping Day

Tokyo shops on Sunday. So did I.

I had planned to see the gardens at the Imperial Palace on Sunday morning. Unfortunately, it was raining quite hard, so I had to change plans. I also bought an umbrella. It cost $3. I don’t expect it to last very long.

I headed back to Roppongi Hills. It is enclosed, so I was out of the rain. When I was there two days ago, I spent all of my time in the museum, so I didn’t really see the shopping area.

The bad thing is that I saw a frame for spectacles there that I really love. The design company is called Parasite. They did not have lenses to match my prescription, which is the only factor that stopped my from buying them.

I bought some small and inexpensive souvenir items, then headed to Shibuya, which is another shopping area. It didn’t have anything of interest for me, so I walked up to Harajuku.

Harajuku was on my “must see on Sunday” list because of:

Cos-play Zoku

Which is: Costume Play Gang.

A striking pair.

Free hugs.

Posing for the tourists.

Tourist zoo.

As you can see, this spot is more popular with the tourists than it is with the zoku.

Harajuku

Harajuku is also the area for boutique shopping. There is a huge assortment of boutiques. The only theme amongst them is: expensive. I bought a t-shirt. It cost $60!

Tokyo is certainly a great place to shop. You can probably find anything, if you just know where to look.

Well-dressed

Tokyo is a well-dressed city. Even when people are casual, they still look nice. The only slobs walking around are the tourists, like me!

This is another notable difference between Tokyo and Shanghai. When men wear suits in Tokyo, they fit. In China, most men wear ill-fitting suits – almost always too big! This is surprising, since tailoring is available cheaply in China.

It was very nice to see ladies dressed in kimono at the Kabuki theatre! They were mostly older women, and the kimonos were very understated, but beautiful. I thought these must be real Kabuki lovers, who would be in the best seats. I was surprised that some of them were sitting in the cheapest seats!

Trains

Tokyo has a fantastic system of trains and subways. They get you where you want to go quickly and cheaply. You never wait more than a couple of minutes to catch one, either.

They also have a great idea: fare adjustment machines. I have no idea how much fare to pay. It varies depending on distance, transfers, etc. But, what I can do is pay the lowest fare, do my travel, then feed my ticket into the fare adjustment machine and pay what I owe.

In a couple of days, I will ride on Shinkansen (Bullet) trains, which will be interesting.

The subways have information screens, which tell you what the next stop is, and other information, which is where I learned about:

Earthquake

One of the information boards this afternoon said: such-and-such train delayed because of earthquake. The delayed train was a Shinkansen.

Sure enough, when I logged in to Yahoo, the first headline was: Earthquake in Japan.

It was outside of Tokyo, so I was safe.

Senso-ji at night

I’ll sign out with this photo, taken a few minutes ago:

Kabuki

I went to see some Kabuki theatre, yesterday, and was very enjoyable. Kabuki is a traditional form of theatre. It is very stylized, but it is also a theatre “for the masses”.

I went to the Kabuki-za theatre in mid-afternoon. I thought I would just buy a ticket for another day, but a performance was starting in 40 minutes, and the doors opened in ten, so I bought a ticket to go immediately. I got a seat on the third floor (second balcony), towards the front. It was the second-cheapest seat, but it still cost Y4,200 (about $42USD).

The performance started at 4:15 and ended at 8:55. There was three parts, and two intermissions. The second intermission, at 7:00, was for 30 minutes, and I pre-ordered a sushi bento-box for dinner. The food was waiting at intermission time.

The first two segments made up one story, which involved a noble masquerading as a peasant, a “good-for-nothing”, a sushi shop, a few beheadings (and gags involving the head in a sushi barrel), and some fights and stabbing. It was rather Shakespearean in plot.

The last segment was the fourth part of the play that started in the matinee. Fortunately, it also stood alone as a story by itself. One of the actors in this segment was described in the program as “a living national treasure”, so I reckon I was seeing Kabuki performed by the very best!

The theatre rents a small radio box with an earphone, so you can listen to English commentary and translation, which allows you to understand what is going on. It does keep the commentary fairly sparse, so you can listen to the actors and follow their intonation.

More Cherry Blossoms

There are a few more early bloomers.

Check out this one very lonely tree in Ueno Park (to the left, along the shoreline):

There are many, many more cherry trees around it (all of the greyish trees to its right), but they are holding off. A few are developing buds.

You can also view some blossoms up high, in the Mori Tower in Roppongi:

It is clear that everyone is getting ready for sakura-frenzy.

No Phone

It seems that no company in Japan uses SIM cards, so I can’t get my phone running here.

Tokyo – First Day

I’ve already had one action-packed day in Tokyo.

I first went to the Senso-ji Temple, near where I am staying. I discovered there that some cherry blossoms have already started. It is very early! Apparently, this was the first winter in 136 years in which Tokyo got no snowfall.

Then, I took a short cruise down Tokyo’s main river, Sumida-gawa. At the start, you can see Phillipe Starck’s famous building with the giant poop on top:

I disembarked at Hama Rikyu, which is a large Japanese garden. It used to be reserved for the Shogunate, but it is now a public park. While the Chinese like twisted rocks in their gardens, the Japanese seem to prefer twisted trees:

I also had “green tea and a sweet” in the teahouse:

Then, I strolled into Ginza for lunch, and to find the Nikon and Contax photo galleries. The galleries have both moved from the locations in my guidebook. A local camera shop was able to help me find the Nikon gallery.

After that, headed for Yebisu to visit the Contemporary Museum of Photography. One surprise I had there was to see Joel Robochon’s restaurant. It is the European-looking building at the end of the mall.

If you watch Iron Chef, you might remember that Joel Robochon is frequently mentioned.

Finally, I had dinner at Kirin World restaurant, in Shinjuku. Kirin is one of the big beer companies, and the restaurant had their beers on tap. While only Kirin Lager is available in North America, they do actually make some more interesting beers.

Tokyo Time

I arrived in Tokyo, last evening. I have only travelled from the airport to the ryokan where I am staying, so I don’t have much to say about Tokyo, yet.

I had to wake up in Auckland at 5:00am, which was 2:00am Tokyo time. I finally arrived at my ryokan at 7:00pm. It was a long day of travel!

The “premium economy” class on Air New Zealand was very good. As well as the bigger seat and more legroom, we got the same meals as business class, including wine. Each passenger even had their own interactive terminal with movies and tv on demand – but the system had the crappiest user interface and controller I’ve ever seen! It was also running on Windows CE. How do I know? Because it crashed! When rebooting, the Windows CE logo flashed up, for a moment.

Now it’s time to go explore Tokyo….

Auckland

Auckland is an ugly city! The parts I’ve seen, at least, are strikingly unattractive – especially the CBD (downtown) area. I guess no one in Auckland bothered to hire a good architect.

I am just chilling out, and mostly planning and making arrangements for Japan. I have booked my lodging in Tokyo. I will get a JR Rail Pass, which gives a good discount for long-distance rail travel; but only foreign tourists can buy it, and it cannot be purchased in Japan.

Black Sheep

I am going to miss the movie Black Sheep! It opens in NZ on March 22 – the day after I leave. I have seen the trailer for it a few times, and it looks to be pretty funny. It is basically a zombie movie, except that the zombies are sheep, which start attacking the people.

The movie was made in NZ, and Weta did the creature effects.

Fugly Car

This is the Toyota Will VI. I’ve seen them around NZ. I guess that Toyota was inspired by the VW New Beetle to try to create a “cute” car. This is what they ended up with!

Most of them seem to be dented up, too, like this one.

Sailing

In the Bay of Islands, I went sailing on the R. Tucker Thompson. It is a two-masted tall ship.

Here it is arriving to pick up the passengers:

The crew up in the rigging, getting some sails ready:

My turn to climb the rigging:

And yes, I did actually climb up to that point in the rigging to take the photo! It wasn’t too difficult, but it was a little scary. Some daring is required.

Passengers are allowed to climb the front mast, until they are standing on the white platform you can see above the lowest crossbeam. It is easy to get your head up to the height of the crossbeam, but then it is very tricky to climb above that.

Of the 25-or-so passengers, only two of us climbed all the way up.

Looking down to the bowsprit:

Me, relaxing in the netting under the bowsprit:

In true tall ship style, it even has a cannon! We fired it off as we approached the wharf at the end of the trip. It is a tiny cannon, but it makes a big noise!

You can see the tiny little cannon sitting on the deck:

I signed up for this trip when I learned that passengers could climb the rigging. There are many other sailing trips in the area, many of which have passenger participation, but none let you climb.

This is another adventure that I can highly recommend!

Northern Peninsulas: More Bad Weather

I’ve been touring around the Coromandel Peninsula and Northlands, but it has been very windy and rainy for the last few days. The forecast is for it to continue.

It only rains in brief showers, but the winds have been quite high, with even higher gusts.

A tourist was injured in Auckland, yesterday, when a tree was hit by a 150 km/h (95mph) gust and fell on top of her!

I did get enough break in the weather to ride on a fun little narrow gauge railway on the Coromandel Peninsula:

What you see is a second train following my train, up to the top. It was a busy day!

The guy who built the railroad has a pottery workshop at the bottom of the hill. He built the first 200m of railway to carry clay and firewood from the hillside to his shop. Then, he just kept on building! In 2003, he completed the railway, which goes 3km, to the top of the hill, where there is a lookout tower.

The railcars were also built in the local shop.

Bad Weather: No White Island Trip

My boat trip to White Island (a very active volcano) was cancelled, due to bad weather. It looks like the weather will not improve for a few days, so my chance of getting to the island is slim. Too bad. I was looking forward to it.

Here is a device the Kiwis use for crossing rivers, when they don’t want to build a bridge:

More Thermals, Geysers, and Rainforest

I’ve seen plenty of thermal pools and geysers, now. I also visited yet another rainforest area.

There are so many hot springs around Rotorua that the town park even has a bunch of hot pools, which you can see for free.

To the southeast, there is another rainforest area, which has a good collection of the really big trees. They grow up to heights of 50 or 60 metres, and 3 or 4 metres in diameter. Unfortunately, they grow very slowly, so, after a lot of the big trees were logged, faster growing, non-native trees have been planted for the commercial timber industry. No one wants to wait 700 years for a new tree to harvest! There is even a grove of California Coastal Redwoods, planted as an experiment to see how well they grow in NZ.

When hiking in rainforests, you see a lot of pink markers along the trail. The trail markers are orange. The pink markers indicate a poison trap line.

One of the non-native animals introduced by the British was the Opossum, to start a fur trade. Now, there are 70 to 90 million ‘possums, which eat 25,000 tonnes of foliage every day. They are destroying the rainforest, and outcompeting many native species for food. Poison is being used to try to control the population. You can also buy garments with the tradename “possumerino”, which is a wool/possum fur blend.

Orange means “trail”, pink means “poison”.

One thermal area used to have the world’s largest geyser. About 100 years ago, the Waimangu Geyser could erupt over 400 metres (that’s more than 1300 feet)! It lasted for about 4 years, erupting every 36 to 72 hours, and blasting out water, rock, and black sand. Then it became very infrequent, and eventually died.

The same thermal area still has the world’s largest thermal lake: Frying Pan Lake.

In Rotorua, there is another thermal area (admission $35), which has NZ’s largest active geyser: Pohutu. It is a mere 15 to 30 metres, but it erupts about 20 times per day.

Of more interest in the Pohutu area is the Maori Cultural Show. It is included in the admission price. The tourists are invited into the Marae, and then songs and a war chant are performed. It is a good opportunity to learn something about Maori culture.

I have one week left with the campervan, but I am running out of things to do! The only thing I really want to see is White Island, which is an active volcano that has lava flows. Other wise, I’ve seen lots of thermals, rainforest, and volcanoes! There are some beach areas, but beaches don’t hold much interest for me.