Tag Archives: train

Escape from the Airport

The train started running at 6:00 AM, so I left the airport and went to the Kowloon waterfront, where I took the Star Ferry across to Hong Kong Central. (Hong Kong refers to both Hong Kong island and the Special Administrative Zone that includes it. I think the name of the city itself is still Victoria, although no one seems to call it that.)

I couldn’t check in until afternoon, so I had to carry all my stuff with me. It’s only about 20 pounds, because I’ve slowly been learning how important it is to travel light. Still, I didn’t want to spend the morning hiking, especially since I only got about two hours sleep last night, so I caught one of the double-decker trams, went upstairs, and rode around for an hour or so. The fare is HK$2.30 (about 30 cents).

(Note the bamboo scaffolding in the background. Most of Hong Kong’s gleaming modern skyscrapers are built using bamboo scaffolding.)

After all that it was still only 9:00 AM, so I walked down some side streets that had rows of small markets.

The food seemed very fresh.

But I stopped in a bakery instead and got a pastry, then sat in Starbucks for a while. Eventually I meandered back to Kowloon and checked in right at noon.

And now I’m going to take a nap.

Midnight on Lantau

Hong Kong Airport is not exactly jumping on a Saturday night. Or a Friday night. Whatever night this is. I think it’s a few minutes into the 28th. That’s Saturday, right? Whatever.

Anyway, I don’t know what I’m going to do for the rest of the night. I can’t check in until afternoon. I have my Octopus Card, though, so I can go pretty much anywhere. The sky’s my oyster!

UPDATE: The trains do not, in fact, run all night, as I was for some reason thinking. So unless I want to pay extra for a taxi to go somewhere else and hang around in the middle of the night, it looks like I’m here for a few more hours, drinking flat whites, charging my iPad, and reading the Economist’s World in 2014.

Notes on Japan

Home now. According to the pedometer app on my phone, I walked a total of 534,826 steps in the last 22 days, or about 247 miles, an average of 11.227 miles a day.

Some additional notes:

The paper money in Japan is all new. Every time I got change anywhere, I got bills that looked like they had never been used. In the two weeks I was in Japan, I never saw a bill that had even been folded. I can’t even guess how they accomplish that.
Trash cans are surprisingly hard to find. I walked miles with trash stuffed in my bags because I couldn’t find any way to get rid of it. And when you do find a trash can, it will only accept a certain type of recyclable. It might be big enough for your Starbucks cup, but not the lid. Or it’s only for plastic bottles.
Train station restrooms don’t have paper towels or air dryers. You just have to dry your hands on your pants. But many of them do have hooks next to the urinals so you have some place to put your umbrella. A matter of priorities, I guess.
Japan often uses songs familiar to Americans in unexpected ways. There’s no cultural or lyrical association, so they just use the tunes. I was changing my shirt in a restroom in the Nagano train station and I heard a familiar melody that I couldn’t place. It was played in an 8-bit video-game style. After a few seconds, I remembered the lyrics:

Jesus loves me, this I know
For the Bible tells me so

Most intersections play the familiar chirping sounds when the light changes, but some of them play songs. One of the songs is Comin’ Through the Rye.

I also heard Yankee Doodle with Japanese lyrics playing from a video screen outside Akihabara station.

In Japan you get wet wipes with everything. They’re a bit skimpy with regular napkins, but you’ll always get a wet wipe. In Korea the napkins have the consistency of tissues, but rougher. They’re in boxes at the tables, so you can have as many as you like, but they fall apart when you try to use them.
Why do Japanese people live so long? They don’t do anything right. They smoke, they drink, they eat a lot of pastries and don’t exercise and work long hours in stressful jobs. And they outlive everyone on the planet.

Why? Is it all the green tea that they drink? Is it genetics? Is it just a result of counting dead pensioners?

I’m going to start smoking and drinking, just in case.

7-11 is a bank.

UPDATE: My route from start to finish.

Sleepwalking Through Shinjuku

Early morning. I have a cold. I took some Japanese decongestant and I’m undercaffeinated. My feet hurt. It’s starting to rain. What should I do today?

How about wander through the alleys of Shinjuku in the morning drizzle?

A triple latte made me a little less groggy, so I didn’t even get lost all that much.

The Golden Gai in Shinjuku looks like this. It had a definite Nasty Vomit Sauce vibe, but everything’s closed in the morning, so there’s no way to check.

Next I went to Akihabara. I had a hankering for Freshness Burger* and figured I could have lunch and check camera prices in the duty-free shops.

Akihabara is “Electric Town”. It grew out of the black market in surplus military electronics that went on under the train tracks after World War 2. That portion is still there—although it’s legit now—and sells all sorts of electronic components and related items as the trains rumble overhead.

If you’re more than about 5′ 10″ you’ll bump your head. There’s even a second story in there.

The rest of the area is a more standard jumble of computer/camera/stereo/DVD/you-name-it businesses.

The cameras I looked at all had the same prices as on Amazon. I would have saved on taxes and shipping, but that’s it.

And there’s no Freshness Burger there, so I went back to Shinjuku. I knew I’d seen one there. I had lunch and listened to two Japanese girls speak French to each other, then went back to the hotel to take a nap.

* Mos Burger is pretty good, but Freshness Burger is better.

The Danger of Trains

There are those who say that this blog focuses on trains too much, that it’s insufficiently dramatic and fails to live up to the high—even stellar—standards that this blog has set in the past.

To those people I say: You do not realize the danger of stepping onto a train in Tokyo. On any day, at any moment, something like this could happen.

He always goes after the trains. Not to mention the risk from Rodan flying over, or Ghidrah’s lightning breath, or Gamera shooting fire from his leg holes. Granted, Gamera is with a different film company, so he wouldn’t attack in conjunction with those other monsters, but any one of them would be sufficient, is what I’m saying.

But this blog giggles in the face of danger. That’s our commitment to you, our several readers.

You’re welcome.

Nasty Vomit Sauce

About 20 years ago, a friend visited Tokyo and told me of something called “nasty vomit sauce” at some dive down an alley in Shinjuku. I tried to find it today while I was stranded in Shinjuku.

“Sumimasen,” I said to passersby. “Nasuchivomitososuno restauranwa doko desuka?”

But they just bowed and acted embarrassed and rushed away.

“Iidesuyone!” I called after them, but I guess they all had a train to catch or something.

I’ll try again tomorrow. Somebody must know.

Conurbationary Megalopoli

Imagine greater Los Angeles. At 4850 square miles, it has about 13,000,000 people. Now increase the size slightly, to 5240 square miles. Then nearly triple the population, to 36,000,000. Make most of the roads too narrow to drive on and put a giant, confusing train system in the middle of it. Add vast amounts of neon signs and video screens and one emperor.

Now try to find your way around.

I couldn’t find a place to stay in Tokyo proper, at least not for a reasonable price, so I’m staying in Saitama, a little north of Tokyo. Getting here is straightforward. You just take the Saikyo line to Todakoen station. You have to make sure you get on a local or a rapid express, not a super rapid express, because that one bypasses Todakoen. Otherwise, no problem.

But if you’re going the other direction, the line stops at Shinjuku. If you’re foolish enough to stay on the train, thinking it will continue to Shibuya, well…it won’t. It now goes in the other direction, back toward Todakoen. To continue toward Shibuya, you have to get off and take a train on the Rinkai line, which is the same exact line. It’s just called something else in this direction.

So that was a good chunk of my afternoon.

I finally got to Shibuya, but all I did was get a triple latte at the Starbucks that overlooks Shibuya crossing and watch the people go back and forth across the street. A fair percentage of them were just crossing the street to try to get pictures of everyone else crossing the street.

At the starting gate, just as the light turns…

Tonight I’m just going to stay in and read a William Gibson novel.

Matsumoto to Tokyo

Matsumoto to Tokyo was simple: northeast to Nagano on the limited express, then southeast to Tokyo. After that…

I took the Yamanote line from Ueno station. It loops around the city, so I thought I could get a look at the different areas. All I got a look at was the people standing next to me, and occasionally some buildings and train tracks. And I might have seen Shibuya Crossing. Not sure. So I wasted about an hour looping back to Ueno station.

Now then. I have a membership with Toyoko Inn, which is a chain of inexpensive business hotels. They’re all over Japan. But in order to find one, I had to look them up online, and that meant that I had to find wifi. I hadn’t had wifi access since the fish & chips place in Matsumoto. Starbucks has free wifi, but you have to sign up for it first, which means you need an Internet connection first. If I had that, I wouldn’t need the wifi.

But I had signed up for it, just in case. Now I just needed access long enough to get to the confirmation email that they should have sent.

So I got off at Ueno to see if there was public wifi. Nothing. I walked a few blocks from the station to see if I could see a Toyoko Inn. Nothing. But I knew there was a Toyoko Inn near Akihabara, and that was just two more stops, so I got back on the train and went there.

I couldn’t see anything near the station, but I found really slow wifi in one area in front of the station, which enabled me to confirm my Starbucks registration. There was a Starbucks on the third floor of a department store adjacent to the station. So: upstairs, buy a latte, and…no place to sit. Found a bench in the department store and connected to Starbucks. “Cannot connect because you do not have an Internet connection.” Tried several times.

Back downstairs with all my stuff, including a latte I didn’t really want. Tried to put some of the stuff in a locker, but didn’t have enough coins. Carried everything back to the slow wifi area and got to the page with Toyoko Inn’s address and walked there. It’s not really that close.

They only had a vacancy for tonight. I still have to find a place for the rest of the nights, but at least I have wifi here.

Monkey Failure

I had intended to visit Mt. Takasaki Monkey Land on Kyushu, but ran short of time and had to backtrack to Kumamoto rather than do the Kyushu loop I had originally planned.

No problemo. I would just stop at the Iwatayama Monkey Park near Arashiyama. But it was late in the afternoon by the time I got there, so I skipped it, thinking it would be better to see the onsen monkeys near Nagano anyway. They’re the famous ones. And I’m in Nagano now.

But it turns out that the Jigokudani Wild Monkey Park is not really all that close to Nagano. You have to take a train for an hour, then take a bus, then walk for a half hour. The weather’s cleared up, but there’s supposed to be a typhoon coming. And I’m carrying all my stuff.

So to hell with the monkeys. I’m going to Tokyo.

Down Hozu River

Raging torrents and breathtaking ravines at times dousing you with water, at others passing in calmness.

So my brochure says. Arashiyama is a very touristy town just outside of Kyoto and from there I took a tourist train up the Hozu river gorge to Kameoka.

I think Kameoka means “turtle orchestra,” although my Japanese is not strong.

On the bus ride (almost as long as the train ride) from the train station to the dock, I talked to Mike and his son Shane from San Clemente. Mike had lived in Japan as a child and this was his first time back. Apparently it’s changed some since 1967.

We finally got to the boarding site and took off down the river.

The rapids were fearsome!

Okay, they really weren’t. Pirates of the Caribbean is probably scarier. Still, a person could do worse than floating down a lushly forested river gorge, even if a person is having a little trouble keeping the camera dry.

This guy was offering photos for ¥1575.

Near the end, another boat pulled up alongside us and offered food, including beer, sake, and grilled squid.

I opted for walking into town and getting chicken skewers and anpan instead.

There’s a famous bamboo forest there too. It’s a short walk, but impressive. I skipped the associated temple.