Smog

Originally uploaded by Louisblack

I haven't posted for a while so I decided I should probably say hello so that people don't think that we have been sold into prostitution by triads.

We arrived in Hong Kong on Friday and had to rush to our guesthouse because if we didn't get there by 10pm, they would let out our room. So we jumped onto the airport express and grabbed a taxi to our guesthouse in Causeway Bay on Hong Kong Island.

Oh yeah... I completely forgot that I haven't mentioned the situation with our accommodation in Hong Kong. We were originally meant to stay in the notorious Chungking Mansions. 'It'll be an experience' we naively said as we placed our booking through Hostels.com. We have learnt a few things over the last 2 months. One of which is that we are pretty terrible backpackers. We dislike 'slumming it'. So when we checked out some recent reviews about the Hong Kong hostel we quickly decided it might not be the best idea to stay there. We managed to get into a guesthouse on Hong Kong Island for around the same price and we are much happier staying here than the more 'colourful' Kowloon.

As you can see from the picture, the smog here is awful. We have only had one day of blue skies and the rest have been like the picture. On a plus note we have found ourselves a nice local pub and a local restaurant where we can get two huge bowls on noodle soup with two milkshakes for 68HK$.

Stopover

I'm currently sitting in Taiwan airport waiting for our flight to Hong Kong. It's nice to know that we will only be sitting on the plane for an hour and a half. Before we went away Gill (Jordan's mum) said 'I wonder when it is that people stop being excited by air travel?' I think the answer to that could be 'after having to do three fairly long flights in 24 hours.'

Anyway, we had a pleasent, albeit breif, stay in Taiwan. We got in late and were met at the airport by Tom ( a friend of Jordan's mum). We decided to go for a quick drink in a bar before heading home with a rather large can of beer each. Today we just hung around Nan Kan which is a small town outside of Taipei. Sadly, we didn't have the time to get into Taipei to see the 101 (the current tallest building in the world). After a rather hair raising taxi ride, we managed to get to the airport with time to spare.

I will hopefully post something after we have been in Hong Kong for a few days but I have no idea what the situation will be at the guesthouse - we will have to venture out and find an internet cafe.

Only two weeks until we get home and in a way I am looking forward to being back and seeing everyone again. I'm sure you'll all scoff at me saying that all this travelling and sightseeing can be fairly tiring... although in my defense it is around 30-35 degrees round these parts.

More photos

I'm just posting quickly to say that I've uploaded a few more pictures from Japan to the set of Flickr.

Broken phone

I thought I should probably post again regarding what I wrote yesterday. I was mainly talking about in our price range... we have since found a few English or French restaurants but they are on the more expensive end of the spectrum.

I also thought I better post and say my phone has died. I'm not sure what finally did it but it has been on it's way out for a while. The little joy stick didn't go up and pictures kept coming up as scrambled. Oh well, it just means that as soon as I get a job I will have to invest in a 3G iPhone... it just wouldn't be proper not to.

Oh... and Jordan's phone doesn't work in Japan so at the moment we are uncontactable by phone.

Food, glorious food!

Well, I almost feel like Oliver Twist at the moment. Whilst I really do enjoy Japanese food and I used to happily eat a box of sushi for lunch most days at work and eat at Pompoko every week, when it is your only choice for breakfast, lunch and dinner you start getting a little tired of it.

Jordan and I have spent most of this evening fantasising about sausage and mash, pizza and various other forms of culinary delights.

I should explain. The Japanese really like Japanese food. They are content with eating rice bowls, noodles, yakitori, tempura and various other dishes. There just aren't the abundance of ethnic restaurants like there is in London, Brighton or even New Zealand and the US. Every restaurant listed in our Rough Guide is Japanese cuisine which has made it really difficult to find anything else as we cannot read the signs and I'm not even going to get into the Japanese address system.

This may be because, from our little experience, the Japanese are not very good at replicating other country's dishes. We ventured into an Italian restaurant as it was the only one in the area with an English menu. Jordan ended up with the most bizarre minestrone soup and our pizza tasted more like a savoury crepe.

We have decided that tomorrow we will make a concerted effort to find an English restaurant... maybe even a beloved Irish pub to see if we can actually find a completely vegetarian meal (one that Jordan won't have to spend the meal picking pieces of fish out of).

On a brighter note, we had an excellent night last night at the Kamiya bar where we had giant glasses of Asahi and I ate deep fried squid tentacle. We were also sequestered by several drunk Japanese businessmen who were so excited to see a pair of westerners in the bar that they hummed the British national anthem and tried to buy us beers several times. Of course this was all conducted in Japanese so we were very confused and just kept bowing, nodding and smiling.

And to finish, let me tell you I am currently drinking the weirdest tasting milk I have ever had.

Hot

We have been here in Tokyo now for a few days and time is really going quickly.

After my last entry, we went out to a restaurant in Roppongi Hills, a really flash, newly built area with designer shops. The place we found is a restaurant where they serve you a selection of things fried in breadcrumbs. Whilst this may not sound like the tastiest thing in the world, it was in fact quite nice. Jordan had a load of different vegetables but I had a much more exciting dinner. The pieces started out quite tame with beef and chicken but quickly moved to a slightly more bizarre affair. There was a whole fish and a prawn with his legs still on. The octopus tentacle was interesting... a bit like squid but with really chewy suckers.

The following day we headed over to Harajuku which is well known for it's clothes shops, some of which are designer boutiques but there are a few alleys that remind you more of Camden Town than Oxford Street. The streets were incredibly busy and it was difficult to get into any shops so we have made a note to come back and maybe pick up something.

We then ventured across town to our hostel which is in Asakusa. We managed to find a restaurant that had an English menu so we wondered in. We were a little confused to find a hot plate in the middle of our table which we quickly worked out was for us to cook our own food. It was all very confusing and again we didn't really know what had meat and what did not so we just had to hope for the best.

We spent some of the next day looking at the huge shrine in Asakusa and investigating the surrounding area. Today we went over to the zoo which was both fun and a little depressing - are polar bears ever not the saddest thing to see in a zoo? Also, Ling Ling the panda had died 4 months before so we couldn't see her.

We have the rest of our time in Tokyo planned out and even with a fairly hectic schedule we are going to have to miss some stuff out. I'm not sure what people are saying when we said two weeks would be too much.

Japan

Greetings from the land of the rising sun.

We flew into Tokyo on Thursday night after visiting (briefly) four countries in twenty four hours. We are staying with Dave's friends who have lived in Tokyo since 2006.

We spent our first day exploring Shinjuku Gyoen, an amazing garden in a traditional Japanese style. We then wondered the streets of Shinjuju for about 30 minutes trying to find the Tokyo Metropolitan Building. This I thought was quite hilarious as it the tallest building in Tokyo by a fair margin. Once we found the thing, we went up to the (free - stupid Sky Tower) observation deck to get a better view of the city. Apparently on a clear day you can see out to Mt. Fuki but it wasn't a very clear day.

After trying to find a 7/11 shop with any lunchy things left and wondering into a closed restaurant causing much apologising and bowing we decided that Shinjuku is probably a little too busy around lunch time. For lunch we decided to take the train to nearby Harajuku where we could sit and eat in the park... although it did start raining straightaway.

We decided to brave going to a bar in the evening as we both were craving beer. The original plan was to get food too but the bar we found ourself in had a menu with very few pictures and was exclusively in Kanji (the symbols). We finally found somewhere to eat with nice easy english descriptions but it just happened to be an Italian restuarant... now the Japanese have an interesting take on Italian food. The pizza was bizarre but very tasty.

Today we got up and headed out to an animation museum out to the west of the city. The website had a fairly awful map and our Rough Guide didn't provide a great description of it's location so we stood looking bemused in front of a map at the station. This of course attracted much attention from concerned travellers. One man asked if we needed help and looked over the map to see if there was anything written in Japanese that would help. As this did not uncover any useful information and he did not know where the museum was himself he charged off to find someone who did know. After about five minutes he came back and said he could not find anything useful and the look of sorrow on his face that he could not help was quite moving. It's definitely different from England where no one would offer to help a tourist and certainly not to that extent.

Anyway, after much walking we found the musuem which was actually a lot smaller than we would have hoped and we got round it very quickly. I did get to play with a 5 foot tall Gundam robot though!

As I expected, so far Tokyo has been the most amazing place. I have wanted to visit this city since I was a child watching films like Akira when other kids were watching Disney. We have a great deal planned over the next two weeks so I'll hopefully add to what I've already uploaded on Flickr.

Cold

Rather annoyingly we have spent the last few days with little to do in the lakeside town of Taupo. We arrived in the evening a few days ago and straightaway we knew that this was not going to go as planned. The weather has been distinctly colder than the other places we have visited in New Zealand to to it's elevation and position next to a large lake. This has hampered our ability to do anything remotely to do with the outside world. We planned on taking a boat ride out on the lake but all were cancelled due to the weather.

We leave for Auckland at 2:30 this afternoon and then fly to Tokyo on Wednesday at 11:30PM. We are both looking forward to being warm (possibly too warm) in Japan after two weeks of cold weather.

Apologies for the lack of photos on my Flickr stream. The internet cafes have been a little crap at having flash player and I'm not uploading each picture individually. I may just save them all until Tokyo and spent 3 seconds uploading them all in a high speed internet cafe.

Rotorua

It's been a few days since I last posted anything and that is mainly due to the lack of notable events in Tauranga and the abundance of things to do in Rotorua.

I think we have accepted that we may have made a mistake by stopping off in Tauranga and Hamilton. They are really not very important towns and we have missed out on seeing some much more exciting places because of it. I think being in New Zealand has just increased the list of things I would like to see here. I believe another trip out here would be great with what we have learnt. I think a car and no prior plans on where to stay would have made for a much more exciting trip but when you haven't done a trip like this, you think everything has to be planned down to the finest detail.

Anyway! On to Rotorua! We have been very busy here as there is a real bustling tourist industry here and travellers without transport are catered for excellently. We spent our first day exploring before spending the afternoon in the Polynesian Spa getting massages and drinking wine... ridiculously decadent I know but the spa uses geothermally heated water so we convinced ourselves it was a cultural experience. After such a day, our original cheap idea of having beans on toast for dinner seemed a little of an anti climax so we followed Dave's (Jordan's step dad for you who don't know) advice on visiting a restaurant called Freos. The food was amazing and it nicely concluded one of the least backpacker days we have had on our very unbackpacker backpacker holiday.

The next days adventures allowed for a relaxed morning before being shuttled off to a place called Paradise Valley Springs - a trout farm that just happens to have a pride of lions. We managed to get round the farm, which consisted of some trout, pigs, sheep, goats, deers, an evil emu and the most hassling ducks we have ever met. One made the most depressing noise ever heard because we neglected to bring bread. The parks main attraction (other than the trout) is the pride of nine lions. At 2:30 every day they make a spectacle of feeding the lions chunks of horse meat. This was fun to watch if a little unnerving when two females fought quite ferociously over the meat which ended with one bleeding from the nose. The lions are surrounded by a simple fence with an electric fence behind that which gives us onlookers an incredibly close look at the animals - when I upload the photos you'll see what I mean.

In the evening we decided to go along to one of the Maori cultural performances. This consists of a walk around the Maori land and a show of traditional songs and dances. They also provided a dinner off various foods cooked under the ground and the last part of the night was a walk focused on seeing glow worms. The show was interesting but it felt weird when the chief started talking and cracked a few jokes - it jarred a little against the otherwise serious atmosphere.

This morning we ventured out to Hell's Gate which is a thermal reserve outside of Rotorua. We saw bubbling mud and sulphur lakes although there were no geysers.

Now we are just waiting around for our bus to Taupo where we hope to do a few more interesting things. Apparently you can do a tandem skydive for 150NZ$ (approx 60 pounds) which could be fun although it may be a little too brown trousers for me...