The next morning we got the train back to the airport to enquire about the whereabouts of our luggage, only to find out they had been delivered the previous night to the "building administrator". We were pretty pissed off by this time, fed up of going backwards and forwards, not knowing what had happened to our stuff. We even spoke about just skipping Hong Kong once/if we got our bags and going straight to another country!
We got back to the hotel and asked at reception where the building administrator was (8 floors with different hotels, shops etc all crammed onto each of the floors). It turned out the bags got delivered to him the previous night and he decided he wasn’t inclined to inform us about it!
Relieved that we now had our bags we had showers we were desperate for after a day of flying and a night spent in the same clothes. After this we started to calm down abit and decided we would stay in Hong Kong after all.
Friday, 13 March 2009
Monday, 9 March 2009
Day 11-12: Tokyo to Hong Kong
- STILL WAITING ON SOME BETTER INTERNET TO UPLOAD PICS =[ -
Catching planes really sucks. Especially catching this one.
The boarding of the plane to Beijing went very swiftly, as you would expect when boarding in Japan. No customs waiting time, no waiting going through security, very much a case of just checking in and getting on the plane.
The Chinese, it can be said, do not quite excel in the organisation fields in the same way as the Japanese. We got off the plane to be greeted by a woman from Air China showing distinct signs of dismay. "Connect to Hong Kong, come me with now fast", she said as she turned and started to jog through the arrivals terminal. We were unaware that we were in a rush to catch the next plane. By our watches, the website we booked through and the airports display boards there was an hour till the next flight. Apparently not. Turns out the flight had already boarded and was pretty much ready to go, an hour ahead of schedule. How that’s possible is beyond me, but here we were running at an increasingly alarming speed to the transfers and connecting flights security area. Shockingly there at the passport checkpoint there was quite a substantial queue. The woman we were following went through and stood waiting for us on the other side, looking increasingly alarmed. The two guys behind the passport desks were clearly in no rush. It wasn’t that they were doing their jobs well, examining each passport carefully, and then scanning it in the system. It was more a quick glimpse at the picture, a grunt, then going into slowverdrive, moving as painfully slow as possible to scan it, before turning to a random page in the passport and issuing a stamp, also at a horribly slow speed.
I cannot for the life of me stress how slow these people move. We would later brand the population in general as two speed, the two speeds being slow and stopped.
Once we had passed through the passport checks we had to once again go through a full security check, where our hand luggage would be x-rayed again. It will not surprise you to know that there was once again a terribly long queue of people waiting to go through. The woman we were following was having none of it, this time leading us to the front of the queue until she was stopped by one of the security team where she had to explain for five minutes that she worked at the airport, was trying to get us on the plane and was in a desperate rush. It’s not like there was a language barrier! Both these people were Chinese and yet she still had to explain for so long what was going on. They finally agreed to slip us to the front of the queue, much to the disgust of the people queuing. It might be worth noting as well that the Chinese are not an incredibly patient people. In fact the concept of queuing seems lost to them, it’s like being at Alton Towers and having a bunch of kids push past queue jumping, incredibly annoying but at the same time there is nothing you can do about it. The difference being that in China it is apparently the done thing, every man for himself.
Through the x-ray machines we went, running to catch the woman up who had got a head start. She was running pretty fast in fact which isn’t really comforting when you’re trying to catch a 650 quid flight that’s departure is imminent.
We got to the gate finally and boarded only to find a cocky prick in our seats. "Bit late were we guys", he said as we requested he move. By appearance he was clearly an arrogant bugger and given the fact I had just spent the last 25 minutes running around to board a plane that wasn’t supposed to leave for another 35 I decided I wouldn’t comment on his remark. Instead I was just glad to be on the plane. That was until Captain America who had been resituated in front of us put his chair right back. This wouldn’t be a problem if my legs weren’t already wedged between the back of his seat. People don’t seem to realise that when they put their chairs back it does actually cause a reasonable amount of pain, mainly because the frame of the chair tries to cut my knee caps in half. In the past I've tried asking people nicely if they would put the chair up and they either look at you in a very disapproving way or move the chair forwards ever so slightly. Luckily for me I have perfected a technique to manipulate the position of leaning chair backs. Wait for them to stand up, lean forwards or in a later case just do it while they are sitting down and just push the chair with a decent amount of force. In some cases you can make it go more upright than it originally was and the inhabitants of the chair don’t even realise in the slightest. Just shows how much you really need the chair back you inconsiderate gits!
That wasn’t the worst of it. When we arrived in Hong Kong we found that we had no bags. This was after we waited half an hour by the carousels before realising they just weren’t going to come. We headed over to the baggage handling desk and told them our bags hadn’t come out. Apparently they already knew this; they didn’t have time to transfer them to the other plane in Beijing. We filled out some forms and were told our bags would be delivered to our hotel and that they would ring us when they were delivering them.
Reluctantly we made our way to our hotel which turned out to be on the 3rd floor of a building in the Tourist area of Kowloon. We were a bit dubious about the hotels location; it seemed that the area of the street where our hotel was was also the area for all the people who couldn’t get real jobs to try and sell "COPY WATCH BOSS?" or "TAILORED SUITE SIR".
Our bags were meant to be arriving on the 9 o’clock flight from Beijing so we stayed up waiting for the phone call to go and collect our bags. That call never came and by 1am we gave up waiting and went to sleep.
Catching planes really sucks. Especially catching this one.
The boarding of the plane to Beijing went very swiftly, as you would expect when boarding in Japan. No customs waiting time, no waiting going through security, very much a case of just checking in and getting on the plane.
The Chinese, it can be said, do not quite excel in the organisation fields in the same way as the Japanese. We got off the plane to be greeted by a woman from Air China showing distinct signs of dismay. "Connect to Hong Kong, come me with now fast", she said as she turned and started to jog through the arrivals terminal. We were unaware that we were in a rush to catch the next plane. By our watches, the website we booked through and the airports display boards there was an hour till the next flight. Apparently not. Turns out the flight had already boarded and was pretty much ready to go, an hour ahead of schedule. How that’s possible is beyond me, but here we were running at an increasingly alarming speed to the transfers and connecting flights security area. Shockingly there at the passport checkpoint there was quite a substantial queue. The woman we were following went through and stood waiting for us on the other side, looking increasingly alarmed. The two guys behind the passport desks were clearly in no rush. It wasn’t that they were doing their jobs well, examining each passport carefully, and then scanning it in the system. It was more a quick glimpse at the picture, a grunt, then going into slowverdrive, moving as painfully slow as possible to scan it, before turning to a random page in the passport and issuing a stamp, also at a horribly slow speed.
I cannot for the life of me stress how slow these people move. We would later brand the population in general as two speed, the two speeds being slow and stopped.
Once we had passed through the passport checks we had to once again go through a full security check, where our hand luggage would be x-rayed again. It will not surprise you to know that there was once again a terribly long queue of people waiting to go through. The woman we were following was having none of it, this time leading us to the front of the queue until she was stopped by one of the security team where she had to explain for five minutes that she worked at the airport, was trying to get us on the plane and was in a desperate rush. It’s not like there was a language barrier! Both these people were Chinese and yet she still had to explain for so long what was going on. They finally agreed to slip us to the front of the queue, much to the disgust of the people queuing. It might be worth noting as well that the Chinese are not an incredibly patient people. In fact the concept of queuing seems lost to them, it’s like being at Alton Towers and having a bunch of kids push past queue jumping, incredibly annoying but at the same time there is nothing you can do about it. The difference being that in China it is apparently the done thing, every man for himself.
Through the x-ray machines we went, running to catch the woman up who had got a head start. She was running pretty fast in fact which isn’t really comforting when you’re trying to catch a 650 quid flight that’s departure is imminent.
We got to the gate finally and boarded only to find a cocky prick in our seats. "Bit late were we guys", he said as we requested he move. By appearance he was clearly an arrogant bugger and given the fact I had just spent the last 25 minutes running around to board a plane that wasn’t supposed to leave for another 35 I decided I wouldn’t comment on his remark. Instead I was just glad to be on the plane. That was until Captain America who had been resituated in front of us put his chair right back. This wouldn’t be a problem if my legs weren’t already wedged between the back of his seat. People don’t seem to realise that when they put their chairs back it does actually cause a reasonable amount of pain, mainly because the frame of the chair tries to cut my knee caps in half. In the past I've tried asking people nicely if they would put the chair up and they either look at you in a very disapproving way or move the chair forwards ever so slightly. Luckily for me I have perfected a technique to manipulate the position of leaning chair backs. Wait for them to stand up, lean forwards or in a later case just do it while they are sitting down and just push the chair with a decent amount of force. In some cases you can make it go more upright than it originally was and the inhabitants of the chair don’t even realise in the slightest. Just shows how much you really need the chair back you inconsiderate gits!
That wasn’t the worst of it. When we arrived in Hong Kong we found that we had no bags. This was after we waited half an hour by the carousels before realising they just weren’t going to come. We headed over to the baggage handling desk and told them our bags hadn’t come out. Apparently they already knew this; they didn’t have time to transfer them to the other plane in Beijing. We filled out some forms and were told our bags would be delivered to our hotel and that they would ring us when they were delivering them.
Reluctantly we made our way to our hotel which turned out to be on the 3rd floor of a building in the Tourist area of Kowloon. We were a bit dubious about the hotels location; it seemed that the area of the street where our hotel was was also the area for all the people who couldn’t get real jobs to try and sell "COPY WATCH BOSS?" or "TAILORED SUITE SIR".
Our bags were meant to be arriving on the 9 o’clock flight from Beijing so we stayed up waiting for the phone call to go and collect our bags. That call never came and by 1am we gave up waiting and went to sleep.
Monday, 2 March 2009
Day 10: Mt. Fuji
- PICS COMING WHEN I FIND SOME DECENT INTERNET THAT WILL UPLOAD THEM! -
So we got up the following day, nice and early with the clear expectations of a spectacular day trip to Mount Fuji. Unfortunately it wasn’t everything we expected it to be, but it wasn’t a completely lost day!
We went ahead and retraced our train route from the previous nights return journey, this time with a little more success than the previous morning’s attempt (i.e. we actually made it there without desperate taxi measures!). In fact it was quite different to the previous morning’s efforts. The tour was set to leave at nine and this time we got there at... 8:15. Somehow shaving an hour’s travel time off the journey, despite only leaving the hostel some 15 or so minutes earlier than before.
So after sitting about for the next 45 minutes we finally got on the road in our big bus with yet another slightly eccentric Japanese tour guide. I didn’t mention it before, but our guide for the afternoon tour of Tokyo was ever so slightly loopy, with a crazed giggly smile.
Our first stop off was the Mount Fuji information centre which detailed how the mountain was formed and offered several interactive displays. So far so good. The weather outside was quite chilly as you would expect of being quite high up and the ground was lightly dusted in snow, something that a lot of the other people on the tour took quite an interest to. They were building small snow men and other such things. I think for some of them the snow must have been a rarity, quite strange really since they have quite the set of mountain ranges full of ski resorts in the northern part of the country at Sapporo. Don’t you feel lucky back home to have had so much snow recently? I hear it’s been quite an eventful few weeks for the weather. No base wrecking skiing attempts at Whitwick quarry or anything Dad??!
After departing the information centre we were supposed to be driving up the mountain to the seventh lookout station. It would not surprise you then to find out that the sky had clouded over, eliminating any chances of a view when we got up there. The clouds were the least of our problems. As we progressed up the road we arrived abruptly at the first station to find the road had been gated off. Apparently the road was iced over so we couldn’t go up. Gritting machines anyone!!
So this served as our second stop off point, a time to walk up the road a little or for the Japanese tourists, another chance to play with the snow. Despite this being a bit of a useless stop with only a couple of other cars in the car park (full of disgruntled passengers, also a little peeved that they couldn’t drive further up the mountain), there was a crazy little old man with a food store, cooking some kind of meat skewers and corn on the cob and trying to sell it to the passengers of our bus. This old man looked dirty. That’s all I can say. I would not have touched his food with a forty foot barge pole. Despite the sickening look of the food stand, an American couple proceeded to buy one of the meat skewers. A second later after biting into it, his face dropped. I mean DROPPED. Any expression just fell out of his face. The little old man grinned, clearly satisfied with his sale. The American guy wondered off, discreetly emptied his mouth and disposed of the rest of the dog meat skewer, or whatever it may have happened to be.
Back on the bus the guide announced it was lunch time. We were driven to a hotel that was situated next to a small theme park and were duly informed that we would not be able to go to the theme park (oh damn!!). By theme park I mean something you could have fit on the back of our house. It consisted of a roller coaster and a set of tea cups or something. The hotel itself was probably twice the size of the park.
We ate lunch, which can be seen in a photo below. It was a traditional Japanese set meal with quite a few "interesting" items. I didn’t find it to be too bad and there was a constant supply of green tea, supposedly very good for your stomach, which I found to be very palatable.
Back on the bus it was time for our cruise of Lake Ashi. Now my fortune received a day earlier was really taking effect. On arrival to the lake the visibility can only be described as poor or maybe terrible. On the lake we couldn’t see the water as the boat went through it and the realisation that the cable car journey that we would soon be going on was also likely to suck something terrible.
It did. There was very little to see on the way up, nothing to see at the top and then surprisingly on the way down in the cable car there was again absolutely no visibility. As soon as we reached the bottom the mist split and for a few minutes it was possible to see the other side of the lake, consequently a few photos were taken!
The bus journey back to Tokyo was mainly spent sleeping for some reason. I woke a few times, once as we were passing through a town that was full of natural thermal hot pools and again when we dropped people off to get on the bullet train. We decided not to bother with the bullet train. Mainly because we were already half way back to the city and secondly because it was shockingly expensive.
The day wasn’t a complete loss; I did manage to get a few good pictures. The best being a picture of a picture in the information centre. I guess that’s the best view of Mount Fuji I'm going to see unless I come back again someday, which I might! Maybe in the summer instead of the winter next time.
The next morning we would fly to Hong Kong via Beijing so another early night was in order. Our time in Japan had come to an end.
So we got up the following day, nice and early with the clear expectations of a spectacular day trip to Mount Fuji. Unfortunately it wasn’t everything we expected it to be, but it wasn’t a completely lost day!
We went ahead and retraced our train route from the previous nights return journey, this time with a little more success than the previous morning’s attempt (i.e. we actually made it there without desperate taxi measures!). In fact it was quite different to the previous morning’s efforts. The tour was set to leave at nine and this time we got there at... 8:15. Somehow shaving an hour’s travel time off the journey, despite only leaving the hostel some 15 or so minutes earlier than before.
So after sitting about for the next 45 minutes we finally got on the road in our big bus with yet another slightly eccentric Japanese tour guide. I didn’t mention it before, but our guide for the afternoon tour of Tokyo was ever so slightly loopy, with a crazed giggly smile.
Our first stop off was the Mount Fuji information centre which detailed how the mountain was formed and offered several interactive displays. So far so good. The weather outside was quite chilly as you would expect of being quite high up and the ground was lightly dusted in snow, something that a lot of the other people on the tour took quite an interest to. They were building small snow men and other such things. I think for some of them the snow must have been a rarity, quite strange really since they have quite the set of mountain ranges full of ski resorts in the northern part of the country at Sapporo. Don’t you feel lucky back home to have had so much snow recently? I hear it’s been quite an eventful few weeks for the weather. No base wrecking skiing attempts at Whitwick quarry or anything Dad??!
After departing the information centre we were supposed to be driving up the mountain to the seventh lookout station. It would not surprise you then to find out that the sky had clouded over, eliminating any chances of a view when we got up there. The clouds were the least of our problems. As we progressed up the road we arrived abruptly at the first station to find the road had been gated off. Apparently the road was iced over so we couldn’t go up. Gritting machines anyone!!
So this served as our second stop off point, a time to walk up the road a little or for the Japanese tourists, another chance to play with the snow. Despite this being a bit of a useless stop with only a couple of other cars in the car park (full of disgruntled passengers, also a little peeved that they couldn’t drive further up the mountain), there was a crazy little old man with a food store, cooking some kind of meat skewers and corn on the cob and trying to sell it to the passengers of our bus. This old man looked dirty. That’s all I can say. I would not have touched his food with a forty foot barge pole. Despite the sickening look of the food stand, an American couple proceeded to buy one of the meat skewers. A second later after biting into it, his face dropped. I mean DROPPED. Any expression just fell out of his face. The little old man grinned, clearly satisfied with his sale. The American guy wondered off, discreetly emptied his mouth and disposed of the rest of the dog meat skewer, or whatever it may have happened to be.
Back on the bus the guide announced it was lunch time. We were driven to a hotel that was situated next to a small theme park and were duly informed that we would not be able to go to the theme park (oh damn!!). By theme park I mean something you could have fit on the back of our house. It consisted of a roller coaster and a set of tea cups or something. The hotel itself was probably twice the size of the park.
We ate lunch, which can be seen in a photo below. It was a traditional Japanese set meal with quite a few "interesting" items. I didn’t find it to be too bad and there was a constant supply of green tea, supposedly very good for your stomach, which I found to be very palatable.
Back on the bus it was time for our cruise of Lake Ashi. Now my fortune received a day earlier was really taking effect. On arrival to the lake the visibility can only be described as poor or maybe terrible. On the lake we couldn’t see the water as the boat went through it and the realisation that the cable car journey that we would soon be going on was also likely to suck something terrible.
It did. There was very little to see on the way up, nothing to see at the top and then surprisingly on the way down in the cable car there was again absolutely no visibility. As soon as we reached the bottom the mist split and for a few minutes it was possible to see the other side of the lake, consequently a few photos were taken!
The bus journey back to Tokyo was mainly spent sleeping for some reason. I woke a few times, once as we were passing through a town that was full of natural thermal hot pools and again when we dropped people off to get on the bullet train. We decided not to bother with the bullet train. Mainly because we were already half way back to the city and secondly because it was shockingly expensive.
The day wasn’t a complete loss; I did manage to get a few good pictures. The best being a picture of a picture in the information centre. I guess that’s the best view of Mount Fuji I'm going to see unless I come back again someday, which I might! Maybe in the summer instead of the winter next time.
The next morning we would fly to Hong Kong via Beijing so another early night was in order. Our time in Japan had come to an end.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
