Saturday, April 4, 2009

backtracking... hong kong

Current location at 2320 ship's time...
Latitude: 30 degrees 57.56' N
Longitude: 128 degrees 19.75' E
Course: 90 degrees

We are making our way to Kobe, Japan from Shanghai, and will advance our clocks one hour tonight. This makes us 13 hours ahead of EDT, 14 hours ahead of CDT, 15 hours ahead of MDT, and 16 hours ahead of PDT. After Japan we will cross the International Date Line, experiencing April 12 (Easter Sunday) twice, and then we will be behind all of you.

Going back a week, we arrived in Hong Kong http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong on March 29 at our usual arrival time of 8:00am. If you have been reading, you have already seen the Google Earth photo that I posted, which shows our ship docked in Hong Kong at the Ocean Terminal and attached by a walkway to the Harbour City shopping mall http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harbour_City_(Hong_Kong). We had our diplomatic briefing shortly after arrival, and for the first time the consulate officials were very positive and talked about how safe we would be in Hong Kong and China. One of the speakers had a niece on the ship -- perhaps that was why, but in fact it is quite safe, clean and orderly.

I only had one day in Hong Kong, and John and I used it to take a City Orientation tour. The day was cloudy and chilly, although not raining. (Temperatures were in the 50's, but our previous stops had been so hot that this seemed cold to us.) We got on a bus with several of our fellow travellers and left the terminal heading to Hong Kong Island via an underground tunnel. We had a guide who was very good and who entertained us throughout the trip. Once on the other side of Victoria Harbour, we got into sampan boats to tour the harbour. The harbour is surrounded by high rises that house some of the 7 million people that live here. It used to be that the harbour was filled with boats on which people lived as well, but these numbers have dropped in recent years and we were told that now only about 100 people live on the boats. And although there are lots of junk boats, there are a fair number of upscale cabin cruisers and speedboats too.

From the harbour we went to The Peak http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_Peak, http://www.thepeak.com.hk/en/home.asp where in spite of the clouds and fog we had beautiful views of buildings and the harbour, including one of the MV Explorer. There we ate the box lunches that had been provided by the ship's kitchen crew, and wandered around before heading down on the funicular tram http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funicular.

At the bottom we made our way to St John's (Anglican) Cathedral https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._John%27s_Cathedral,_Hong_Kong. It was undergoing construction and we saw scaffolding made of bamboo. Our guide told us that in some construction projects they have tried to move to steel scaffolding, but that so many of the construction workers are used to the bamboo that the accident rate increased and many projects are still using bamboo. Construction is very tidy -- where it is taking place the building is wrapped in green cloth of some kind which is held in place by the bamboo. We also saw legislative and court buildings in this area.

We walked around the Cathedral area then went into a shopping district to look around, although not much was open on Sunday afternoon. There is an HSBC bank in this area where a number of Filipino domestic workers gather to socialize on Sundays -- we saw thousands gathered there.

We went on to the Man Mo Temple http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Mo_Temple built to worship Man, the god of literature, and Mo, the god of war. There was a nearby coffee shop where many of us went for a hot drink after this visit then headed back to the ship. John and I went out that night to a restaurant in the attached mall, a nice change from ship food.

Tomorrow I will update on the Beijing trip, which I found excellent, but which I am learning left others disappointed. There were several different trips and I expect that our guide made the difference for us.

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

warning: self-indulgent posting ahead...

Here is a photo of me at the top of the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall of China http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutianyu. I had to take the picture myself, because I was the only one on our trip who made it all the way to the top! I had a great time doing the hike and felt wonderful afterward. Now I am in training for climbing a live volcano in Guatemala in a few weeks!

I am tired tonight so heading off to bed soon. We leave Beijing tomorrow, but for me this has been one of the best days of the trip. In addition to the Wall, we went to Olympic Green, the site of many of the venues of the 2008 Summer Olympics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Summer_Olympics#Venues. The weather, which has been quite cool and very windy, cooperated, and you can see we had a lovely blue sky with sun and no wind. Our guide, Andy, has been unbelievably good and the trip leader and her husband and I went for dinner with him tonight. I want to say more about him in the blog, but will do so at another time. I also will go back and write about Hong Kong and the rest of our stay in Beijing later -- there is much to say.

News from John: he slept through a life boat drill last night as the ship left for Shanghai, and the 150 people that were left on the ship (most came to Beijing) had a nice dinner with the captain. I think he is probably lucky to have been able to participate in the dinner after missing the drill!

Sunday, March 29, 2009

a photo to share...


I am up way too late considering I am leaving very early for Beijing, but I was playing around with Google Earth and plugged in our current coordinates in Hong Kong. It was exciting to see that the satellite photo that came up is so recent that our ship was there with the refueling vessel alongside. There are two ships in the photo -- ours is the blue one, and the white one behind us is still there tonight. If you double click the photo you will get a larger image.

We did have a City Orientation tour today. More on that when I get to Beijing.