The Gap

Shanghai, China to Tokyo, Japan
My journals from Europe and Australia are both incomplete. Towards the end of both journeys, I became lazy or busy and failed to chronicle the finale. Months and years later I attempt to recall those minor details, but they have become fuzzy, at best, around the edges. This last trip was no different, unfortunately. As I posted earlier, the unavailability of internet cafes really was the main cause of the abrupt end to my journal entries. There is a rather sizeable gap in writing from the time we entered China until our departure in Japan. I did, however, manage to write several different conclusions to the trip in Tokyo and Honolulu. The everyday happenings went unrecorded and I’m forced to be dependent on a blurry memory. Even though only a short time has passed, I’m starting to forget the little details as the mental snapshots are beginning to fade. The following is my recent recollection of the events that will fill in the gap from Shanghai until the forthcoming conclusions.

We left Shanghai in the afternoon. We met Alli and her friend Wei Wei at work during lunch and they showed us a literal hole in the wall place to eat. But the food was good and extremely cheap. Alli had to get back to work so we said our goodbyes and went with Wei Wei to a local basketball court that was endorsed by Yao Ming called Yao’s House. We shot around a bit, but had take off and do the navigating alone. Already running late, we caught a cab and told him to take us to the train station. He spoke as much English as we did Mandarin, which was none. We showed him our train ticket and he understood. It was rush hour and as our departure time slowly moved from a half-hour to fifteen minutes, I began to get worried that we might miss our ride to Beijing. He dropped us off at the taxi stand and we made a mad dash for our train. With fortune on our side, we found all the right gates and boarded our train with six or seven minutes to spare.

It’s only twelve hours to Beijing, so we got there early in the morning. Out of local currency, we figured we’d just hit up an ATM at the train station or exchange some Travelers Checks. There were none around. We didn’t look too hard because, like Hong Kong and Shanghai, Beijing was teeming with people and we just wanted to get away. Eventually we crossed the large street and I guarded our packs as Brad went in search of an ATM. With currency in hand, we caught a cab to the street where our hostel was located.

It took some work to convey to the cabby that we wanted to get to Sanlitun Street. He couldn’t read or understand the English translations or pronunciations of his language. We finally just pointed to his map and said take us there. At the hostel, we unloaded our packs on to the floor and took a load off our minds as we napped in the air conditioned room; something we hadn’t had in the last week.

Before leaving Shanghai Brad and I made the decision to cut our trip short by five days. We each had our reasons. Brad had just gotten rehired at his school in Hawaii teaching Biology, something he didn’t teach the previous year. He wanted to get back so he could prepare his lesson plans and begin the year being ahead, rather than playing catch-up. My reason was more straightforward. I was running out of funds. I only had about seven months to save up for a two-month trip, including all my plane tickets, new supplies, and spending money, and have money sitting in the bank for ongoing expenses back home. Online, I watched as my bank account went from low four digits to mid three to low three. So five days were cut off our Japan leg, which, in retrospect, would have cost nearly as much as the previous month. It’s expensive there. In changing our tickets, I didn’t actually look at when we were leaving Beijing for Tokyo. When I did look I was surprised to find out that we had three more days in Beijing than what we originally thought, which turned out to be just fine.

In the six days we had in Beijing, we managed to cover quite a bit of ground. On our first exploration day, (we took the arrival day off by lounging around) we headed down to Tiananmen Square, which is just a massive concrete square filled with thousands of people. At the south end is the ancient Front Gate. Heading north is Chairman Mao Zedong’s mausoleum, where we waited in line for less than hour to view his preserved corpse. Continuing on, we passed the Monument to the People’s Heroes and on to the Forbidden City. It was in line to get our entrance tickets that we met a British guy named Tom. He accompanied us through the immense city that was off limits to the public for over 500 years. Still walking north, we concluded our walking tour at Prospect Hill Park, where we climbed the hill to get a view back on the Forbidden City.

Later that night we met Tom at a cafe on Sanlitun. We made plans to go to the Summer Palace the following day. Since there were three of us, it wasn’t very expensive to take a taxi to the palace rather than a bus. This was the emperor’s retreat hundreds of years ago. It was destroyed several times by British and French troops and rebuilt again. Nearly two square miles of it is covered in gardens. Countless buildings and shops dot the landscape. At one end was a lake with an island connected by a bridge. We walked across and that was where the skies opened up and it began to rain. In several previous cities we experienced heavy showers like this, but they usually passed in a matter of minutes. This rain kept on going. Eventually we got drenched making a dash for the exit and getting a cab back to our hostel. I was in the bathroom when the power went out. That didn’t stop us from having a good time. We got our raincoats on and trudged through the streets that were filled with a foot of water. The Italian place that we had eaten at twice already was one of the few restaurants still open by candlelight. The three of us sat around the table with a drink trying to figure out what to eat. Then the lights came back on which meant that the ovens worked which meant that we could order pizza. So we did. After dinner we went to the other side of the street where the lights were still out at the cafes. We got some good deals because there wasn’t much foot traffic out.

Tom booked his Great Wall tour through his hostel and went on it the next day. Brad and I caught up on a few things including a Peking duck dinner and booking our Great Wall trek. We met at another hostel early in the morning the following day and loaded into a minibus with fifteen people that took us nearly three hours outside of Beijing to section of the wall called Jinshanling. From there we walked the wall for almost five hours to the conclusion at Simatai. Along with Angkor Wat in Cambodia, the Wall was one of my highlights. I love ancient architecture. I’m not going to try to explain or describe what I saw. Pictures can only do that. Once at Simatai we had the option to walk down to the parking lot to load back on the bus or we could get there by taking a zip line, a pulley on cable that ran hundreds of feet over a chasm and a river below. We chose that way to conclude the experience.

We met back up with Tom and shared an evening out that included a great Thai meal and a traditional Chinese massage by blind masseuses. We said our goodbyes and the next afternoon we flew to Tokyo.

As per usual, we didn’t book our lodgings in advance. We’ve never had a problem with finding places to stay before. The customs officials gave us a bit of a hassle for not pre-booking a place to stay, especially since it was after 9pm and Tokyo was over an hour away by train from the airport in Narita. Finding accommodation was not only difficult, but really expensive. The place we found only had lodging for one night. By the time we got there, after getting lost and paying for a $30, fifteen minute taxi, we arrived after 11pm and had to be checked out at 10am the next morning. Calling places in the morning yielded one possibility, a traditional Japanese hotel (I described in an entry to come), that was around $90 a night. For that much money we could have stayed in a Cambodian hotel for three weeks.

Brad is really into food and especially sushi. He noted a place in our guidebook that he wanted to find that served great raw fish. We set out to locate it in the Shibuya area. He thought he was reading the map wrong, but as it turned out the place had just been demolished. We ate a Mexican place nearby instead. The next morning we went to the famous fish markets. But we got there a little late and missed most of the bargaining which is why people go there. Brad got his sushi fix at lunch at a place that served all-you-can-eat sushi at $40 a plate. Then on to the Sony building that was a showroom for all the new Sony products coming out. I wished I had a few million yen to spend there. The next day we just explored different areas of town, but found ourselves back in Shibuya for dinner. This time it was T.G.I. Fridays.

That is where the gap ends. From here on it is documented.