Sayonara!

I was sad for having to leave Japan... But probably that is the best moment to leave, it means that the will to return exists. I'll be back! Sayonara!

Kyoto and Hiroshima

Three days of sightseeing surrounded by tons of other tourists is the maximum I can possibly do in a row. That's precisely what I did in Kyoto and Hiroshima. I cycled from temple to temple in Kyoto and visited the Peace Memorial park in Hiroshima where the atom bomb exploded.

Kyoto's uncountable temples, mountains and Japanese gardens are breathtaking, the Geisha districts are beautiful, but I didn't like the city itself that much. I definitely need to come back with a bit more money to try the more expensive restaurants all over the city and to stay in an elegant Ryokan, a typical Japanese house with the paper walls and elegant gardens. Still, I saw some pretty amazing stuff.

Hiroshima is a cute and slower paced town with lots of monuments and  memorials related with the bomb. As I expected there were lots of American tourists.

Shinkansen

I remember reading about the Shinkansen bullet trains in Japan when I was a kid. I was crazy about them! On top of that my brother is here in Japan doing an exchange programme, as partt of his PhD on high speed trains. Here he works with some of the smartest people researching on this area, which I had the pleasure to meet.

Riding the Shinkansen was mandatory!

I went from Tokyo to Kyoto, then to Hiroshima and then back to Kyoto at 300 km/h. The Shinkansen network is gargantuan! Trains leave almost every 5 minutes to every direction in Japan, and the average delay is in the order of a few seconds only. And the coolest thing: the trains look like spaceships from a sci-fi movie!

The 8 years old Joao would have loved to read this post!

Japanese rules and the essential dualities of travelling

The politeness here is unbelievable! Everything is elegant and perfectionism is extreme! The rules completely fit that philosophy. No answering phones in the trains, no smoking in the streets (although you can smoke in most bars and sometimes restaurants), trains are on time by the second, people meet for dinner at the precise minute agreed beforehand, etc... The list is infinite...

I'm allergic to too many rules and formality in my every day's life, but here in Japan they don't bother me, probably in the same way the chaos and lack of rules in Vietnam, for example, fascinate me. Here I'm a simple outsider, an observer... When travelling one lets it go and doesn't constantly judge what is around according to the values and preconceptions brought from home. Without this mindset travelling becomes unbearable, with it travelling is the best thing one can live!

The pleasure of travelling is a well balanced mix between difference and similarity, between the known and the unknown, the fulfillment of the expected and the surprise of the unexpected, the comfortable and the uncomfortable, the feeling of accomplishment and the frustration... The similarities keeps one sane, the differences shakes one's ideas about everything... At the end a bunch of new ideas about home and about one self emerge.

Tokyo - The biggest machine ever built

Tokyo is massive! Full of rules, without much room for breaking them. It is also clean, funny (it is actually hilarious some times), inebriating colourful, expensive (if you are not careful), fast paced, modern but still with bits from older times...

I arrived late at night, right next to the Shinjuku Station (the largest train/metro station in the world, a city by itself). I had booked a capsule hotel for the first night, which was a fantastic way of experience the Japanese efficiency after two weeks in the chaos of Vietnam. Endless corridors with thousands of capsules with the size of a single bed, full of men (it was an hotel just for men with no tattoos!) who probably missed the last train after a drinking night. All the rules for where to put the shoes, how to get to the capsule, how to use the common bath made the whole bizarre experience simple, accessible and comfortable. It was small example of how the Japanese rules and protocol are here to make everything simple, comfortable, elegant and welcoming.The next morning I had a bath in the Onsen (public bath) on the top floor - a bunch of naked Japanese men in a massive hot tub or showering while sitting on a small stool.

The next two days were fantastic: chaotic, a bit stressful, frustrating and very exhausting. Sounds horrible, right? Wrong! These were some of the best days in the trip so far. Instead of sightseeing I had to sort out stuff in a massive city with a language that made no sense, stuff happening everywhere that made no sense, with a culture with different rules and protocol while being bombarded with all the colours, signs and sheer scale of everything! Amongst other things, I had to find a way to contact my brother (living in Tokyo at the moment) after having lost my SIM card in Vietnam, book an hotel, meet my brother Chossas, sort out my Japanese rail pass, buy the visa for China, etc. Back in London I would have sort this in one morning, here it took me 2 days full of travels in the wrong direction, frustrating conversations in telephone shops to try to buy a SIM card (impossible for a foreign tourist, by the way - it is possible to rent a super-expensive card in the airport), trying to contact my brother via skype and trying to meet him in Tokyo station. This pushed me straight into the way of living in Tokyo and made me explore areas I would never go if I was just sightseeing.

After this it was easy... Very, very easy! Once you know the rules, everything works.

The next days I hanged out with my brother, met his Japanese colleagues in an unforgettable sashimi dinner, met some westerners living here for many years, met Zach, an ex-colleague from London and went hiking in the mountains of Hakone Park with Tanabe sensei (my brother's supervisor here) and his wife, with volcanoes and Mount Fuji in the background. These experiences showed me some privileged points of view over what the hell is going on here.

Sightseeing was just an excuse to get lost in the streets where all the craziness happens. From dog-manicure shops to ultra-exaggerated Rockabillies dancing in an hilarious way in Yoyogi? Park... I also realised that all the characters that we see in Japanese cartoons actually exist! Every time you see some cartoon character that seems to be very exaggerated, both in physionomy and behaviour, you'll find it in these streets, believe me!

And of course, the food... Oh, the monument that is Japanese food! I'll leave that for another post!

To be very honest before I came here I was less excited about Japan than China... It annoyed me the way sometimes the West praises Japan and doesn't care whatsoever for other cultures. I was expecting it to be very westernised, and consequently more accessible...and it is (which explains in part this fascination by the western people), but the quirky differences are many... and fascinating indeed! Tokyo turned out to be a great positive surprise!

No wonder why the Westerners fall in love with this place and culture... It's impossible not to!

Crossing the Road in Saigon

Crossing the road in Saigon is an adventure. There are motorbikes coming from every direction and nobody stops for you, the pedestrian-adventurer... Technique: cross at a constant pace and never hesitate! The cars and bikes move slowly and will avoid you.

Crossing the road in Vietnam for the first time made me think about the danger these people have to deal with every day, after a week it made me think how over-careful we are in the West about almost everything, and the consequences of that in our lifes, now when I crossed a road in Saigon for the last time to catch the taxi to the airport it just made me think how fast a different place can change what you think... Specially about those things that shocked you at the beginning.

Some photos from Vietnam

Tomorrow I will land in Japan... 

Disconnecting from work in Vietnam

Going bamboo

One of the frequent types of characters that one meets while travelling is the white man who left home to a distant and exotic place and never returned.

They are an infinite source of stories, and most of the times they are really good story tellers. All of them have a specific calm look in their eyes and always take their time to tell even the smallest snippet of a story. When talking about the reasons why they are in that place all of them mention the weather and the women! "... and the women... oh the women...". Some of them are married to a local woman and most of them have a local girlfriend. Usually they have more patience for tourists or travellers when alcohol is involved. The majority of the ones I've met were from an English speaking country/region where the weather is usually cold. They usually have some simple job there or live from their government money (retirement or other type of subsidies). Some speak the local language very well, most of them speak at least the basic. All of them have a good relation with the locals, but they always openly complain about them and their country (either corruption, laziness, lack of organisation, etc.)... Pretty much the same way I complain about, for example, the weather in London and at the same time I ended up there 5 years, fascinated by the place. When asked if they want to go back to their country they always say "no way! Well... Maybe in many years from now... But not now!". Most of then travelled a lot around the world.

Some of the most interesting ones I've met so far in this trip were a Canadian guy who created 12 years ago a simple and isolated beach resort with bamboo huts in the jungle, an English primary school teacher that lived a few years in Vietnam, then India and currently in Tanzania, a South African that used to work in a pub in Kent until coming to Asia and a Dutch guy of around my age with some kind of paralysis and who used to have one epileptic attack every week in Europe that stopped once he got here.

Last night I was having dinner with a bunch of people who are staying here at Jungle Beach and we were talking about this theme with some of the previously mentioned characters plus some other guests. A Dutch tourist girl mentioned at some point, without bad intention, the 'misfits who end up finding their place outside their own lanf'. She was clearly the misfit at that table, and so were the other tourists or travellers, like me...

Vietnam North to South

After Ho Chi Minh City I flew to Hanoi to meet Pete who had arrived earlier that day. The broad plan was to move from North all the way to the South again, which we are doing. The details of that plan kept on changing all the time (as it should in a proper travel). At the end we started in Hanoi, caught a night train to Sapa in the mountains, night train back to Hanoi, flight to Danang, taxi to Hoi An, night bus and motorbike to Jungle Beach. Most of the time we spent in transports was during the night, which allowed us to save money and time.

Getting the night train from Hanoi to Sapa

The futuristic night bus from Hoi An to Nha Trang (Jungle Beach).

Vietnam is colourful, frantic and diverse! The cities are beautiful, the nature is stunning and the food is from another world!

Hanoi an Hoi An are just beautiful! Both have a Mediterranean look (probably as a result of French colonisation) and the food is fantastic. Hanoi has some of the frantic vibe of Ho Chi Minh's streets and the size of a capital. Like in most countries in Asia life happens on the streets! People eat, do business and socialise on the streets.

Having a Bia Hoi - draught fresh beer brewed in the same day - 20 euro cents!

Sapa is a mountain resort town up in the north. We went there for some mountain trekking, but unfortunately the fog was so thick that didn't let us see the vistas with mountains and rice paddies. During the trekking we did see some villages where different tribes still live.

Rice paddies in Sapa. We had some visibility during the first day.

A kid from a village in the mountains around Sapa.

A young water buffalo and a villager near Sapa.

The fog in the mountains around Sapa. Pete and our guide.

Hoi An's centre is a UNESCO protected site and is by far the most pretty/romantic town I've seen in Southeast Asia... It is also a food Mecca! Despite it's small size, we ate in several restaurants and market stalls and we didn't even scratched the surface! One could easily spend months without repeating a dish and a restaurant. But at the end Hoi An is a place for the tourists and travellers.

A street in Hoi An.

The river in Hoi An.

And here we are now, in Jungle Beach, a remote resort in a deserted beach somewhere in central Vietnam created by a Canadian guy 12 years ago. A bunch of bamboo huts between the beach and the jungle, communal lunches and dinners with all the guests and chats until bedtime (some times as late as 9PM)! For the first time I don't hear the constant humming of motorbike engines and the buzzing of horns...

Peter Rapunzel in Jungle Beach

View from the room in Jungle Beach