So that’s that over and done with. I traveled westwards by train, plane and automobile for over 31,000 miles until I got back to where I started out from a few months ago. I beat Phileas Fogg by a few days. I’ve eaten subs, grinders and hoagies. I’ve renewed friendships and forged some new ones. I’ve experimented with facial hair, driven for the first time in a decade, jumped from a really high building, rolled down a steep hill in a ball, fell out of a perfectly fine airplane, shaved my head, met my baby niece and just about melted my credit card to boot.
Archive for the 'Travel' Category
I was quite pleased to leave Japan behind. Don’t get me wrong: I quite like it there but, after nigh-on three months of living out of a bag, I was ready to go home. I was also a little fed up with not understanding practically anything that was going on around me. Most places that I’ve traveled to before I spoke a little of the language or could at least make an educated guess at what signs were telling me. Being immersed in a kind of audio/visual white noise for a week was pretty disconcerting.
Let me get this straight. Blowing my nose or eating while walking is considered to be extremely rude but apparently you can cough up a huge gob of phlegm and spit without anyone batting an eyelid?
Welcome to Japan: land of contradictions. It was supposed to be the rainy season while I was here but I didn’t see a drop of rain all week. I also didn’t experience an earthquake which I’m delighted about.
Here you can still smoke in restaurants but signs try to dissuade you from smoking while you are walking down the street.
I learned that those masks you see people wearing aren’t due to worries over pollution. They’ve for combating the spread of germs. Specifically, your germs. You know, so if you’re ill you can still go into the office and not contaminate anybody else. Surely, any culture that has a specific word set aside for death from overwork can’t be all that healthy. On the other hand, in the longevity stakes, Australia (even with its new-found fattest nation status) is number two to Japan.
It does kind of make me wonder what age people would live to here if everybody did suddenly stop smoking.
Today I purchased a day ticket for the Tokyo Metro and set off exploring, armed only with my iPhone subway map. I started off in the Sony Building, mainly slobbering over the 70″ Bravia (a snip at ¥4 million) and the stunningly slim XEL-1 OLED unit. After that I had a shoe shine outside Yūrakuchō station before jumping back on the tube and heading towards Tokyo.
I’m thinking about home more and more as it gets closer and closer to the time to go back to the UK after my round-the-world trip. I guess it’s only natural. It’s been interesting comparing different cities and cultures and how they do things.
I’m wondering what state the tram work in Edinburgh is at. If I’ve ranted about this to you before then I apologise but an experience I had on the tram in Melbourne last week has rekindled my annoyance.
I don’t think that I was quite with it when leaving Melbourne. I was flying at 1550 and had a good nights sleep so I had no real excuses for being a bit dopey. I thought that there happened to be a lot of people called ‘Mel’ working at the airport judging by their name tags . . .
Continue reading ‘Melbourne - Singapore - Tokyo (7,285 miles)’
If anybody were to ask me what the “must do” of Melbourne is then I’d have to say that you need to actually get out of Melbourne. The Neighbours tour is amusing enough but I would have to suggest a Great Ocean Road tour.
I went on one yesterday. It was a long day, setting off at 0730 and getting back to the city a little after 2100. We took in Geelong, Torquay and Bells Beach (as referenced in Point Break - the actual beach was in Oregon) before heading along to Split Point lighthouse (as seen in Mad Max and Round The Twist).
Having driven down the west coast of America it was a great pleasure to have someone else do the driving and consequently feel free to enjoy the views without worrying about crashing the car. We were so much closer to the water and maybe because of this the waves were on a far more impressive scale. The waves fell almost as if they were in slow motion. The water wasn’t exactly clear due to the recent rainfall.
However, the waves on the surf coast paled in comparison to those on the shipwreck coast. It was an extremely windy day which whipped up the ocean. The waves were honestly the biggest waves I’ve seen outside of a Laird Hamilton film and they crashed over the 100 foot cliffs.
We stopped at Mait’s Rest Rainforest and Kennett River to see some wild koalas and hand-feed King Parrots and Rosellas. Some kangaroos were also grazing in the nearby fields but there was still no hopping action.
The highlight of the day was taking a short helicopter flight over and around the 12 Apostles. After this, we made short stops at Loch Ard Gorge and London Arch before driving back to Melbourne.
I have to say that I was surprised by just how much traffic was on the M5 freeway in to Sydney at 0530 and glad that I allowed plenty of time to get to the airport. I caught up on some sleep on the plane before occupying myself by circling typso and errata in Virgin Blue’s in-flight magazine. Parachute jump over Port Macquarie from 30,000 meters? I may have only one tandem jump under my belt but I’m fairly sure that jumping from the stratosphere - even HALO or HAHO jumps - isn’t all that common.
I took a trip up to Katoomba and the Blue Mountains yesterday with my aunt and uncle. The scenery and views of the Three Sisters are amazing - easily worth the drive. While it was apparently raining back in Sydney, we were blessed with unseasonally warm and sunny weather.
We also took a trip to Scenic World and had a ride on the steepest incline railway in the world (a maximum gradient of 52 degrees) down to the Scenic Walkway in the lush valley below where the temperature drops by a good few degrees. It was midweek so the place wasn’t all that busy but I’m told that at the weekend you can barely move for all of the tourists.