Okay firstly apologies for being so late with updates to this blog.
I just realized I was at the half way point for my Asia trip and I haven't posted any updates here.
Apologies for the lack of photos with this posting but I'm having trouble with uploading to blogger.
I guess I'll start with a summary and then go into some specific details on what I've been up to.
Firstly what countries have I been to so far Japan, Philippians, Hong Kong and Thailand have been on the list so far also with a day trip to Macau thrown in for good measure.
So far on the trip I've taken 8 separate flights, other transport options have included cars, buses, trains, scooters, tuktuks, ferries, jeepnies,cable cars, foot etc
What are my current plans, the current plans involve Cambodia next week followed by New Zealand for two weeks and then Australia for one month.
Okay so now for some details on the individual spots
Japan
I started my trip by flying into Tokyo, I was actually staying on the outskirts of Tokyo maybe a 30 minute train ride away, this was mainly to get a reasonably priced hotel, central Tokyo prices were just too expensive.
Before going to Japan a lot of people had advise me that a large number of people there spoke English, i have to say outside of the classical high tourist areas I found limited English, obviously anybody that did speak English was a lot more fluent with it than I was with Japanese, but I did feel that I was missing a lot by not being able to read signs and such, i know that I missed a lot of restaurants for example this way.
If you are visiting Japan and have the option of touring with a Japanese speaker this would be an excellent option.
For me I would summarize Tokyo as torture in one sense, imagine a geek in the middle of lots of electronic shops but with no space to bring anything home :-)
If you can imagine anything electronic you can probably find it and the components to build or repair it in Tokyo, and probably not in only a single shop but in multiple.
Now don't get me wrong the prices are retail prices i.e. you can find them cheaper online but if you are in the middle of an electronics project and suddenly find yourself short of that one critical component you can simply stop by the electronics market and pick it up.
There are also of course lots of temples and other cultural items to see as you wander around, one thing that did surprise me was that the trains were never quite as full as I expected, having said this maybe I missed the really bad rush hours.
After Tokyo I took the bullet train to Hiroshima, this visit was one of the most moving of the trip so far, i have of course visited other cities and areas in Europe that have been devastated by war but when you are in Hiroshima you realize destruction on a different scale. If you arrived in Hiroshima today having never heard the history of the city there is very little evidence of the destruction outside of a few specific monuments mostly in the peace park, however arriving with some knowledge of the city is a totally different experience, it is very hard not to dwell the destruction that occurred here, as i wandered around the city I was struck on one level by the lack of older buildings, with urban renewal this is being more common in major cities but usually there is still some level of older buildings nestled amongst the newer buildings, the few buildings that appear older have the hard to identify aspects that indicate they are in the large part reconstructions.
One thing I spotted was an old tree with a sign saying "A bomb tree" it's only with a second look that I realize that I had missed a crucial hyphen the sign read "A-bomb tree" which has wholly different meanings, this is a tree that survived the bomb, when this tree and others like it showed signs of life after the explosion they became symbols of hope for the survivors.
The real cost and devastation is really brought home by a visit to the peace memorial park and the museum, a few of the most memorable exhibits include the before and after models of the city and an overlay of the destruction on the modern city map, the hotel I was staying in was just on the edge of the almost total destruction zone ( with over 90% casualties) it had taken me about 30 minutes to walk to the memorial park with is adjacent to the epicenter of the blast. A number of the exhibits speak to the individual impact on the day items including watches that are forever stopped at the time of the blast, peoples lunch boxes containing the cremated remains of a lunch they will never get to eat. A set of steps from an Hiroshima bank where you can still see a darkened area that is the only evidence that somebody was sitting there when the bomb exploded.
From Hiroshima I took a day trip to Miyajima Island, this is a UNESCO site that near to Hiroshima and is best described as what I expected non urban Japan to be ( but probably doesn't exist anymore) there are a number of temples on the island and more shrines than you can count. There is a lovely cable car that goes most of the way to the summit of the island (~500m) but me being me I decided to walk it, not normally I hard walk but I didn't quite coming on the number of steps which I hate when walking, i much prefer a nice slope to steps.
Having reached the summit and enjoyed the view along with lots of shrines along the way I decided to stay hiking on the way down, there were even more steps on the route down :-(
The only downside to the walking was I tweaked something in my back but that didn't become an issue till the next day.
After Hiroshima I was again off on the bullet train this time to Osaka.
I mainly did some general sightseeing in Osaka and used it as a base to see Kyoto and Kobe.
From Osaka I flew to the Philippines with my first actual destination being the small island of Malapascua for a week of diving, the main attraction here is the chance of diving with Thresher sharks which come to a pinnacle near the island in the mornings for cleaning, these sharks are known for their extremely large tails as you can see in one of the pictures below, there are also quite a lot of macro life here including nudibranches, seahorses and other small animals.
After Malapascua I was off to Coron which is on Bushanga island, still in the Philippians for a week of wreck diving. I don't have too many pictures from underwater of this week as we were doing a lot of wreck penetration and I didn't want a camera with me, as I didn't have suitable strobes with me so the camera would have been mostly useless inside the wrecks and I didn't want another item dangling off we as I tried to squeeze through a narrow opening.
The wrecks of Coron are all Japanese merchant ships that were so by the Americans in world war 2, the merchant first was moved to Coron for the precieved safely but they were discovered by American planes and subsequently sunk for more information check out www.coronwrecks.com which has information on the individual ships and the overall battle.
From the Philippians I flew to Hong Kong for a few days I was actually staying in Kowloon and not on Hong Kong island itself, prices are much cheaper in Kowloon than on Hong Kong island itself so a lot of tourists stay there, but it is only a short subway ride to Hong Kong proper.
Some of the highlights that stand out from my visit to Hong Kong include visiting the giant Buddha which has been featured in plenty of films, one of the best ways to get there is to take the subway from Hong Kong and then a cable car to the Buddha itself, this is one of the longest cable car rides I've been on with the trip each way taking 20 to 30 minutes, the actual trip is broken into three main parts with the gondola being handed off automatically between different cables at intermediate stations.
Other highlights included visiting Victoria peak at night and seeing the Hong Kong skyline lit up at night, this was actually my second trip to the peak but the first day I visited the peak was covered in low lying cloud so I could see very little. I also took a day trip to Macau from Hong Kong, Macau is a strange place, it is a former Portuguese colony and retains a lot of the architectural influences from this period, it can also be called the Los Vegas of Asia, for a long time people from Hong Kong came to Macau to gamble, at one point there was only the one casino there but now it features a lot of the same names you would see in Vegas.
From Hong Kong I flew to Thailand specifically to Bangkok, to be honest not really my sort of city I found it too over crowded, one aspect that I found really annoying was trying to simply walk down the street and having tuktuk drivers constantly stopping and trying to convince you to take them.
From Bangkok I got a bus and ferry to Koh Tao for some more diving, i ended up spending Christmas here including a Christmas day dive, but the best days diving was the 26th where we had not one but two whale shark encounters.
The first was on the first dive but was very fleeting I didn't manage to get my camera up before it was gone.
The second dive was at a different site that was much closer to shore so we weren't expecting much on this basis and due to the relatively bad visibility I decided to leave my camera on the boat as did my dive buddy. The two of us and our dive guide decided to dive at a site that was maybe 150m from the site the rest of the boat was diving at so we jumped first and then the boat motored on to the site, we would swim over one we had seen the site we wanted.
Maybe 10 minutes into the dive I heard some excited noises from the guide and looked around to see him pointing above us, maybe 5 meters above us was cruising a 6m whale shark ( most of the whale sharks in this area are juveniles, the adults reach about 16m) it stayed near us for maybe 40 minutes swimming as close as one meter from us at times, all around us, the encounter lasted until a large group of drivers from another dive boat arrived and at this point the three of us were starting to run low on air so it was time to surface and finish a totally amazing dive.Unfortunately no pictures but the memories will last a life time.
I'm sure the divers and crew on the dive boats near us were sure something was wrong at first from the amount of shouting we were doing when we surfaced.
From Koh Tao which is on the east side of Thailand I headed to Khao Lak which is on the west side about an hour north of Phuket. The plan for here was a small bit more diving and some general relaxation. I managed to get in a one day dive trip but also a three day two night live aboard to the Similan islands, some of the highlights of the diving there included a massive manta ray, octopuses and some just massive schools of fish.
I'm writing this update from khao Lak now.
Well I'll try get a few more updates as I go along.
Apologies for any spelling mistakes above the gesture input on my tablet gets some wrong and I don't always spot the mistakes.
