Monday 3 May The Big Trip VI: Hong Kong
We left Australia on 27 March. This was the first time either of us had been in the southern hemisphere, and we want to go back as soon as we can afford it – possibly not to Australia, but definitely to New Zealand. It's great to be able to enjoy summer during the northern winter. It was also exciting to see some of the things we had previously only heard about, like the Southern Cross. And it really is true that the water swirls the other way round in the plughole. The most disconcerting thing about the southern hemisphere is that the sun goes the wrong way round the sky. It rises in the east and sets in the west, of course, but it travels via the north rather than the south, so that shadows move in an anticlockwise direction. This shouldn't have come as a surprise, but for some reason we weren't expecting it, and it took a lot of getting used to.
The last four days of our trip were spent in Hong Kong, and to be honest this part of the trip was a bit of an anticlimax. The weather didn't help. It was cool and overcast, with cloud often below the level of the tops of the many skyscrapers. Also, my mental picture of Hong Kong was years out of date. I was expecting narrow streets lined with cheap stalls, and a harbour filled with bustling little boats, Chinese junks and dhows, that sort of thing. But Hong Kong is a modern city of high rise apartments and shopping malls, and the shipping in the harbour consists mostly of large barges and ferries.
Liz spent eighteen months in Singapore a few years ago, and she hated it. She said most of the people there were only interested in making stacks of money and spending it on designer clothes in the endless shopping malls. That was pretty much how Hong Kong appeared to me. The malls and hotel lobbies were full of trendy boutiques selling clothes by the likes of Gucci and Armani (and many other even more exclusive brands that I had never heard of). Not my scene at all.
That's the negative side of Hong Kong. On the positive side, we were staying in an excellent hotel. The Salisbury YMCA is not at all like your typical Y. It has one of the best locations in the city, on the waterfront in Kowloon, and our tenth floor room had a grandstand view across the harbour to Hong Kong Island. The ferry terminal is just a couple of minutes' walk away, the rooms are large and comfortable, and the restaurant has a mouthwatering seafood buffet at a very reasonable price. Speaking of restaurants, the food in Hong Kong is as good as you'll find anywhere. The lunchtime dim sum were irresistible. If we had stayed for more than a few days, we would soon have been seriously overweight.
We did most of the things that the guidebooks suggest. We wandered along the Tsim Sha Tsui promenade, took the ferry across to the island, rode the Peak Tram up to Victoria Peak to admire the view (as best we could, through the mist), and took Sunday afternoon tea at the Peninsula Hotel. We also enjoyed dinner with some friends in their multimillion dollar apartment in an exclusive high rise development in the fashionable Mid-Levels area. And Mary had a great time shopping for some stunning Chinese silk jackets for special occasions. But we both agreed that four days in Hong Kong was quite enough, and by the end of it we were ready for the long flight home (thirteen hours nonstop, from Hong Kong to Heathrow – we were glad that we had paid extra for an upgrade to British Airways' World Traveller Plus class).
So that completes the saga of our round the world trip. It was worth every penny we paid, and in fact it didn't cost as much as I had budgeted for. I'm sure we'll be doing something of the sort again in two or three years.
During the trip, I took dozens of photos with the digital camera, and I have spent a large part of the past month editing them and putting the better ones on the family web page. If you're interested you can see them here.
Wednesday 5 May The Big Trip VII: The nerd's version
Places we stayed
Ratings from * to ***** give the Lobo-solo verdict on value for money and overall happy memories of the place.
31 Jan. Manchester airport SAS Radisson Hotel. *
1-5 Feb. Waikiki, Ohana Reef Towers Hotel. ***
6-7 Feb. Kailua, King Kamehameha Hotel. ****
8 Feb. [Overnight flight Honolulu - Nadi.]
9 Feb. disappeared [crossed International Date Line]
10-11 Feb. Nadi, Fiji Mocambo Hotel. ****
12-13 Feb. Christchurch, Orari B&B. ***
14-15 Feb. Portobello, Rugosa B&B. *****
16, 18 Feb. Te Anau, Antler Lodge B&B. **
17 Feb. Doubtful Sound, overnight trip on Fiordland Navigator. ****
19-20 Feb. Te Anau, Barn House B&B. ****
21-22 Feb. Queenstown, Amber Motor Lodge. ****
23 Feb. Okuru Beach Homestay. *
24 Feb. Fox Glacier, Grant and Marietta's Homestay. *****
25 Feb. Barrytown, Kally House B&B. *** (***** if it wasn't for the waterbed.)
26 Feb. St Arnaud, Nelson Lakes Homestay. ***
27 Feb. Picton, Echo Lodge B&B. **
28 Feb. Palmerston North, Consolidated Mid-City Motel. **
29 Feb. Turangi, Rainbow Motel. ****
1-2 Mar. Rotorua, stayed with Mary's cousins.
3 Mar. Whakatane, Amber Court Motel. **
4 Mar. Coromandel, Coromandel Court Motel. ****
5 Mar. Orewa, Orewa Motor Lodge. **
6-7 Mar. Paihia, Admiral's View Lodge. *****
8 Mar. Auckland airport, Pacific Inn. *
9-11 Mar. Sydney, Harbour Rocks Hotel. ****
12 Mar. Katoomba, Three Sisters Motel. *
13 Mar. Blackheath, High Mountains Motor Inn. ***
14 Mar. Windsor, Windsor Terrace Motel. **
15-16 Mar. Bondi Beachside Inn. ****
17-20 Mar. Cairns Colonial Club Resort. **
21-23 Mar. Yulara, Outback Pioneer Hotel. *****
24-26 Mar. Cairns, Reef Palms Motel. ****
27-30 Mar. Kowloon, Salisbury YMCA Hotel. *****
31 Mar. [Overnight flight Hong Kong - London.]
Cars we rented
Hawaii (Oahu) 1-5 February: Dodge Neon (Alamo).
Hawaii (Big Island) 6-8 February: Dodge Neon (Dollar).
Fiji 10-12 February: Toyota Echo (Thrifty).
New Zealand South Island 12-28 February: Holden Astra (Avis).
New Zealand North Island 28 February - 9 March: Holden Astra (Avis).
Australia (Sydney) 12-17 March: Nissan Pulsar (Hertz).
Australia (Cairns) 24-27 March: Toyota Echo (Hertz).
If I was a genuine nerd, I would give a list of the 15 planes that we flew in. But in fact I don't much enjoy air travel and I never even noticed the makes or models of the planes. Also, I lost count of the number of times I saw Master and Commander on in-flight movies.
Monday 10 May
I meant to add to the previous entry a list of books read during the Big Trip. In fact, most of my reading consisted of planning for the next few days' travels, using the Lonely Planet guides. But I also found time to read three novels during the trip:
Vernon God Little by D B C Pierre,
If nobody speaks of remarkable things by Jon McGregor,
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time by Mark Haddon.
I thoroughly enjoyed all of them, and recommend them for holiday reading.
I have been driving the same car, a Volvo 440, for nearly 11 years. I bought it new, when we returned to England from Philadelphia in 1993. I don't use it that much, and it still only has just over 76,000 miles on the clock. It has been extremely reliable and has never let me down. But for the past year or so it has been beginning to show its age. It has developed a tendency to overheat, and I have to slip the selector lever into neutral whenever the car is stationary, otherwise the temperature needle shoots up into the red zone. I asked the garage to fix this problem when I last had the car serviced. They said there was a component in the exhaust that was malfunctioning, and they charged me £195 for replacing it (expensive parts and servicing is a feature common to all Volvos), but that did nothing to cure the trouble. It wasn't so bad during the winter months, but now that warmer weather is finally reaching these northern latitudes it's becoming a problem again. Also, the car is beginning to make various untraceable but ominous noises from time to time, and spots of rust are appearing in the wheel arches. What with one thing and another, the time has come to replace it. I decided to go for a Honda Civic, because they are said to be very reliable. We took one for a test drive last week, and completed the purchase today. It's not new, but is less than a year old, has only been used as a demo model and has covered less than 5,000 miles. So far, I'm very pleased with it. With a 1.6 litre engine, it's slightly smaller and less powerful than the Volvo, but that's in keeping with our reduced circumstances now that I'm semi-retired.
It's not often that a bank promptly admits having made a mistake and actually refunds the charges caused by its incompetence. In fact, I don't recall ever hearing of such a thing happening. Until now.
This story starts just before we left for our Big Trip. Mary had a savings account with Intelligent Finance, an offshoot of the Halifax Bank, in which she was putting aside some money for Liz. In her pessimistic way, she was concerned that we might have some disaster during the trip, and she wanted to make sure that Liz didn't lose this money. So she closed the account, asked Intelligent Finance to pay the balance into our current account (or checking account as they say in America), and wrote a cheque for a five-figure sum to Liz.
Two weeks later, in New Zealand, I went to check our email at an internet cafe where I had to pay for a minimum 20 minutes connect time. The email was dealt with in a few minutes, and to use up the rest of the time I accessed the site for our bank. I had a nasty sensation in the stomach when I saw that our current balance was given as something like -£9,000. Yes, that's a minus sign in front of the pounds symbol. Looking more carefully at the online bank statement I saw that Liz had cashed her cheque but there was no corresponding credit transfer from Intelligent Finance. What's more, our bank was charging £25 a day for exceeding our overdraft limit. I was scared that they were about to freeze the account so that we wouldn't be able use our ATM card for the rest of the trip. That would really have buggered our holiday finances.
Later that evening, Mary phoned Intelligent Finance (across the other side of the world, with a 12 hour time difference, so that the banks in England were just beginning their day's work) and spoke to a very helpful customer services manager. To our surprise and relief, he confirmed that they had a written record of the phone call in which Mary had asked for the transfer to be made, and he admitted that they had failed to make the transfer. He promised to do so immediately and to refund us for all the expenses incurred. The transfer went through very quickly, and when we got home I sent them a list of all the penalty charges and interest charges levied by our bank. They have now refunded all these, together with a generous amount for the cost of the long distance phone call.
Since then, Mary has noticed another mistake made by Intelligent Finance in one of her savings accounts, and they have corrected that too. So Intelligent Finance may not be very intelligent, or competent, but at least they don't drag their feet in putting things right. Maybe that's not a lot to ask of a bank. But my expectations of banks, based on years of experience, are very low. I think the moral of this story is that Intelligent Finance is a good bank to do business with, so long as you watch them like a hawk. Also, they pay a very good rate of interest.
Saturday 15 May
On Monday, a new car; on Friday, a new computer. If that sounds extravagant, I can only point out that the old car had lasted nearly eleven years, and the old computer was coming up towards six years. The time had definitely come for a replacement in both cases.
Looking back at the journal entry from November 1998 when I reported the previous computer purchase, it's amusing to see how impressed I was with its speed (a breathtaking 266 MHz) and memory capacity (4 Gb – wow!). The new eMac is what they now call an entry level machine, and I won't even mention its specifications. They don't look that impressive even now, and they certainly won't by the time I next buy a computer.
Coming to terms with a new computer is always a nightmare for me. Just as I get used to operating the previous one, a new model comes along with all sorts of unexpected quirks. In this case, the upgrade means getting used to the Mac operating system OS X, which is very different from the familiar OS 9. It took me most of yesterday to begin to find my way around it, and get an internet connection. Today, I seem to have cracked the problem of writing plain text files and installing an ftp program. If you see this journal entry on the day of writing then you'll know that this worked satisfactorily.
The real problem is how to transfer all my files from the old computer (which used floppy disks and an SCSI bus) to the new computer (which has a CD/DVD drive but no floppy drive, and USB and FireWire ports). The only way for the two machines to connect to each other is through their ethernet ports. But even with an ethernet connection they don't seem to recognise each other's existence. If you don't hear from me for the next week or two it's because I'm quietly going mad trying to cope with this problem.
Sunday 16 May Anniversary entry
Success!! After at least 24 hours of wrestling with them, I have now succeeded in getting the two computers to talk to each other, and to transfer all my files to the new one. The reasons it all took so long can be put down to (a) stupidity and (b) impatience. In fact, all the information I needed to carry out the procedure was documented in Help files. But for too long I neglected to look for it in the right place (stupidity). Then when I found the information, I skimmed through it too rapidly and left out vital components of the process, such as adjusting permissions on files, setting Network Preference to AppleTalk on both computers, and so on (impatience). This morning, I slowed down, read all the instructions again, followed them carefully and deliberately, and hey presto – everything works fine. Also, I spent some time getting to know how to use Mac OS X. It no longer seems so unintuitive, and I'm beginning to feel more comfortable with it.
The new car took much less getting used to. I felt happy behind the wheel from the word go. But then cars are less complicated than computers.
It is exactly six years ago today that I wrote the first entry in my Geocities online journal, and exactly three years since I moved it to this site. To mark the occasion, here is an extract from the journal in September 2001, where I wrote a brief review of Piers Paul Read's book The Templars, which still seems relevant today.
I don't know what made me decide to read this book, except that it is a study of a period of history about which I knew next to nothing. It tells the story of the Crusades in the 12th and 13th centuries, starting in the year 1099 when a sense of outrage spread across Europe at the fact that Christian pilgrims were unable to visit Jerusalem in safety because the Holy Land was in the hands of Moslem infidels. Armies were assembled to reclaim Jerusalem for Christendom, spearheaded by the Templars, an order of knighthood which was a strange cross between a monastic order and a multinational military task force. The early Crusades were comparatively successful, establishing a chain of fortified castles which provided a measure of protection for the faithful as they made their pilgrimage.
In the longer term the effect on the Islamic world was to unite the disparate tribes under such inspired generals as the Saracen leader Saladin, and the mysterious Old Man Of The Mountains who sent bands of fanatical (and probably drugged) young Assassins on suicide missions to drive out the Christian invaders. Within 200 years the last vestiges of Christian occupation had been wiped out and the Holy Land reverted to Islamic control.
The effects on Christian Europe were more insidious, corrupting the church from within. Theologians propounded the pernicious concept of the Holy War. Others preached that the setbacks in the Holy Land represented the Judgement of God on sinners. The search for scapegoats led to the establishment of the Inquisition, and evildoers such as witches were denounced, tortured and burnt to death. Eventually the Templars themselves were denounced and their leaders burned at the stake.
The Templars is not a particularly well written book. It reads too much like a textbook, with a lot of unnecessary detail. But the overall story that it tells is a fascinating and sobering one. I remember thinking as I read it that the flames of hatred that were lit during the Crusades continued to smoulder through the centuries.
Three weeks later, after the terrible events of 11 September, one can't help seeing shocking new parallels with many of these ancient events. But don't jump to conclusions: I wouldn't want to suggest for one moment that what we are seeing now is in any way some sort of renewed enmity between Christians and Moslems. Also, I'm in no position to criticise those who have rashly used the word 'crusade' in recent days. They obviously have no understanding at all of the historical implications of the word, but then neither did I until I read this book. Still, they do say that those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it, and I can't help fearing that the modern day Templars who are raring to charge into Afghanistan will end up hurting themselves more than their enemies.
Three years later, it seems as though we really are condemned to repeat history, as our civilisation is corrupted from within by the unwarranted invasion of Iraq and the brutal treatment of detainees there and elsewhere.
On a happier note, it has been a beautiful spring weekend here. Mary has been sunning herself on the patio as I skulked in the study brooding over the wretched computer. The fine weather is forecast to last for another few days, and I shall take advantage of my semi-retired situation to go for a hike in the Yorkshire Dales tomorrow, gloating over the thought that everyone else will have to go back to work on Monday morning. Enjoy your week!
Sunday 23 May
Yesterday was Cup Final day. I don't follow football seriously and I wasn't even aware that the match was taking place. I went out after lunch to deliver some election leaflets for the Lib Dems, and I was puzzled that nobody was out in their gardens on such a warm sunny afternoon. Then I noticed that they were all glued to their televisions, and the penny dropped. I finished the leaflet round just before 4 p.m., by which time I had missed the first half of the game. But I fetched a beer from the fridge and settled down to watch the second half. It was a fairly uninspired game, enlivened only by the fantastic footballing skills of the young Portuguese player Cristiano Ronaldo (not to be confused with the Brazilian Ronaldo, who plays for Real Madrid). He scored the matchwinning goal, but that was during the first half, so I missed it (the photo, lifted from the BBC News website, shows him celebrating the goal).
Not much happened during the past week that's worthy of note. On Monday I went for a hike in the Yorkshire Dales, taking the digital camera with me. I put a few photos of the walk in a rare entry in my LiveJournal site. On Tuesday I was invited to a dinner at my old school. This turned out to be a rather high-powered occasion. Only about 20 people had been invited, most of them from roughly my generation, but only one person that I actually knew from school days. The first person that I talked to told me that he had recently retired as a Director of a well-known merchant bank and had moved to his country house to breed racehorses. That sort of set the tone for the evening. It was clear that most of the guests were rolling in money, and I assume that the purpose of the evening was to encourage them to remember the school in their wills. That raises the question of why they should have invited me. I have no answer to that. But if the idea was to solicit legacies, it was an extremely soft sell, and nothing as sordid as money was mentioned during the evening. It was interesting to see the old place again. It hasn't changed much in the 45 years since I left.
