Alice and I had decided that we needed to do an Asian cruise to visit some countries that we had not been to before. So we signed up for a 16 day Princess Cruise from Bangkok to Beijing.
Due to the length of the cruise and the fact that we had been to Bangkok and Beijing before we elected no extra time in either city.
The trip started to be real when it was time to get our Chinese Visas in New York. There was a horrible line and when our number was up we found out that the air itinerary I had brought somehow did not have our names on it. The agent would let us come to the head of the line once we obtained a document with our names. We found a bodega a few blocks away with internet access and I was able to find and print our reservation. When we got back to the consulate the door was locked but we got the security supervisor to let us in the back door since they were still working. Saved another trip!
We decided to have a car and driver pick us up at 4am on the day of departure. When the alarm went off we had no electricity! Fortunately the bags were in the garage and we had flashlights.
This was to be a two stop trip, with changes in San Francisco and Tokyo. Other than a tight connection in San Francisco, it was simply long. We still think it is nice in the upper deck of the 747.
So we arrived in Bangkok at 11pm (noon in New York) and taxied to the Millennium Hilton on the river. It is a really nice new hotel with great views, plus it has its own dock and fleet of boats on the river. The river is the life blood of Bangkok with point to point ferries and river busses making multiple stops. There were smaller cargo boats and giant barges pulled by tugs, and even boats scooping up and removing debris from the river. An unusual but common boat is long and slender with a long trailing drive shaft-propeller powered by an auto engine at the end of the drive shaft and steered by pivoting the drive shaft with the engine from side to side. We walked along the river and did some shopping before our car and driver took us for the two hour drive to the ship. The drive to the port was approximately 100 miles on a freeway that took us past rice paddies and fish farms, as well as some factories and finally the mountains of nearby Cambodia. We waded onto the ship in teeming rain.
The big event of the evening were the fishing boats with very bright lights to attract the fish.
We had a sea day and then Singapore, which was a non event for us. It was still teeming rain, we had no tour and decided not to get off the ship. We were docked in a huge container port which was interesting to watch.
A sea day and then Vietnam. We docked in one of the branches of the Mekong River delta. We did have an all day tour of Saigon with a two hour bus ride each way.
We learned a lot about Vietnam. It is an open economy with a lot of foreign investment. Communist per the China model. There is private employment, and people do buy or rent their housing, but there is no political freedom. It has been conquered by China. The French attempted to conquer it and were repulsed. The US was repulsed. Then a civil war ensued and the North conquered the South. The US is now welcomed for tourism and investment, with no particular thought about the past. Vietnam is energy independent but has insufficient refining capacity. It is an ethnically very pure country with 98% native Vietnamese and 2% ethnic Chinese from the past.
The tour covered the presidential palace, the US embassy, a museum, a water puppet show, a lunch and music show at a banquet restaurant, the post office, a Chinese temple and some time to walk the streets. Central Saigon is absolutely beautiful. There are rivers everywhere. The biggest surprise were the numbers and aggressiveness of the motos, the word used for motorcycles and motor scooters. They fill up a whole street and are nearly impossible to pass. Very few private cars.
The second day in Viet Nam was a much smaller area, Nha Trang. Again it was teeming rain and we did not get off the ship. We saw lots of construction of residences for foreigners along the beaches.
Next was Hong Kong. Three major islands, minor islands and a peninsula connecting to the mainland. We have been to Hong Kong before and loved it. We did not take a tour as we were going to lunch with a friend. The entrance to the Hong Kong harbor is spectacular, with freighters, cargo ferries and people ferries all vying for their space in the harbor. There is a shortage of housing in Hong Kong, partially alleviated by dormitory 'cages', houseboats and families actually living on the cargo ferries that they operate. The UK lease on Hong Kong ran out so it is now a special administrative region of China. There is full economic freedom but no elections of political freedom. The other change since our last visit is a huge amount of growth. We remembered open spaces in Kowloon that have been covered in high rises.
Our lunch was with Boon, our Chinese-Australian friend of 15 years. He is probably 50 years old and has reinvented himself from a consultant to a consultant investor. He travels the world for two months at a time without returning home to his family. His main interest is in buying, processing and selling fish around the world. It is a very scarce commodity, with supply limited by government allocated rights and quotas. Unfortunately many of his contacts are with Mafia types that have obtained the bulk of these quotas. So this industry is operating under the radar of world scrutiny. He described his Russian associates as all being survivors of assassination attempts and all with missing body parts as a consequence. He has a cherished wife and daughter in Australia. The daughter will graduate from high school this year and then go off to college. We have promised to come to Australia for her wedding!
There was a Hong Kong folkloric show on the dock as we arrived and in the ship that evening. It ranged from Chinese/Western hybrid classical music to sleight of hand and dragon dances.
Another sea day and then Taiwan. We landed at a port city, Keelung, 1/2 hour away from Taipei, in the rain. Keelung is a very big harbor and a gritty city. The trip to Taipei was on a freeway with numerous tunnels through the mountains. When we got to Taipei it was bright and sunny. The city has old and new parts and is generally clean and nice with beautiful parks and public buildings. Most people remember that the Chinese nationalists came to Taiwan after Mao Tse Tung was winning the revolution on the mainland. We were told that prior to and during WW2 the Japanese controlled Taiwan. Anyway, now, Taiwan is a democracy and has had several changes in leadership and policy towards the mainland. The tour included a very elaborate memorial to Chang Kai Shek, the national museum where a large number of mainland China artifacts were removed by Chang and his followers for safekeeping and a 101 story skyscraper. The language is Chinese Mandarin, same as Official Mainland, though with old fashioned Chinese characters instead of the simplified characters used on the mainland. English is widely spoken, but very little signage.
Next was Okinawa, without an intervening sea day. It was a short visit of 6 hours. Our tour took us to a major historical castle where the ancient rulers of Okinawa held forth and to a shopping area. Okinawa, comprising 1500 islands with 10 being inhabited, is now a prefecture of Japan and was conquered by the Americans in WW2, then returned to Japan in the 1960s. The prevailing view on WW2 here is that, simply, Japan lost the war after the atom bomb was dropped. The battle for Okinawa itself cost over 100,000 lives! Nonetheless, they did nothing wrong in starting or pursuing the war. We got lots of other impressions. There is a very large main island that is flat with low hills. There is a mix of Chinese, Native Okinawan and Japanese cultures. Housing density is very high, typical of Japan. The main city, Naha, is served by a monorail line cleverly covering the entire city from the airport to the castle. Sharijo Castle is a square donut shaped wooden building on the top of a hill and surrounded by heavy walls and a series of gates. It has a commanding view of the island. It was of interest to see the throne of the kings that it was built for. And we had to take our shoes off to enter the castle. As a final note, so not to cause congestion in the surrounding neighborhoods, there was underground parking for cars and tour busses. The shopping mall street offered a mix of tourist and everyday needs in everything from a department store to free standing retail stores to stalls in a covered alley.
Last stop before Beijing was Shanghai. We docked at a container port about 45 minutes from the city center. The first thing we noticed was the brown color of the water, later confirmed as a branch of the Yangtze River delta. The second thing we noted was the highly polluted air, which we later saw was all through the city. The third thing we noticed that the ship was cordoned off by the police and nobody was getting off! I should have mentioned that there was a slight outbreak of the Norwalk virus on the ship. As the captain announced the local officials were calling the senior officials to come from Shanghai and decide to let us off the ship or not. They finally arrived, inspected the ship, even interviewed sick passengers and after three hours let us get off. The captain delayed the departure so that the tours could be given. We took the free shuttle to the center of the city and visited the Shanghai Museum to see a fabulous collection of bronze artifacts and sculptures going back to 1500BC. The museum had titles and information about the objects in English and Chinese. Some other observations about Shanghai: it is a sprawling city of 25 million with only high rise housing; there is a very large middle class; there are lots of expressways and elevated trains and still, lots of traffic; lots and lots of vendors selling cheap merchandise, especially fakes of fashion goods.
Only two sea days left. All is going smoothly. We are photographing a large ugly bird on our balcony. The Chinese health officers are on the ship as we go towards Beijing. Then the captain announces that we are turning around to aid a distressed ship. Then a half hour later we turned around again and the captain said we could not confirm the distress so we proceeded. Back to watching election returns on CNN. We learned the result at noon China time. The next 24 hours were uneventful. Then the captain made the announcement that we had speeded up and we would arrive in Beijing the night before to expedite clearance of the ship to disembark. We did get there at 11pm and had officials board. We confidently went to bed. The next morning we awoke at the dock. But nothing was being unloaded! Then the captain announced that discussions with the health officials was in process. Three hours later he announced that there had been a breakthrough and that we were free to leave; that select individuals would be questioned by the Chinese. We were first off the ship and were not questioned.
We were on a bus to the airport 100 miles away. the trip was uneventful. The port city was nice looking, then there was farmland and fish farm ponds, and then Beijing. The new airport is spectacular. We had lunch in the lounge and the flight left on time and arrived in Washington on time.
To speak about the ship. We sailed on the Diamond Princess which is a 2600 passenger ship built in 2004 and operated by Princess Cruises. It is laid out to give the feel of a city with neighborhoods; it has 5 swimming pools, 5 dining rooms, two specialty restaurants and three self service buffets of different sizes and countless bars. There are 3 theaters of different sizes and a half dozen piano players and combos performing in the bars and the atrium, even a string quartet. We had a balcony that we really enjoyed for the viewing and privacy. We also had 'anytime' dining that allowed us to show up at any of 4 restaurants at any time and be seated without a reservation...and it really worked without waiting for us. There was always a 4 course dinner with many choices for each course and most food cooked to order. There were 2 - 3 shows each evening, some repeated later in the same evening. The mix of people was interesting especially for a US oriented company. The country groups roughly in order of decreasing size were UK, American, Brazilians, French Canadians, Australians, Germans, Russians, Mexicans and other European. There were a lot of Asian-Americans. Good breakfast conversations with a retired Welsh fire chief, real estate lady from LA, a French couple that met in Guadeloupe, a Mexican auto plant manager, a French-Canadian couple, two divorced English sisters, a UK dentist, an Australian couple that migrated from England to Adelaide, a German couple, several survivors or the cabin quarantine program and a California Obama activist. There were some opportunities to converse in Portuguese, Spanish and French.
Generally we really enjoyed the ship.
Due to the length of the cruise and the fact that we had been to Bangkok and Beijing before we elected no extra time in either city.
The trip started to be real when it was time to get our Chinese Visas in New York. There was a horrible line and when our number was up we found out that the air itinerary I had brought somehow did not have our names on it. The agent would let us come to the head of the line once we obtained a document with our names. We found a bodega a few blocks away with internet access and I was able to find and print our reservation. When we got back to the consulate the door was locked but we got the security supervisor to let us in the back door since they were still working. Saved another trip!
We decided to have a car and driver pick us up at 4am on the day of departure. When the alarm went off we had no electricity! Fortunately the bags were in the garage and we had flashlights.
This was to be a two stop trip, with changes in San Francisco and Tokyo. Other than a tight connection in San Francisco, it was simply long. We still think it is nice in the upper deck of the 747.
So we arrived in Bangkok at 11pm (noon in New York) and taxied to the Millennium Hilton on the river. It is a really nice new hotel with great views, plus it has its own dock and fleet of boats on the river. The river is the life blood of Bangkok with point to point ferries and river busses making multiple stops. There were smaller cargo boats and giant barges pulled by tugs, and even boats scooping up and removing debris from the river. An unusual but common boat is long and slender with a long trailing drive shaft-propeller powered by an auto engine at the end of the drive shaft and steered by pivoting the drive shaft with the engine from side to side. We walked along the river and did some shopping before our car and driver took us for the two hour drive to the ship. The drive to the port was approximately 100 miles on a freeway that took us past rice paddies and fish farms, as well as some factories and finally the mountains of nearby Cambodia. We waded onto the ship in teeming rain.
The big event of the evening were the fishing boats with very bright lights to attract the fish.
We had a sea day and then Singapore, which was a non event for us. It was still teeming rain, we had no tour and decided not to get off the ship. We were docked in a huge container port which was interesting to watch.
A sea day and then Vietnam. We docked in one of the branches of the Mekong River delta. We did have an all day tour of Saigon with a two hour bus ride each way.
We learned a lot about Vietnam. It is an open economy with a lot of foreign investment. Communist per the China model. There is private employment, and people do buy or rent their housing, but there is no political freedom. It has been conquered by China. The French attempted to conquer it and were repulsed. The US was repulsed. Then a civil war ensued and the North conquered the South. The US is now welcomed for tourism and investment, with no particular thought about the past. Vietnam is energy independent but has insufficient refining capacity. It is an ethnically very pure country with 98% native Vietnamese and 2% ethnic Chinese from the past.
The tour covered the presidential palace, the US embassy, a museum, a water puppet show, a lunch and music show at a banquet restaurant, the post office, a Chinese temple and some time to walk the streets. Central Saigon is absolutely beautiful. There are rivers everywhere. The biggest surprise were the numbers and aggressiveness of the motos, the word used for motorcycles and motor scooters. They fill up a whole street and are nearly impossible to pass. Very few private cars.
The second day in Viet Nam was a much smaller area, Nha Trang. Again it was teeming rain and we did not get off the ship. We saw lots of construction of residences for foreigners along the beaches.
Next was Hong Kong. Three major islands, minor islands and a peninsula connecting to the mainland. We have been to Hong Kong before and loved it. We did not take a tour as we were going to lunch with a friend. The entrance to the Hong Kong harbor is spectacular, with freighters, cargo ferries and people ferries all vying for their space in the harbor. There is a shortage of housing in Hong Kong, partially alleviated by dormitory 'cages', houseboats and families actually living on the cargo ferries that they operate. The UK lease on Hong Kong ran out so it is now a special administrative region of China. There is full economic freedom but no elections of political freedom. The other change since our last visit is a huge amount of growth. We remembered open spaces in Kowloon that have been covered in high rises.
Our lunch was with Boon, our Chinese-Australian friend of 15 years. He is probably 50 years old and has reinvented himself from a consultant to a consultant investor. He travels the world for two months at a time without returning home to his family. His main interest is in buying, processing and selling fish around the world. It is a very scarce commodity, with supply limited by government allocated rights and quotas. Unfortunately many of his contacts are with Mafia types that have obtained the bulk of these quotas. So this industry is operating under the radar of world scrutiny. He described his Russian associates as all being survivors of assassination attempts and all with missing body parts as a consequence. He has a cherished wife and daughter in Australia. The daughter will graduate from high school this year and then go off to college. We have promised to come to Australia for her wedding!
There was a Hong Kong folkloric show on the dock as we arrived and in the ship that evening. It ranged from Chinese/Western hybrid classical music to sleight of hand and dragon dances.
Another sea day and then Taiwan. We landed at a port city, Keelung, 1/2 hour away from Taipei, in the rain. Keelung is a very big harbor and a gritty city. The trip to Taipei was on a freeway with numerous tunnels through the mountains. When we got to Taipei it was bright and sunny. The city has old and new parts and is generally clean and nice with beautiful parks and public buildings. Most people remember that the Chinese nationalists came to Taiwan after Mao Tse Tung was winning the revolution on the mainland. We were told that prior to and during WW2 the Japanese controlled Taiwan. Anyway, now, Taiwan is a democracy and has had several changes in leadership and policy towards the mainland. The tour included a very elaborate memorial to Chang Kai Shek, the national museum where a large number of mainland China artifacts were removed by Chang and his followers for safekeeping and a 101 story skyscraper. The language is Chinese Mandarin, same as Official Mainland, though with old fashioned Chinese characters instead of the simplified characters used on the mainland. English is widely spoken, but very little signage.
Next was Okinawa, without an intervening sea day. It was a short visit of 6 hours. Our tour took us to a major historical castle where the ancient rulers of Okinawa held forth and to a shopping area. Okinawa, comprising 1500 islands with 10 being inhabited, is now a prefecture of Japan and was conquered by the Americans in WW2, then returned to Japan in the 1960s. The prevailing view on WW2 here is that, simply, Japan lost the war after the atom bomb was dropped. The battle for Okinawa itself cost over 100,000 lives! Nonetheless, they did nothing wrong in starting or pursuing the war. We got lots of other impressions. There is a very large main island that is flat with low hills. There is a mix of Chinese, Native Okinawan and Japanese cultures. Housing density is very high, typical of Japan. The main city, Naha, is served by a monorail line cleverly covering the entire city from the airport to the castle. Sharijo Castle is a square donut shaped wooden building on the top of a hill and surrounded by heavy walls and a series of gates. It has a commanding view of the island. It was of interest to see the throne of the kings that it was built for. And we had to take our shoes off to enter the castle. As a final note, so not to cause congestion in the surrounding neighborhoods, there was underground parking for cars and tour busses. The shopping mall street offered a mix of tourist and everyday needs in everything from a department store to free standing retail stores to stalls in a covered alley.
Last stop before Beijing was Shanghai. We docked at a container port about 45 minutes from the city center. The first thing we noticed was the brown color of the water, later confirmed as a branch of the Yangtze River delta. The second thing we noted was the highly polluted air, which we later saw was all through the city. The third thing we noticed that the ship was cordoned off by the police and nobody was getting off! I should have mentioned that there was a slight outbreak of the Norwalk virus on the ship. As the captain announced the local officials were calling the senior officials to come from Shanghai and decide to let us off the ship or not. They finally arrived, inspected the ship, even interviewed sick passengers and after three hours let us get off. The captain delayed the departure so that the tours could be given. We took the free shuttle to the center of the city and visited the Shanghai Museum to see a fabulous collection of bronze artifacts and sculptures going back to 1500BC. The museum had titles and information about the objects in English and Chinese. Some other observations about Shanghai: it is a sprawling city of 25 million with only high rise housing; there is a very large middle class; there are lots of expressways and elevated trains and still, lots of traffic; lots and lots of vendors selling cheap merchandise, especially fakes of fashion goods.
Only two sea days left. All is going smoothly. We are photographing a large ugly bird on our balcony. The Chinese health officers are on the ship as we go towards Beijing. Then the captain announces that we are turning around to aid a distressed ship. Then a half hour later we turned around again and the captain said we could not confirm the distress so we proceeded. Back to watching election returns on CNN. We learned the result at noon China time. The next 24 hours were uneventful. Then the captain made the announcement that we had speeded up and we would arrive in Beijing the night before to expedite clearance of the ship to disembark. We did get there at 11pm and had officials board. We confidently went to bed. The next morning we awoke at the dock. But nothing was being unloaded! Then the captain announced that discussions with the health officials was in process. Three hours later he announced that there had been a breakthrough and that we were free to leave; that select individuals would be questioned by the Chinese. We were first off the ship and were not questioned.
We were on a bus to the airport 100 miles away. the trip was uneventful. The port city was nice looking, then there was farmland and fish farm ponds, and then Beijing. The new airport is spectacular. We had lunch in the lounge and the flight left on time and arrived in Washington on time.
To speak about the ship. We sailed on the Diamond Princess which is a 2600 passenger ship built in 2004 and operated by Princess Cruises. It is laid out to give the feel of a city with neighborhoods; it has 5 swimming pools, 5 dining rooms, two specialty restaurants and three self service buffets of different sizes and countless bars. There are 3 theaters of different sizes and a half dozen piano players and combos performing in the bars and the atrium, even a string quartet. We had a balcony that we really enjoyed for the viewing and privacy. We also had 'anytime' dining that allowed us to show up at any of 4 restaurants at any time and be seated without a reservation...and it really worked without waiting for us. There was always a 4 course dinner with many choices for each course and most food cooked to order. There were 2 - 3 shows each evening, some repeated later in the same evening. The mix of people was interesting especially for a US oriented company. The country groups roughly in order of decreasing size were UK, American, Brazilians, French Canadians, Australians, Germans, Russians, Mexicans and other European. There were a lot of Asian-Americans. Good breakfast conversations with a retired Welsh fire chief, real estate lady from LA, a French couple that met in Guadeloupe, a Mexican auto plant manager, a French-Canadian couple, two divorced English sisters, a UK dentist, an Australian couple that migrated from England to Adelaide, a German couple, several survivors or the cabin quarantine program and a California Obama activist. There were some opportunities to converse in Portuguese, Spanish and French.
Generally we really enjoyed the ship.
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