After our "donkey" (Malaysian train) ride to Wakaf Bahru, we spent the night in Khota Bharu. The guidebook was right – Khota Bahru accomodation is filthy (regardless of price.) But we found a place where the bed at least was clean and free of bedbugs to spend the night.

The next morning, we took a local bus to the Thai border and crossed over to Sungai Kolok. A nasty surprise at the border: they’re only giving out 15-day entry stamps when you cross by land, not the 30 days we were promised by our guidebook (and still available when entering by air.) So our plans will have to change… oh well, they were only plans.

From Sungai Kolok, we took a second class Thai train to Hat Yai. I’ve been on a third class Thai train and the only difference is hard vs. soft seats – still no aircon, but that’s fine. The cars were white steel on the outside, mango orange-painted wood on the inside, so I declared the train to be a mango. Overall the mango was much older than the donkey, but better maintainted.

It was about 5 hours to Hat Yai, then a tuktuk ride took us to the bus station. Most of the buses were actually minibuses going to all sorts of places, but Krabi is on the way to Phuket, which is a big enough destination to merit a big bus. And what a bus it was! This bus was, in fact, a kitten. A pink kitten. I decided this because it had beckoning cat air fresheners inside. It was a double decker with seats on top and a padded floor below holding baggage, someone’s new motor scooter, and overflow passengers. Overall, the nicest bus I’ve ever taken, especially since it had aircon. Other features included DVDs of Thai music videos on screen during the 5 hour ride and a green fluorescent tube in the engine compartment – definite style points. On a rest stop, I watched the shiny Mercedes engine for a while and noticed that they were carrying several spare fan belts. Smart bus company!

Once in Krabi, another adventure: at this time we were travelling with another backpacking couple we met in Sungai Kolok. The bus stop was in a remote area but we didn’t trust the aggressive man who met us right off the bus and told us it was 6 km to downtown and he would take us there for 200 baht (about half the cost of our 5 hour bus trip!) He would’t budge on the price, so we started walking. And walked, and walked. After well over 1km of walking, a moto driver stopped for us. These are drivers who will take you around town on the back of a motorcycle – very popular with the locals for short trips. He realized there was no way we could take motos with our heavy backpacks, and helpfully called some friends with a taxi. About 10 minutes later, the taxi (which was a pickup truck with passenger benches in the bed) showed up. We didn’t even try to haggle over the 200 baht price this driver also wanted.

He took us to the hostel, no problem, and we paid through the passenger side window. The driver’s ~5 year old daughter actually took the money, held up by his wife. This was clearly a family business! All in all, it was a good lesson in 3rd world economics: sometimes you can bargain, but sometimes you just have to pay the 200 baht to get where you’re going.

The hostel was called Good Dream – an oasis of sanity in this crazy country. The owner spoke excellent English and had a wide varitety of opinionated information on Krabi area attractions, with prices. The room was cheap and spotlessly clean. The breakfast was not the cheapest but it was excellent – the closest thing I’ve had to a trucker’s breakfast in over 2 months.

Onwards from Krabi, we took a longtail boat to Railey Beach – 150 baht each. The boatman wanted 400 baht more to go to Ton Sai so we declined. Various sources said it was a 15 minute walk to Ton Sai Beach, which is the area with the most climbers and the cheapest accomodation (coincidence? I think not.) Various sources were wrong. There’s a 15 minute walk between the beaches that’s doable at low tide, but not with heavy backpacks because of slippery rocks, and anyway this was high tide. There’s a 30-45 minute overland walk which we tried to find, but on the way there we passed a couple of climbers who told us there was another way: a path near the low tide walk where you scramble up a steep hill and down the other side. It took us about 30 minutes to find the path though, and Robin couldn’t do it with her backpack so I had to do it 3 times, twice with a load!

So, finally, Tonsai. I bought a big jug of water at the first bar on the beach and we drank most of it on the spot. Then we found a cheap but decent hut: it has a shower, electric lights, and a fan. Compared to my usual climbing trips where I’m camping, this hut is luxurious I think we’ll stay here for a while.

The jungle line was definitely a good way to do just that. From Gemas, we boarded another "donkey" (Malaysian train) and rode it all day. The scenery was amazing! Lush jungle on both sides, palm oil plantations, and then the mountains, which was lush jungle plus amazing rock outcroppings.

Photos are here. Taking great photos from a train window is almost impossible, but these are decent at least

Please don’t take my recent negativity to mean I’m not having fun. I’m enjoying it, and hopefully so are you

Robin and I arrived late on Friday night to find the public transit system already shut down, so we took a taxi to our hostel.

I spent most of our trip wondering what there is to do in Singapore other than play tourist and shop. I still haven’t figured that one out. Fortunately, there are a few interesting things to do as a tourist, like the awesome Bird Park (all sorts of birds, of course) and the Night Safari (where we saw sleeping lions, hunting tigers, etc.)

The weather in Singapore is about a billion degrees and humid, like the rest of southeast Asia, and it somehow manages to feel a lot like a third world country: there are people selling junk on the street amid Lexuses and Mercedes. Things randomly don’t work (like ticketing for the local "rapid" transit, which is a giant pile of fail.) Everything seems to be either shoddy or owned by a megacorp. So from that point of view, it’s been a good experience: a place to get used to the heat, humidity, and general inconvenience of life in this part of the world without any actual danger to us or our property.

And now we’re on a train that took us across the border to Malaysia and will hopefully take us to Gemas. At the station, yet another sign we’re not in Japan anymore: the train was over an hour late leaving Singapore, and now seems to be running an hour behind schedule. Welcome to the third world! I declared to Robin that this train is not a kitten (since kittens are of course the embodiment of awesome in the world.) She told me it was a donkey, and I’m inclined to agree.

We’re hoping to spend the night in Gemas then get up early to taking the Jungle Line to Khota Bharu, which borders Thailand. From there, train, bus, then boat to Railay Beach and rock climbing!

[*] Nothing in the first paragraph of this entry should be taken as fact. Obviously.

Alright.

To everyone who visits temples and shrines and shows complete disrespect for them, like the jerks who were at the Daibutsu in Kamakura: fuck you. I’m sure the Daibutsu doesn’t care – he’s been meditating for 1000 years and he’s seen worse than you in that time. But the Buddhists who visit him to worship certainly do. Would you act this way in a church back home?

And to the people posing for photos in front of the atomic bomb dome in Hiroshima: fuck you with a spoon. This is a monument to an absolute atrocity and it’s fine to want to show that to your friends, but why do you need to be in the photo too? "Hey, never mind the dome. Look at me!"

OK, I’m done here.

Kyoto was a great place to spend our last few days in Japan. I took Robin to Kurama and Kibune, we visited some of Kyoto’s temples and shrines (including the awesome Fushimi Inari and the Tofuku-ji zen garden) and made it to the flea market at Kitano Tenmangu shrine, where Robin bought a skirt.

Kyoto is a wonderful place – so many traditional-style buildings and yet so modern too. And the weather cooperated: 3 days of sun! Strange that we got good weather in Kyoto but not Tokyo…

Now we’re on UA 875 to Singapore. It feels weird to be leaving Japan after so long, and weird to be on United in a place so foreign. So well, that’s it. Goodbye Japan, and see you again someday!

After finding Caroline’s place, about a 15 minute walk from the train station, we all headed to dinner at the best kaiten restaurant in Japan. Kaiten (conveyor belt sushi) generally doesn’t have a great reputation. A frient once compared it to the McDonald’s of sushi. But this place was a shining exception, as one might expect in a prefecture renowned for its seafood. After dinner, Caroline took us to a small izakaya, again pretty different from the ones in Tokyo. People were as friendly as in my last small izakaya in Kagoshima, but it also had an amazing selection of fresh fish in an icebox and extremely fresh fish in a saltwater tank. We didn’t stay long because Robin and I were tired from a day spent on trains.

The next morning was a tea ceremony! Caroline drove us to a nearby town where some of her Japanese friends were practicing the art of sencha-do, or Chinese-inspired green tea ceremony. As we learned, this is quite different from matcha-do, which is what most people think of as a "Japanese tea ceremony." The basics are the same: the host makes tea for the guests, who enjoy it and each other’s company. But the details… well… the steps are quite different. Also, these ladies did it fairly informally. One of them had been studying sencha-do for a while, and the rest were learning from her. They did a great job both of making the tea and of making us feel welcome! All in all a wonderful experience.

Then we headed to a the local department store where some special needs students Caroline teaches were having a fundraising sale, wandered around a local park, and borrowed some bikes to explore the coastline and rivers of Masuda.

And then onwards to Hiroshima. Thanks, Caroline!

• Capsule hotels. Usually for men only, although some women-only or mixed places are appearing. ¥4000/night per person, single beds only. Ask at the nearest koban (police box) and they’ll point you in the right direction.
• Internet / comic cafés. These primarily exist for people who need to get out of a cramped house with their family or wife and spend some time surfing the web, watching movies, or reading manga (comic books.) Most are open 24 hours/day and have cheap overnight rates. The chair in your cubicle is usually some sort of couch or a chair that reclines flat, or some places are starting to offer flat floors. May not accept single women, but I’ve heard that’s fairly rare these days. ¥1500-4000/night.
• Karaoke boxes. Soundproof rooms with karaoke systems, but they really don’t care what you do in the room as long as you pay for the time. Bench seats mean it won’t be a hugely comfortable night, but probably a decent place to pass out if you’re tired after a night singing and drinking but the morning’s trains are still hours away. ¥????/night

And for completeness:

• Love hotels. You probably need to be a male/female couple, although single females or two females who claim to be friends looking for some "girl time" are also likely to be accepted. You may also be refused service arbitrarily if you’re white or don’t speak Japanese. Starts at ¥6000/night per couple and goes up – really nice places start at ¥10000/night. More expensive on a weekend night. If you’re interested in learning more about love hotels, there’s a book about them you can buy. Not amazing – he needs a better editor and it’s not up to date enough to mention the problems we had at Dogenzaka – but an interesting read.
• Taxi home. I was told a taxi from Shibuya to my apartment in Ebisu, one train stop away, would be about ¥2000. The other side of the city is probably closer to ¥10000. The suburbs? Forget about it.

Note, ¥100 is about $1.20 Canadian as of this entry. Or just pretend the last 2 digits are cents for a rough approximation of prices.

1. I’m not going to be putting photos in my blog entries for the next while. It just takes too much time in front of a computer, and entries get posted a lot later as a result too. You can see my latest photos on flickr (and I’ll try to add that link to entries in the future.)
2. My awesome girlfriend Robin has joined me here. We’ll be travelling together most of the way to Tibet, and you can read her blog here.
3. If you’re reading this on Facebook, it looks better on modernduck.com (or you can use an RSS reader.)
4. If you still use Livejournal, you can add my blog to your friends page (thanks, Julie.) But again, it looks better on modernduck.com.
5. If you’re looking for a good way to keep track of what’s new on a few blogs, Google Reader is great.
6. You’re all awesome. See you soon

It’s also an interesting region from a transit point of view. JR only serves the nearby city of Odawara, so from there you need to use the private Odakyu railway. From Odawara, I took:

1. A suburban type train for about 4 stops. The line originates in Shinjuku (downtown Tokyo) so we could have taken the same train all the way from there, but we had JR passes so using their trains was free.
2. A pokey local mountain train. This was my favourite of the bunch. The trainsets have 2 or 3 short carriages with long couplings for a very tight turning radius. It also does switchbacks on the way up: the train drives up into the switchback then pulls out going the other direction but on a different track, still going up. Sometimes another train going the other direction pulls into the switchback during this process so they can pass each other (most of the line is single track.) Yes, I took photos – not uploaded yet
3. A cable car: two cars balanced on one cable with one going uphill and one going down, driven by a motor at the top.
4. A gondola (called a "ropeway") like a ski lift, but ticketed per ride like a transit system.

Our hotel was on one of the pokey local train stops. We arrived mid-afternoon on Thursday after some errands in Tokyo in the morning, then headed out to explore right away.

I wanted to head to Owakudani. By the time I got to the bottom of the ropeway, I was warned that the ropeway was shutting down in 30 minutes so I could only spend about 10 minutes at the top. I told the guy I’d walk down, and he warned me it would take an hour to get back to the ropeway station, and longer to get to the bottom of the cable car. OK, fine, that’s about what I expected anyway

Robin left me at that point to explore on her own, and I took the ropeway to Owakudani. The main attraction there is eggs boiled in a hotspring: Kuro Tamago. Kuro (black) since the shells turn a wonderful shade of black in the sulphurous steam. I walked up the mountain to the area with the egg vats (which only took a few minutes) and saw another ropeway, this time for cargo only. It was used to send boiled eggs down from the vats to the gift shop!

I bought some eggs for later and started the walk down. The hiking trails were covered in reasonably deep snow so I just took the road. It took me about 45 minutes to reach the ropeway station, and as expected the cable car had also stopped. But it only took me another 30 minutes to get back to the hotel. Robin was already back, so we went for dinner then… the onsen.

There were several onsen in the area, but most were huge baths full of tourists. Fortunately, our hotel was almost empty and had its own bath. It had a sign you could put down by the door to indicate what type of bath it was at the moment: male only, female only, or mixed. But there was a Japanese man inside who hadn’t put down a sign! Robin and I had no idea if she was allowed to enter or not with the man there so we just went up to our room for 30 minutes to wait.

The onsen was nice but extremely hot and there was no cold pool (or even a way to add cold water.) The indoor pool was large, probably big enough for 10 people, and there was a small outdoor tub probably intended for one but just big enough for the two of us. We soaked our tired bodies then headed to bed.