Yangtze River – President No 7

Posted on August 16, 2015 by borysSNORC

There doesn’t appear to be much information online about the President No 7 Yangtze River Cruise ship, so I thought I would take some notes. Who knows? They might be helpful to others planning on taking this trip.

The first thing we noticed when checking in is that the decor is quite lavish and ornate, the ship is designed to be a 5 star hotel, and it is quite well designed and appointed. But when you look a bit closer, you notice that things aren’t quite maintained the way you would expect in a 5 star ship or hotel in the West. For example, the ship is barely 3 years old, and yet the carpets in the room are covered in stains, and they look like you wouldn’t want to take your shoes off – we found this to be the case in common areas of 5 star hotels here too though.

There is a swimming pool on the very lower deck, which we thought might be quite inviting as we have been playing tourist in extremely hot conditions – only when we went to inspect it, the water was cloudy, the room had a strong smell of varnish, and there were some sections around the pool’s edge where the marble had sustained some damage and rather than being repaired, it was covered with a duct taped piece of rubber that had obviously been there for some time. It seems somewhat typical of fancy China hotels to be well designed and start out looking amazing, but then the details get missed – popped buttons on sofas don’t get replaced or fixed, broken tiles in showers get re-grouted, but in a very slapdash fashion that doesn’t match the quality of the original fit out etc. It just seems to be the Chinese way.

But back to the President No 7. Each room is a balcony room, and every room is made up of twin beds. Upon request you can ask that your bed be ‘put together’ to make a large queen size bed… but there doesn’t appear to be any queen size linen on the ship. We asked the room staff to put our bed together, he came in, moved the bedside tables, pushed the bed together and re-arranged the quilts such that we had two single quilts overlapping in the middle. 🙂 It was rather odd – as we could have shoved the beds together ourselves. We were expecting them to re-make the bed with proper queen size linen, but oh well.

The room also has a small desk and chair, and a small sofa (that folds out for a child’s size bed). The desk and chair are handy, but the sofa is really uncomfortable. The room also has a small double closet – though for barely three nights, it is hardly worth unpacking, which is problematic, as there are no suitcase stands and not a lot of floor space to put your suitcase for the duration. We did gain some more useful floor space to be able to live out of our suitcases for the few days after pushing the beds together, so it is workable for just a few days.

The room also has a kettle and a tea making facilities, though we are not provided any milk, so it is for green or herbal tea mostly. Additionally there is a small refrigerator in the room, large enough for a six pack of beer, a few bottles of water and perhaps a couple of soft drinks. You are allowed to bring beer onboard with you, but it is for consumption in the staterooms only and not in the public areas of the ship. When you arrive the fridge will likely be turned off or even unplugged to safe power, so they will tell you there is a ‘cool box’ for already cool things, but if you push the fridge aside you can plug it in easily enough.

All rooms on the ship appear to be exactly the same dimensions, except there are some suites on the top floor, Floor 6, which have a larger living space, bigger couches and mores space all round. Unfortunately these larger, upscale rooms are not accessible by the elevator. So every time you wish to go to your room, you need to go to level 5 and then walk up two flights of stairs – with steps that are of irregular height… I thought I was going to trip on the way back down as the steps are an odd height.

For the first night onboard, dinner is not included – so your guide will recommend that you take something for dinner onboard with you or you can opt to have a set menu dinner in the dining room or served in your room for RMB80 (approximately AU$17 at time of writing). I wasn’t particularly hungry so Mr K ordered dinner to the room – and when it turned up, it took three wait staff to bring it all in! The $17 set menu dinner was like a 7 course meal… sticky rice, a chicken and mushroom dish, some kung pao chicken, vegetable congee, an eggplant dish, a green beans dish, an enormous soup of some sort, some fries and ketchup, a plate of fruit, and some cake, It more than fed both of us and there were left overs that got sent back with the dirty plates. So glad he didn’t order dinner for two!

We discovered that you can get a unlimited bag of laundry done for RMB200 (about AU$40), which means for the 3 nights we are here, we can keep giving them back dirty clothes by 8pm at night and get them back by 8am the next day. When you’ve been travelling for 5 weeks, laundry becomes a big deal, especially when this tour has had no down time for spending on your own to find a laundromat, and the cost of doing laundry in the four and five star hotels they have us staying in is even worse than luxury cruise ship laundry prices! Will update this when the first bagful comes back to see if they have over starched or killed any delicate items. (You have to handwash your smalls when travelling, if they kill the lace or elastics on your bras… I can’t imagine trying trying to shop for bras for someone as busty as I am, in China!) Edit: laundry all came back in good order. Nothing over starched or pressed to within an inch of its life. Bonus!

Announcements over the public address system seem to be coming in Chinese, German and English, and on the first day the announcements were not quite as loud and obnoxious as Guilin airport, but not far off it. However, the first thing in the morning there were PA announcements that came on with soft music followed by a calm, gentle voice telling everyone about breakfast and the shore excursions for the morning. Which just goes to show – they know how to be unobtrusive, but usually chose not to be.

Something else I think is a handy tip… Our breakfast and lunch meals which are included in the fare are served buffet style (dinner is a la carte), and we learned to get to the buffet as early as possible – and I mean EARLY, like as soon as it is announced over the public address system. Not because you might miss out on something to eat – you won’t, there is too much food if anything – but because there are plenty of children who take a second pass at the buffet. On their first pass, they seem to be with their parents who are helping them fill their plates, after that, they are helping themselves, and unfortunately are picking up all the food with their hands. It’s a norovirus outbreak waiting to happen.

The Captain’s Welcoming Banquet was a bit of an eye opener. There were several welcoming speeches in Chinese, English and German (large group of Austrian and Swiss on this trip), and the Europeans were politely listening to the speeches and toasts and applauding their appreciation for the ship’s company where appropriate. The Chinese guests appeared to be not listening at all, paid no attention, didn’t applaud or toast with the rest of us and were already hoeing into the meals placed on the tables. We noticed that the Chinese guests were served different dishes to the foreign guests as well. Not only that, the Chinese guests were literally, ‘eat and run’ – up and out the door within about 20 minutes flat, whereas the foreign tourists were lingering over their meals, engaging in conversation and having additional beverages… beer and soft drink is cheap (not as cheap as on shore, but cheap), wine on the otherhand was ridiculous – an Australian Penfolds Rawsons Retreat Cabernet Sauvignon was 280RMB which is just shy of AU$60 for a AU$10 bottle of wine. Even the few domestic wines on board were that price and higher.

The following night was the Captains Farewell Banquet where we saw the same tableau enacted with different speeches.

What else? Getting on and off the ship is total chaos. The domestic passengers have no problem pushing you out of the way or cutting queues. They also let their children absolutely run amok (we have been told this is the ‘little emperor / little empress’ result of China’s one child policy, but that children are extremely disciplined when bring managed by their teachers at school. Painful but true. Also the tour guides can’t seem to have their speakers on at a reasonable volume so it’s full bore audio assault all the time not a relaxing environment at all.

Overall, the ship was so-so. Not sure if I’d say it was five star ship… but it probably is for China.

Grand Japan – Aomori Nebuta Festival

Posted on August 1, 2015 by borysSNORC

Doing the back to back cruises means we get a second stop in Aomori. Last time here, we did a day trip out to Lake Towada and the Mt Hokkado Ropeways, so this time we decided to go down town and check out the famous Nebuta Museum.

Now there is a ship tour that takes you to this museum, but after a tiny bit research, Mr K found out the Nebuta Museum is marked on the map contained in the Aomori Port Guide supplied by the ship’s Port Expert, not as the Nebuta Musuem but as the ‘Wa Rasse House’… and it is spitting distance from where the free shuttle bus drops you off in town. So passengers can get there easily and cheaply without taking the ship tour. Hmmm.

Anyway, the entire town is wrapped up in the Nebuta Festival which is occurring all this week and culminating in a large parade that runs all next week. The Nebuta Festival is thought to be a combination of the Chinese Tanabata Festival and the local customs of the Aomori farming community. Both involved lanterns and are believed to have naturally blended together over time. The name ‘Nebuta’ comes from the adjective for ‘sleepy’ in local dialect as the primary goal of the festival is to wake people up during the long hot draining days of summer! We can certainly voucher for that. The festival attracts about 3 million people each year and runs along a parade route of about 3.1km with up to 22 enormous handmade floats.

The Nebuta Museum currently houses about five floats from the most recent festival, and the museum was created to allow people to get a closer look at the floats, as during the chaos of the festival, there is no chance to get up close to them to appreciate the artworks. Each float is nine meters wide, sever meters long and about five meters high.

The creators of the Nebuta floats are actually known as Nebuta artists – this is a full time occupation, and is not a job done solo. The Nebuta artists have a team of craftsmen and electricians who help them turn their artistic visions into reality. It takes an average of three months to make a Nebuta float – sometimes more for the larger, more elaborate floats.

The Nebuta masks on display at the museum were all made by current Nebuta artists, and these apparently are abstracted self portraits, but I am no sure about that. The Festival also engages the ‘haneto’ dancers of region who do plenty of jumping and chanting in time to loud music and lots of drums.

   The entire place is quite amazingly beautiful and so unique, and considering it was barely AU$6 per person in entry fee, was very interesting and well worth stopping in. Due to the festival at the moment there was a large market of street food happening right outside the museum… selling grilled octopus, chicken on a stick, tempura vegetables on a stick, shaved flavoured milk, apple spring rolls (yes, you read that right and they were delicious!), and all sorts of yummy things.

Grand Japan – Kanazawa

Posted on August 1, 2015 by borysSNORC

Had no idea what to expect from Kanazawa… (after Maizuru, though, expectations were pretty low 😉 ). We did our research of course, and realised pretty quickly that it is a largish place (pop. 460,000) and the sights we wanted to see were quite spread out. So decided to do another ship tour as we would have been up for very expensive cab rides anyway, and this way we get dropped in nice and close to the things we want to see as well as a guide who can hopefully give us a pile of additional local information on the places we wanted to visit.
Kanazawa, in the Ishikawa Prefecture, is one of the few remaining castle towns of Japan and is best known for Kenroku-en Castle and Kenroku-en Garden complex, and it’s extremely well preserved samurai and geisha districts. It also has a lot of beautiful temples (Japan has temples, temples, everywhere!) and is well known for it’s traditional arts and crafts – especially the gold leaf work that is so prevalent in many Japanese decorative arts pursuits – and has a lot of museums. We chose to go tot he Kenroku-en Gardens, followed by the geisha district and the samurai district.

The Kenroku-en, Edo period, Garden, is regarded as one of the top three gardens in Japan. The name kenroku means – ‘combined six’ and was inspired by a famous Sung Dynasty garden in China that dictated six attributes are required for ‘perfection’: seclusion, spaciousness, artificiality, antiquity, abundant water and broad views. Kenroku-en has all these attributes. Originally the garden just belonged to an outer villa of the Kanazawa-jo (Kanazawa Castle), but was later enlarged to serve the castle proper. The castle was completed in the early 19th century and the gardens were opened to the public in over 135 years ago in 1871. It was truly beautiful, full o graceful ponds, steams and waterfalls, quaint bridges and little teahouses. I wish we had more time here to just find a seat with a lovely vista and listen to the water trickling by.

During the 15th century, Kanazawa had an autonomous Buddhist government that was ousted in 1583 by Maeda Toshiie – head of the powerful Maeda clan. Kanazawa apparently means ‘golden marshes’ and the region was extraordinarily wealthy given its rice growing capacity – some 5 million bushels of rice per annum and this wealth allowed the Maeda to heavily patronise the culture and the arts. Thanks to its lack of military targets, the city was spared most of the destruction of WWII, meaning that its veritable plethora of religious, historical and cultural sites are remarkably well preserved, and I never would have thought it possible, but I believe Kanazawa’s historical districts are even more beautiful than Kyoto.

After the gardens we went to the Higashi-chayamachi, Kanazawa’s famous geisha district. The entire area is a beautiful atmosphere of stunning Edo architecture, with many of the areas okiya (geisha houses) and ochaya (tea houses) built in the early 1800s. In its heyday, the Higashi-chayamachi boasted over 400 registered geisha working in the various ochaya. Now there is about 40 geisha in the area and most of them own and operate their own tea houses. They no longer live in okiya and are no longer beholden to the powerful matriarchs who traditionally controlled the okiyas.

We had the good fortune to meet a lovely lady, Hanako. She was standing outside her ochaya watching a flood of tourists come through what is probably a rather quiet area during the day. I stopped and bowed, said ‘Konnichi wa’, and told her she looked beautiful in her sheer black kimono. We struck up a conversation and it turns out Hanako owns the tea house she was standing by, and has been a geiko for many years.

She is one of the few geiko of the Higashi-chayamachi who entertains foreign clients during the day as she has excellent English and French, but she made a point of telling me that her night clients are chosen in the traditional fashion – they must be introduced by someone who already patronises her tea house and has become a trusted client. I think she was wanting to make sure to let us know that she doesn’t entertain just anyone, even though she does entertain foreigners. We spoke briefly about dance, music, and the artistry that successful geiko must attain.

Hanako told me that playing the shamisen (three stringed lute/guitar type instrument) was her particular talent. It was such a wonderful encounter. I had an opportunity to tell her how fascinated I was with the geiko training and lifestyle, and how I feel we have nothing like it in the West. I asked her what it was like, entertaining such diverse and varied people and asked if she enjoyed making conversation with so many different clients. Hanako said she very much enjoyed her work, and had met ‘many intelligent and power-like people’. She was extremely gracious,and was as curious about the Diamond Princess cruise ship and how many people were on it etc, as I was curious about the life of this real life geiko. I could have talked with her for hours, but felt I couldn’t keep her (her time is money after all!), and formally thanked her for speaking with me as we left ‘Duomo-arigatou-gozimas’. Yes, it’s taken a while but I have acquired some basic Japanese so as not to embarrass myself. Meeting Hanako just made my day!

After a lovely wander through the Higashi-chayamachi geisha district, we then made our way to the Nagamachi samurai district. We had an opportunity to enter the Nomura Samurai Houses which was built in the 1770s. It offers a unique look at how a middle class samurai warrior lived. It is also well known for its private garden and proudly displayed a plaque near the front door listing it as the number one private garden in all Kanazawa. The Nomura House has some beautiful artefacts on display, some armour, painted screens, a private house shrine/altar, and some other Edo period personal effects etc.

Then it was back to the ship – takoyaki on the pier and home on the Diamond Princess again… what a wonderful place Kanazawa turned out to be. It definitely exceeded expectations and is a very successfully blended historical / modern city. Have to put it on your list, I think I’d stay here a couple of days in order to be able to take in the sights as well as have time to explore the traditional crafts practiced in the city.

Grand Japan – Maizuru

Posted on July 31, 2015 by borysSNORC

Maizuru…
Port gateway to the beautiful, timeless city of Kyoto home to more UNESCO heritage sites than you can poke a stick at. Maizuru is where we were supposed to port this morning. However, thanks to an unforeseen mechanical issue in the middle of the night, we have arrived in Maizuru two hours late – which is proving right inconvenient to those who were planning 12 hour day tours to Kyoto, given that Kyoto is 70mins drive away. We spent nearly a week in Kyoto before joining the cruise, so our day today consisted of, sleeping in, waiting for our 10:30am call to go through the Japanese immigration procedures (again), then heading into Maizuru to maybe have a look around the red brick warehouses which have been converted into a Torpedo Museum, or go hunt for some fresh sushi, and definitely go find some free wifi. 🙂 This is in no small part because when you look up Kyoto in the Lonely Planet, it takes up about 70 pages of the 600 page book, whereas when you look up Maizuru, it has half a paragraph and that basically says, ‘Maizuru is a bustling port city that services the beautiful historical city of Kyoto – so go there if you want to see anything interesting’. No shit. Even the onboard ‘Shore Expert’ on the ship is quoted as saying there is nothing much to do in Maizuru. So needless to say, we were in no hurry to get off the ship … unlike many of our fellow passengers who were quite put out to hear that we had issues during the night that were going to cut their tours to Kyoto short. (For the record – I am really impressed at the way the shore tours being cut short, is being handled… most of the full day tours include a lunch break somewhere which usually means, a drive to a lunch venue and then an hour to an hour and a half for the busload of people to be fed. So they informed everyone that their tours would be skipping lunch and they would be refunded between USD$25-$30 for the lunch they were missing, but doing this would allow participants to still maximise their time in Kyoto, to still see the amazing sights they were travelling all that way to see. Very clever and well done in my book. Another big tick as to why you would book a tour through the ship rather than make your own arrangements when travelling abroad in countries where you have communications and language barriers.)

The immigration system here is quite strict, well compared to the wishy washy lack of even stamping passports that goes on between Australia and New Zealand and the complete lack of procedures between many European countries. The way the ship operates is to bring the Japanese Customs officials onto the ship, set them up in the Club Fusion Bar (which is Deck 7 Aft), and allocate passengers a time to come down to go through the immigration process – paperwork, passports scanned, photo taken, finger printed. We went through this entering Japan at the airport, and again re-entering Japan from Russia, and now we have to do it again as we re-enter from South Korea. No biggies. Except that on the Russia re-entry, no one seemed prepared to wait for their allotted time. So, when we turned up at the 10:30am time on our card… we found a queue that snaked back past the Atrium. :/ It took an hour and a half to get to the front of the queue and was well after midday before we got off the ship that day.

So today, all the same bureaucracy is going down. We’ve been informed not to go down to immigration until 2 hours after the time allotted on our original cards (issued before the mechanical issues in the middle of the night)… but do you think the passengers are doing what they’ve been asked? Not on your life. Obviously those on tour have been given priority times over people like us who have no particular plans for the day (and so they should), but given there is very little to do in Maizuru, I can’t for the life of me figure out why somewhere around 500 or more people are lined up from the Club Fusion Bar, the entire length of the ship to the Princess Theatre (as Deck 7 Forward as you can get). Crazy.

<<video>>

It’s now about midday, and almost two hours after our original allotted time, so just about the time we have been told we can go through the immigration processes – and there is still a queue of well over 150 people down there. Where do they think they are going? The ship is in port until 11pm tonight, so even if you had things to do ashore today (in beautiful, culturally significant downtown Maizuru?!), I can’t see the point in standing in a queue for hours getting cranky about things that are beyond everyone’s control. I guess we will just have to ring for tea for two and enjoy an elegant morning tea while we wait for the queue to dissipate. 😛

*insert elegant classic music to accompany our civilised tea for two in the stateroom*

So, we eventually went down to the Club Fusion immigration at about 1:30pm. Would you believe we waited less than five minutes and were processed back into Japan? Fancy that. Oh and look, we still have 10 hours to spend in Maizuru, famous port town to Kyoto.

We did end up heading off the ship around 2pm… mostly in hunt of two things – wifi and fresh sushi. 😀 We took the five minute shuttle that dropped us into the centre of town, which of course is the JR station and then wandered over to the nearby markets/covered shopping street and went to see what we could see. And what we found was a very typical port town without much to see. As it was so late and the population of Maizuru is not huge, nearly every restaurant we went past was closed. Restaurant hours being typically between 11am and 2pm, and then re-opening at 6pm and open to midnight or some even said 3am. So we failed on the sushi front.

But we did find the visitors information centre which was all set up for the tourists off the ship. There were ladies doing tea ceremonies for people, there were others playing shakuhachi, people trying on yakuta, groups folding origami and of course, heaps of us sitting around enjoying the music and the free wifi. Happy, happy, joy, joy all round.

So glad we spend nearly a week in Kyoto before the cruise, instead of trying to cram so many culturally significant sights into the one day available through the Maizuru port. Many people on the ship were less than happy at dinner tonight.

Grand Japan – Hakodate

Posted on July 23, 2015 by borysSNORC

Hakodate is the southern most port of Hokkaido and faces Aomori (tomorrow’s port) across the Tsugaru Straits. Another beautiful city famous for its history, amazingly fresh seafood, unique shopping and unusually scenic cityscape.

More famous fish markets! I’d love to live in walking distance to somewhere like this. Fresh fish and seafood right at your doorstep would be amazing and so many sushi restaurants you are the totally spoiled for choice.

After wandering the morning markets which spans four city blocks has over 400 vendors, we went looking for the Red Brick Warehouses. This is Hakodate’s historic waterfront district which marks the site where the shipyards and original foreign settlements were located. Now, they are transformed into atmospheric shopping centres and the enormous Hakodate Beer Hall. We wandered around shopping for a bit… we seem to be accumulating more and more fragile items, more is the pity – it’s going to make for a packing challenge and a half!

From there we went to the Goryokaku Historic Corridor, which contains, the very cool Goryokaku Tower which has some observation decks that we went up to have a look over the Goryokaku Fort.

In 1854, the Tokugawa shogunate ended its period of isolation that had lasted for over 200 years, and concluded the Treaty of Peace and Amity between the United States and the Empire of Japan. Commodore Perry, who came with his fleet to inspect Hakodate following its designation as an open international port was instrumental in negotiation the American integration into the area.

The Hakodate Magistrate, who was appointed by the Tokugawa shogunate to govern Hakodate and Ezo promoted land reclamation and industrial development while fortifying the defensive capabilities of the area. The Goroyokaku Fort was modelled on European citadel towns.

Construction of the Fort began in 1857 and professional tradesmen and labourers came from all over Japan for the construction of the moat, the stone walls , government offices and housing for government officials. Fort Goryokaku was completed in 1864.

The Fort was overtaken by deserters of the shogunate army, despite the new Hakodate Government sending garrison troops to attacked the deserts on their approach. The deserters were more battle experienced and they routed the garrison troops. Takeaki Enomoto, the leader of the deserters, entered Fort Goryokaku followed by his men flying the Rising Sun flag. The armies of the new Meiji government eventually fought back after many other skirmishes, and regained control of the Fort (lots of people and historical events deleted here, but that’s the Readers Digest version).

The beginning of the Meiji Era saw the end of the turbulent Restoration period, and the Fort evolved into an area of industry. One of the things the Fort was used for was ice. “Goryokaku Ice” was collected and sold from the fresh water in the moat in areas as remote as Honshu… apparently the ice trade from the moat’s fort became quite the thriving industy.

This is the Magistrates house. Built in the late 1800s, it has recently been complete renovated/restored and now looks completely new inside. We have seen plenty of buildings (mostly temples) from this era, but nothing like this. This building has been restored in accordance with the original plans and using the original materials… this is what one of these gorgeous buildings would have looked like when they were brand new and built for purpose. I love the tatami mats everywhere – it has me wondering why our floors at home have hard tiles anywhere in our houses, I also love the multipurpose layout of most buildings – a room can have many purposes depending on the time of day and the day of the week. It’s very versatile with all the sliding screens making for private and open spaces.

So, after checking out the Magistrates House, and a rather big day of running around Hakodate we head back to the ship for a bit of late lunch and potter about before tonight’s outing.

The ship was having a traditional folkloric dance group on board and we tried to catch some of it before we had to head out. It was some dancers dressed as maiko and geiko. I’ve never seen any kind of dance quite like it… The movements of the dance seemed in no way connected to the beat or rhythm of the music. Just bizarre.

(sorry about poor image quality but it was all I could do under the theater conditions).

After this, a little ten year old boy came out and did a traditional samurai dance culminating in a hari-kari ritual suicide enactment we decided to call it quits and joined our tour group… weird.

Off to the Mt Hakodate Ropeway which is a cable car to a famous observatory/lookout with Japan’s third best view (and before anyone asks – No. I have no idea what the number one and two best views are, but they very proudly boast this as the third).

Crammed into bus. Walked up loads of steps. Crammed into gondola and up we went.