A brief synopsis. The actual Pac Rim Trip was only 2 weeks long, from 6-19 January. I was part of a group that left a week early - bound for the islands in Southern Thailand. We later linked up with the rest of the group in Hong Kong.
Thailand
Just lazing around on the beach with my beer and Cal colors.
To start, Koh Pa Ngan was great. Not only was it the longest week of my
life, but it was also the most relaxed I had been in a long time. The
weather was warm enough to sleep on the beach but not humid. There are
few people on the island, and everything is cheap. I paid $40 for 6
nights of accomodations, breakfasts and dinners. Beer was $2 a bottle
and we spent many pleasurable hours laying on the beach. To give you a
taste of how our hectic days would progress, imagine gently waking up to
the sound of small waves rolling up on the beach. You get up and take a
drink from the bottle of water at your feet, get dressed, and walk down
the hill to the beach. If the restaurant isn't open yet, you take off
your sandals and lay in the hammock waiting for someone else to get up.
Maybe the kitchen is open and you order some rice porridge and a beer,
after which you go back to the beach. At 11:00 or so, Eric and Marcin get
up and around 1:00 we decide to go somewhere. When we get to our beach
of the day, it's more lounging, eating, and drinking. Finally, we head
back to our bungalows for more of the same and to turn in for the night.
Can you believe that we were able to keep this pace up for six days?
What's a tropical beach without a gorgeous sunset to end the day?
This is the view from the beach 10 feet in front of our bungalow
At least we were settled for New Year's Eve. We started out our
festivities at our bungalows, the bar at Thong Young. After several
mini bottles of Jack Daniels, two bottles of Mae Khong whisky, and
numerous beers, we were ready to head into Haad Rin to
join the rest of the island in welcoming in the New Year. Haad Rin in
a backpacker's mecca. There a few regular tourists and everyone was out
on the beach drinking and eating. We had dinner and more beer, then
headed out to the beach. Marcin, Henry,
and Kevin promptly fell asleep. True to nature, I went out to find
fireworks - which I found. Unfortunately, I don't remember much after
that other than at some point I had a cigarette and was firing rockets over the crowd. I also remember some passerb
y asking "is that safe?". - I'm sure it was.
Coral Bay, a fairly nice resort on the other side of the island. We paid $1.20 per night for accommodations at our bungalow..
On 2nd, we went across the island to another beach. The beaches only got better as we went along. This one had nice warm shallow water and a sand bar that we all camped out on. I took a hike around the headland and came upon Coral Bay. The beach here
looks pretty much like the one we were camped out on. It was at this beach that Henry started to absorb the group's bad karma. While wading around the water, he cut his foot on the coral (#1). The bar we ate at, had some of the best yellow Thai curry I
have ever had (at $2). The next day, we took one of the worst roads I have ever seen and ended up at beach #3. Once again more lazing around and hiking. We tried to walk over the top of one of the headlands and couldn't find a route, so we decided to
wade around the shore. Bad idea. The water was fairly deep, we had to fight surf, and the rocks were very slippery. We had just gotten on top of our first rocks when Henry (recurring theme here) slipped and fell, slicing up his leg in the process (#2)
As we cruised Koh Samui on our mopeds, we came upon a butterfly garden and Marcin found a caterpillar to play with.
Once again, Henry got hurt (#3). It takes some time to get used to riding a scooter and he just about had the hang of starting when gravity took hold of him and threw him to the ground. Unfortunately, the scooter fell over onto his bad knee and bad thin
gs happened. Fortunately, Henry is such a buff dude that the fall didn't injure the knee as badly as it could have. I'm sure that if it had been anyone else, it would have been worse - then again none of us fell off our scooters. The scooters were grea
t. For 150 Baht (US$6) we got them for the whole day and there is not much on Koh Samui that you can't see in a day.
Here is another picture of the falls. We had to hike up almost 1.5 kilometers uphill to find it.
I nearly ran the whole way up and upon reaching the falls, promptly collapsed. Once we saw it though, it was quite nice. Unfortunately, we couldn't spend to much time admiring the falls because it was getting late in the day and 1) we didn't want to mak
e the climb down in the dark and 2) we didn't want to ride our mopeds in the dark.
Helen, Kevin, and I left on the early ferry the next day to visit Chaiya and then to take the train north to Bangkok. Chaiya unfortunately doesn't have much to see. I was expected something more like Ayuttaya which we saw last year. Chaiya reputedly ha
s wats and temples, but no one knew where they were. As a result, we spent the afternoon wandering around the town (at least we saw an authentic Thai town because we were the only tourists there) while we waited for the train to Bangkok. At long last, t
he train arrived.
When we bought the tickets (fairly cheap) we were expecting European type sleeper cars where there are 4-6 people to a compartment. We got on the train to discover a Pullman type sleeper where all the bunks are arranged along the length of the train. We
were all sitting there chatting until the bed maker appeared, shooed everyone out of their seats, and literally made everyone's bed. After that, there wasn't much to do except go to sleep. We finally arrive in Bangkok early in the morning and meet ever
yone else at the Holiday Inn, Bangkok.
In Bangkok, I went down to Khow San Road again to do some shopping and at a lot of beef noodle dishes. I think that the only thing that I bought were some polo shirts and ties.
Shenzhen and Guangzhou
Henry and Carol at lunch for dim sum. No turtle soup this time.
To me, Shenzhen is like Jakarta, interesting but only for a day. As
Jerry Chen put it, it was "the land or not quite right". Shenzhen is
one of the special economic zones and at 17 years old is a very young
city. At times it seemed like a third of the skyscrapers were under
construction. The pace of development itself
was amazing. However, there is not much beneath the facade and little
culture or history to be found. After the newness wore off, I think
that everyone got kind of bored.
An interesting thing happened to us in Shenzhen. We were walking around
in the "cultural village" next to the hotel looking for a restaurant
that Kevin had seen earlier. We finally find it and the hostess motions
us in. When we sit down, we asked for an English menu and realize that
it doesn't do much to help us. At this
point, the hostess is sitting right next to Kevin pointing out dishes
and the other 3 waitresses are hanging over his shoulder. The hostess
kept pointing to a "Tao Yuan Supper Pot" and giving us the thumbs up, at
which point we shake our heads and move
on. She would keep point things out and inevitably go back to the
supper pot (the most expensive dish on the menu) and give the thumbs up.
Oh yes, when we first sat down, they gave us some peanuts which I
started to eat. When the hostess came over, she pick up the bowl of
peanuts (I was still eating them), smelt them, then took them away.
Anyway, back to the story. At some point, Kevin invited me to jump into
the conversation to which I replied, "you look
like you're doing just fine." Eventually we did get our food which
turned out to be quite good. We ate a lot.
After dinner, we left and ran into the Elliotts, Helen, Jerry, and
Laurel and took them back to the restaurant. Kevin and I wanted the
entertainment of watching them and the hostess go at it. It was amusing.
We only spent 2 or 3 days in Shenzhen after which we took the bus to
Guangzhou. Gaungzhou has a lot more character and history than
Shenzhen. The first place we looked at was the open air market. That in
itself was amazing. As the joke goes, what is the only thing with 4 legs
that a Cantonese won't eat -- a table. Everything imaginable could be
found at the market. The first set of stalls were dried fruits,
mushrooms, herbs, centipedes, scorpions, lizards and everything else.
Then we got to the live animal area. Dogs, cats, poultry, fish, turtles,
live scorpions, rats, were kept live in cages and people would just come
by and pick out what they wanted. I was most fascinated by the bucket of
scorpions and the three men who were crouched over it picking out
scorpions with their chopsticks. Makes you wonder, how do you tell if a
scorpion is good or not?
After 2 days in Guangzhou, we took the hydrofoil back to Hong Kong. For
some reason, it was bitterly cold in the boat and no one would turn the
heater on. We all started to take out all the jackets and coats we had
in our bags and still froze.
Hong Kong
Hong Kong lights up after dark. This picture is taken from the top
of Victoria Peak
Of all the cities we visited, Hong Kong was my favorite. There is a
character and personality that can't be found anywhere else in the
world. There is something for everyone.
One of the things I was looking for in Hong Kong was a new Mah Jongg
set. As we wandered though the Central section, we ran into Leslie and
Tony who later referred us to a Mah Jongg dealer. We stopped by later
in the week. I was shown an antique bone and bamboo set which I really
liked. The price started at 1000 HK$ and I negotiated down to 800 HK$.
The company visits in Hong Kong were really good. First Pacific gave us
a good overview of the telecom market in Hong Kong and detailed
information on how they were going after the market. We were also able
to be very aggressive in our question and answer session and to their
credit, they fielded our questions well. In the hour between First
Pacific and the alumni reception went out to the Hard Rock Cafe and had a
beer.
The alumni reception was pretty good and we met a lot of people including
some of the exchange students that had been here in the fall, Juanna and
Daphne. After the reception, we all walked over to the Milk Bar where we
met up with a bunch of MBA's from Columbia and Stern who were doing
consulting projects in the area.
The following day, Henry and I met up with Carol Chang who had been an
exchange student in our first year. She now works for (I'll find the
name somewher) and we had dim sum then a tour of the store.
One of the sights that everyone should see is the top of Victoria Peak.
Kevin and I took the subway over to the Hong Kong side, then on the way
over to the tram station, toured the Bank of Shanghai and Bank of China
building. These too are worth seeing. We also cut through the Hong Kong
Park which is worth seeing too. The best time to be up on Victoria Peak
is just before sunset. It was great to watch the sun set and all the
lights in the city come on one by one.
Tokyo
Café 7-5 at the Roppongi Crossing is nice for people watching. Here, Jerry gets caught ogling.
Once again, we found ourselves back in Roppongi where the foreigners hang out. The easiest meeting place is Café 7-5 right across from the Roppongi Crossing. From the upstairs window, you can sip beer and watch all the people coming into Roppongi for th
e night. Unfortunately, for the rest of the bars we tried, the beer was fairly expensive at 1000 Yen per beer. At $10 a beer on tap, my alcohol tolerance is quite low. We had a good time though and tried out Delaney's Irish Pub (ask Ann Scott and Eliz
abeth Herrick about the SEALS) and the (can't remember the name here) sports bar.
One of the most memorable company visits was to Fujitsu. They gave a good briefing about what they do at the plant and how the business is organized, then took us through a tour of their design facilities. The best part of the demonstration was a neural
net computer they had developed. The robot, which had an arm and a free turning pendulum arm at the end of it, would learn how to balance the pendulum arm. It was really neat just to watch the process of learning. Eventually, the computer learned enou
gh to not only balance the arm, but to compensate when it was pushed.
Jizo-do statues dedicated to unborn children at Hasekammon temple in Kamakura.
Unlike last year, I got out of Tokyo and saw some of the other cities. A group of us blew off the American Chamber of Commerce breakfast (saw them last year and didn't want to pay $26 for breakfast) and went to Kamakura with Todd Young. It was nice to g
et away from the city and see something a little quieter. They have the big buddha and some nice temples there. To see everything would take a full day which we didn't have. The Hasekammon in particular was nice and very picturesque. The jizo-do statu
es are offered by parents who had abortions but the site guide explains them as "children who didn't have the chance to live". The statues at the higher site actually has some of the doll dressed up and offerings of toys left behind.
After 9 hours on a cramped plane, we decide to ride home in style.
Finally, our trip came to an end. After three weeks of traveling, I was ready to come home. The flight home was crowded and we had stereo babies on several sides. At least I had an aisle seat. On the upside, one we arrived at SFO, we took advantage of
a stretch limo to take us home.
One of the Japanese temples in Kamakura, on the western coast of Japan.
One of the beautiful waterfalls on Koh Samui.
Our merry group of Eric Gabrielsen, Marcin Tublywicz, Henry Hwong, Helen Uhrig, Kevin Kan, and myself left at 12:30 on the 29th and didn't set our bags down until 5 pm on the 31st. Again, it was a long trip. I should also mention that Ann Scott and Mark
Goodrich shared our travel adventure but left us in Thailand. Getting to Asia requires lots of flying. In our case, 9 hours from San Francisco to Tokyo and 6 hours from Tokyo to Bangkok. Getting to Southern Thailand, requires everything else. From Ba
ngkok, we took planes, buses, ferries, and taxis until we finally arrived at Koh Pa Ngan. Along the way, our connection to Bangkok was delayed for 6 hours so Northwest, provided 2000 yen ($20) for meals. Twenty dollars buys a lot of food and beer almost
anywhere in the world so we felt quite happy. After a curry rice and two beers, I still had 1000 yen to buy more beer. Either way, we would have had a 6 hour wait at an airport, even if the flight had been on time. When we finally arrived in Ko Pha Ng
an, we were tired and hungry but overall happy about the way things had turned out. If we hadn't been delayed, we would have ended up camping out in the Bangkok Airport for the 6 hours and we wouldn't have had any money for food.