Greg and Mandy's Travels

Flight arrived on time mid morning in Brisbane.

Bags took a while to come through, and then they decided to use me as a training run for their custom’s sniffer dog, so we didn’t get the early train we hoped for.

Did our usual skytrain to Eagle Junction, train to Landsborough then bus home via the Uni, and arrived mid afternoon.

This week we’ve walked 133,000 steps, which is 81.4km, and climbed 124 fights of stairs. This brings the daunting total for the trip to 570,000 steps, covering 354 km, and climbing 627 flights of steps. That’s further than Melbourne to Albury, and the same effort as climbing to the top of the Empire State Building 6 times!…

Emerged from our room over the market to search for some breakfast, and ended up getting swallowed up in the teeming mass outside our door. Saturday. Everybody in town was at the market doing their weekly shop, and all of them were using drive-thru.

Walked down a couple of streets where we were expelled out the end of the melee into the side streets like a cork coming out of a wine bottle. Took us a while to find anything that sold coffee – not high on the list of local shoppers buying their bag of bok-choy, but eventually we stumbled on a coffee shop where the server was as surprised to see a customer as we were to find him.…

There’s lots of natural, scenic beauty in Taiwan. It’s a fairly small island and most of the island is mountainous and pretty inaccessible. In world terms not many visitors come here, and really there aren’t that many world-class scenic attractions to see, but it is an interesting place. 

Most visitors confine themselves to three things. The first is a hefty dose of Taipei to get a sense of the history of the people here, and a bit of a clue about why it is one of the world’s major flashpoints. The second attraction that most people go to is down the east coast of the island at Taroko Gorge which we visited on Wednesday.…

Today we were moving from the east side of the Taiwan island to the west side and, as we’ve seen before, the only way to get from one side of the island to the other is by going all the way around the coast to avoid the huge mountain range running down the spine of the country. 

So, we took a train this morning from Hualien all the way back north to Taipei, then transferred onto another high speed rail train and went south for another two hours. Very uneventful, and very comfortable, but still five hours in a train is a long time.…

Before the Chinese and before the Japanese, somewhere around the 17th or 18th century, indigenous tribes finally traversed the central mountain range of the island from the west, and settled in the area near the east coast now known as Taroko Gorge, forming their own tribal identity and customs.

Taroko Gorge is an impressive 19-km-long canyon and takes its name from the Truku tribe, one of the 16 tribes of Taiwan, and the one that settled in this area all those years ago. Though often referred to as the largest marble canyon in the world and nicknamed “The Marble Gorge” because of the large quantities of the stone in it, the rock is actually a unique combination of marble, granite and quartz micas, giving it a wide range of colours and textures.…

Had a few hours before our lunchtime train out into the countryside, so we hopped on a local bus and went out into the suburbs to visit the National Revolutionary Martyrs Shrine. As one would expect from any (previously) totalitarian regime seeking to honour the martyrs who had died in its formation, it was a very impressive place. More like a small Tiananmen Square rather than a Shrine.

Arrived at 8:55 which was rather fortuitous as the complex opened at 9am with a changing of the guard. Mind you every tour group in the city also came to see it. Ceremonial white uniforms and helmets.…

We had a walking tour of Taipei this morning and, with such a late check in at some unearthly hour of the morning meaning we only had a short sleep, we were a little less organised than usual.

Left early to walk the 2km down to the start of the tour, pausing to grab a coffee and pastry on the way.

There were about 30 in the tour group, which we were told is fairly normal, so we were split into two smaller groups and set off.

But first, to make much sense of it all, you’ll have to endure a potted history of the island.…

Well, that’s it for Japan. We’ve spent 23 days seeing some remarkable things, and trying to make sense of some unfathomable mysteries, and it’s been a fun time.

We had a relaxed check out this morning after our last breakfast of coffee and toast in the ‘shopping street’, and then we walked down to the station in the sunshine after leaving our clear umbrella in the Airbnb for the next guest to use. A bite to eat at the station, then on to our last bullet train to Hakata, which is only one station away from the Fukuoka airport.

Arrived in Hakata early afternoon and had a lot of time to spare before our evening flight, so we walked around the nearby neighbourhoods of Hakata exploring some temples and gardens in the sunshine.…

Three days after dropping the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and the day after the Soviet Union declared war on Japan, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. It was originally destined for Kokora, a very heavily industrialised city nearby, but when cloud obscured the city, the crew of Bockscar diverted to the secondary target, Nagasaki, and dropped Fatman over the city around morning tea time. Estimates are that 130,000 people were either killed or injured, around one third of the population. 

Whether it was the second bomb or the Soviet army rampaging through Japanese held Manchuria that did it is debated, but after a lot of arguing, going against the wishes of a number of his generals, and after a failed coup d’etat, Emperor Hirohito gave a recorded radio address across the Empire on 15 August announcing the surrender of Japan to the Allies.…

Today was the day to explore a whole new side of Japan that most people don’t know about. Nagasaki, for a time, was Japan’s gateway to the world.

Around about 1550 the first foreign traders made their way to Asia from Portugal and bumped into Japan. They started a fairly lucrative trade with Asian countries and tried to tie up the whole of the Asian trade routes. But the Dutch were having none of that. By 1600 they had arrived too, having first established the Dutch East India Company in what is now Indonesia as their base. In 1602 Dutch trading ships started arriving in force, but this coincided with the commencement of the Edo period in 1603 when the newly crowned Shogun seized power from the emperor, and started ruling Japan by himself.…