Asia Mega Tour II Retrospective - Part Three

So for this last installment of the great review of the Second Asian Mega Tour, I am going to list all of the wonderful experiences and people that we met along with links to the posts if you'd like to revisit them.

• Sightseeing Train in Kyushu
• The wonderful singing canal boatman in Yanagawa
• The lovely weaver in Fukuoka
• Getting to wander an empty temple in Kyoto
• Our incredible photo workshops in Kyoto and Tokyo
• The geek culture scene in Namba-Nisanbushi Osaka
• Tamsui, Taipei temple celebration
• Our Maokong Gondola experience talking with the Taiwanese couple
• The guides and talking with the Taiwanese soldier during our Taipei walking tour
• The Takoro Gorge and Taiwan East Coast
• Cremation ceremony, coffee and walking through the village in Bali
• The Galungan temple ceremony experience
• Our wonderful Bali driver Putu
• The afternoon at the warung with the gamelan
• Kula Lampur cityscape and the Petronas Towers
• Eating in Langkawi and the amazing Coffee Warung and its Nasi Lamak
• Massive kindergartner hide and go seek in Tokyo
• Outdoor free theater in Shinjuku
• Culinary Backstreets Tour in Tokyo
• Quest for the one true Ramen in Shin-Yokohama
• And last BUT NOT LEAST, the wonderful experience of sharing photography and blogging all through the trip with my Love!!!!!

Asia Mega Tour II Retrospective - Part Two

Continuing on with the deep reflective dive into our trip.

Things we were surprised by:

• Amount of English in Japan - Everything we read said we'd find little English. Instead we found most places, even out in Kyushu, a wide prevalence of understanding and use of basic traveler English and many more English menus than we would have expected

• Credit Card Usage in Japan - Again all we read warned that Japan was mostly a cash economy. But no, we were able to use our credit cars at the majority of places we shopped and ate.

• Room Sizes - Warnings and reviews about the small size of rooms especially in Japan before going, for the price we were paying (NOT super premium), we found the rooms as good as what we find in Europe.

• Fitting in and Not Being Stared at - There wasn't anywhere on this trip where we felt people were looking at us because we were Westerners. A big difference from our experience in China the year before. 

• Feeling at Home in Japan - Other than the language and alphabet, the whole vibe of building construction, urban layout, transportation systems, store layouts, etc. in Japan was totally not jarring. I was rather amazed by how at home I felt there.

• Taipei - My favorite place we visited. It was friendly. There was way more English used and understood than in Japan. People were helpful, even solicitous. In six days there we did not do everything on our list. The closeness of wilderness and countryside to city. It is on my short list of places I really want to go back to.

• Accepting Being Taken Care of In Bali - Wife and I are pretty self-reliant and at least up to now, not all the comfortable having people who are 'help' doing things for you. Maybe we perceive having 'help' as being snooty. However, finding ourselves in a villa with all kinds of help to do cleaning, cooking, washing, laundry, we found ourselves getting accepting it all with aplomb pretty darn fast.

Things not loved:

• Eating in Japan - Many people expressed surprised when we commented on this during our trip. But even before going, I would have said that Japanese was on the bottom of my list of Asian cuisines liked. But particularly for Wife, the flavor emphases and the preponderance of highly fatty meat were highly negative. It was only by our last stay in Tokyo that we found means of dealing with the situation.

• Airbnb in Asia - We only did it in Japan but the difficulty of finding where you were when dealing with a foreign alphabet and the tendency of these places to be crammed with bedding to accommodate the largest number of people made them less that relaxing for us.

• Discount Airlines - We are really getting tired of dealing with the restrictions of discount airlines. Unfortunately they are frequently the best connections and the price differential can be significant. Not to mention a lot of the full fare carriers have similar restrictions.

• Driving in Bali - Ugh, developing country driving. Hard on the body. So long to get anywhere.

• Being Overwhelmed in Tokyo - The sheer mass of humanity that you encountered was really too much. The scope and scale of everything was a bit much for us. Wonder if we would have felt different if we had started here or done this when we were not tired and at the end of the journey

Things Loved!!

• Rail Travel in Japan - Yes there are some quirks you have to figure out about making certain reservations and paying for the journey and the reservation separately but OMG it is so easy to get around, so dependable, and so convenient. When you add the fact that each major train station is like a little city with hotels and department stores around it, you can make the train the focus of your travel. And there is the whole sub-culture of the tourist trains going into the countryside too!

• Japanese Gardens - Love em. When we go back to Japan it will be to focus on tourist trains and gardens

• Japanese Department and Convenience Stores - Oh if only we had figured out earlier that the large department stores have restaurants on their top floors and grocery stores with prepared foods in the basement, I would have just found where the largest department stores were and made hotel reservations near them! And if you needed a quick meal, some inexpensive whiskey, an umbrella, a cash machine...there were the plethora of 7-11's, Family Marts and Lawsons.

• IC Cards - Whether it was the Easy Card in Taipei or the Suica Card in Tokyo, these prepaid cards made transportation so incredibly easy and there were discounts on transportation associated with using them.

• Taipei Metro - Not sure quite what made it different but it just seemed that his system of anyone we used was the easiest to navigate and the most comfortable. It was one of the many reasons I loved Taipei so much. 

• Experiences in Bali - I will give a review of all of our experiences in the next post but truly some of the most extraordinary interactions we had were in Bali.

• Architecture in Kula Lampur - All the written material plays down KL as a place to visit other than for eating and shopping. I was totally impressed with the architecture and loved the cityscape especially the Petronas Towers and our spectacular view of them from our hotel!

• Eating in Langkawi Malaysia - A lot of this was because we were with the #2 clan and they love to eat but love of eating doesn't mean that you're always going to find good food. The variety and quality and value we found there was top notch. 

Asia Mega Tour II Retrospective - Part One

After having walked barefoot with only a loin cloth to a lonely spot in the Sandia Mountains where I contemplated for weeks on end existing only tree bark, grubs, rain water, the dew on morning plants and ample amounts of VSOP Cognac, the full truths of the Asia Mega Tour have been organized and are now ready to set down for posterity. It took longer than anticipated to get these truths in written form as Wife had to bail me out of custody after I was arrested for public indecency on my way back from my mountain retreat.

As there is a lot of material, I'm going to put this in three posts. Let's start with the deeper, more navel gazing types of revelations.

• Finding Our Way to Travel - As I mentioned in earlier posts, it was amazing how energized this trip made us feel. I think we have discovered that there is a process that really seems to fulfill all we are trying to gain from travel. That process is going somewhere, going through the initial 24 hours or so of trying to get oriented, followed by another day or two of gradually feeling we have this particular locale understood, followed by another day or two of saying, "Yes, we got this one figured out, we like it, don't like it, would come back, wouldn't come back", after which we are ready to move on. There is something about this process that results in our being stimulated but not overwhelmed and is deeply gratifying too.

• Self-Planning Opens the Door for Experiences - We had so many amazing serendipitous experiences that totally enriched this trip. And I can point to all of them as being a result of our doing our own planning. I am the first to admit that I enjoy doing the travel planning and making all our arrangements. But it also allows us to get ourselves into places that would normally not be on the travel radar screen. And it is these places where we keep running into the experiences that are so enriching.

• We Miss Our Physical Capabilities - When we first were dreaming about traveling like this a decade and a half ago, both Wife and I were big time into hiking. We dreamed of going around the world and being able to combine our travel and hiking loves. Sadly our bodies gave out and hiking a lost pastime long before we got to our ability to travel. We are very, very thankful for the physical ability to do what we still can do. But there is hardly a day that passes on our travels where we encounter something that requires climbing or walking that is now not realistically things we can do. 

• Smaller Versus Larger - There is certainly a point as far as the size and density of a city, its complexity and just the sheer mass of people where Wife and I both kind of shut down. It's hard to pinpoint exactly where this point is. It's not as if we only want to be in small towns and villages. Far from it. We like being in places where they have metros, tram systems and relatively easy to use buses. On this trip for example, Taipei which has 2.7 million in population and 7 million in the region, seemed to us very approachable. While Tokyo with over 13 million in its prefecture and over 37 million in its metropolitan area was just too much.

• Developed Versus Underdeveloped - We find we are somewhat conflicted on our enjoyment of going to a developed country like Taiwan versus an underdeveloped country such as Indonesia (Bali). In a developed country we have significantly more freedom of movement, to get around on our own, sometimes driving, other times using public transportation and always walking. In an underdeveloped country we need to have drivers and walking is much more difficult and dangerous. Water and eating are safe in developed countries. You have to be careful in underdeveloped countries. The starkness of difference in our level of economic well-being and what is encountered in developing countries can weigh on you. But some of the best experiences we've had and most interesting things we've done have been in developing countries.

Asia Mega Tour II - The Trip Home

Our flight home didn't leave until 7 PM so we had some time to kill in Tokyo yet. We went out shopping for various things that children had requested. Unfortunately the Japan they evidently visited or bought things from was an alternative universe from the one we were in. We dutifully showed pictures to various staff at our hotel and at stores only to be met with stares and typically polite Japanese regret that they couldn't help us. At the hotel they even called around to a number of stores for one particular food item with no success. That used up most of our free time.

We were at one of the department stores on this search and I used my new found knowledge to buy some sashimi. Wife wanted Japanese fried chicken and there was a place right next to our hotel. They were cool with me eating my sashimi while Wife ate her chicken. Then we picked up our bags, caught a cab to the train station, took the train to Narita airport. We turned in our IC Suica cards without problem. Actually I had made a mistake and put both our train rides to Narita on one card and didn't have enough to get out but the automatic 'card recharge machine' was down. So they waved us through. This was picked up when I turned in the cards. But then they didn't charge us for it anyway!

We hung out in the ANA business class lounge. Not as good as Singapore Airlines or EVA by far though the guy making sushi, who was a character, gave me an extra piece because I was willing to use my five word/phrases of Japanese with him.

The flight to LA was totally uneventful. We stayed at a hotel very near the airport. We had our traditional first sticker shock meal back in the US where our 10 inch pizza, shared salad and two glasses of wine matched the most expensive meal we ate in two months in Asia.

The next day it was home to Albuquerque where instead of sun and blue skies it has been snowing and highs in the 40's!

We have this process of coming home down to a science. The jet lag has been managed to a minimum. Wife has about two days to catch up on accounting and stuff. I already had my business meetings set up before we ever arrived. It hardly felt like we had left.

We are so incredibly lucky and grateful to have the ability and the wherewithal to do what we do. The traditional postmortem of the trip will be in the next day or so.

It was really, really, really fabulous.

Asia Mega Tour II - Finale, Search for the One True Ramen

With a single day left on two month tour, we were exploring our options within the Tokyo area. I wanted to see some water and had suggested visiting Yokohama, only 30 minutes by train from Shinjuku. As I researched I came across something that struck my eye...the Shin-Yokohama Ramen Museum! What was this? Going to the museum's site I found out a lot about ramen and the fact that the museum's key feature was subsidiary branches of multiple top flight ramen places from around the country representing the best of their regional styles. This led to more research on my part and my finally understanding the component parts of ramen and the wide range of regional variations.

This led to THE QUEST. The Quest for the One True Ramen.

Some history...remember back to our trip beginnings. We were in the south/west of Japan on the island of Kyushu in the cities of Kagoshima and Fukuoka. We'd had all kinds of issues finding food we liked but our fall back was ramen. It was rich, meaty, and had all the flavor points we were looking for. Fast forward to being in Taiwan. It was our last night there and there was a Japanese ramen place in the train station next to our hotel. The ramen there was 'Tokyo style'. That didn't mean much to us but we were very disappointed when our bowls came with a heaping pile bonito flakes on them giving the ramen a distinctly fishy flavor. We didn't think much about this until we finally made our way to Tokyo. Our first meal was ramen and it was nothing like what we'd had when we were down south. The broth was very fishy and they put a dollop of salted fish in oil on top of the bowl. We were very disappointed and feared to try ramen again.

But my research showed the types of ramen, their use of different broth components, flavoring components (called 'tare' it is a strong flavor on the bottom of the bowl), noodle types, noodle length of cooking time, and additions. And I found OUR ramen, the ramen of the south, the ramen of Kyushu, the TONKATSU RAMEN based on a rich pork bone broth and no fish!!!!!  Lo and behold at the Shin-Yokohama Ramen Museum was a place offering the very ramen we sought! The quest began.

First it is necessary to go to Yokohama

Yokohama is a city of 3 million that is part of the 35 million person Tokyo metropolitan area

Compared to the intensity of the areas of Tokyo we'd been in to date, it was an island of calm.

Yokohama struck us as a particularly attractive and photogenic city

Upon our arriving we went from the main train station to a development next door (almost always the case with Japanese train stations from our limited observation)

We noted this mural

 Yokohama was the major port of entry into Japan after it was opened up in the mid-19th century 

This mural has scenes depicting that era

Next we took a water taxi to another part of the city which gave us great views of the city 

The weather was glorious and the inner photographer freshly blooded from his recent workshop came forth

Behold

Study of Yokohama Harbor on a Rising Sun Theme

Study of Yokohama Harbor without Rising Sun

ARG what is this we spy?

Our nemesis - The Cruise Ship

Actually they all seemed to be in places other than Yokohama today

Into the lovely bay side park

Statue notable for something but I forgot to write it down

Hopefully Wife puts it on her blog

Photographer's study of other photographers

Then we went to what was reputed to be Japan's largest Chinatown

There a slew of school children in uniform

Some kind of end of year field trip we suspect

By this time a number of hours had passed and we were getting tired and hungry

We wanted Japanese fried chicken but this was the kingdom of steamed buns and there was none to be found

Wife wisely recognizing the infamous de-I family hunger crabs made a command decision to buy some recognizable spring rolls which we wolfed down

Next we needed to get to a particular train station to get to Shin-Yokohama, a suburb around Shinkasen train station (not the same as the regular station) where the museum is located

Now the quest truly began

Train station

So close looking on the map

So NOT close by way of the feet and attempts to navigate with map and google

But despite the long, hot walk there were still pictures to be taken

And what is this?

Why I believe it is monument in homage to the veritable ramen noodle itself

At last we reached our goal 

Arriving at Shin-Yokohama a Japanese gentleman struck up a conversation with us in English

(very unusual)

He had a warm spot for Americans based on working there

He walked us to the museum

Ah the splendor of it

Inside the museum (which had a steep discounts for seniors thank you - the first and only we'd seen in Asia) - it was laid out as 1950's Tokyo would look like

After some searching, we find our place

Further frustration trying to figure out the system for buying tickets from the machine (too the right) for getting what we wanted

But ultimately the price

THE ONE TRUE RAMEN

Gad it was good

Delicious rich pork broth, crispy fried garlic over the top, highly seasoned pork meat, and NO fish

With extra meat it was $9

I was in heaven 😇

So let us say goodbye to our quest with one last

SIGNS OF THE WORLD

Feral bikes clearly are a big problem in Yokohama

Asia Mega Tour II - Food Tour Japan

With only days left to the mega tour, we had booked a food tour with the company, Culinary Backstreets. We had used these folks for a tour in Istanbul and had had a marvelous experience with our visiting far more of the city than we would have otherwise and learning much beyond food. We were supposed to take a tour with them last year in Shanghai but we had to cancel because of our Vietnam food poisoning. So we were really looking forward to this one in Tokyo.

Our tour took us to two areas of the Tokyo region - Shibuya, the home of the ultra-hip, ultra-chic and then to Kichijoji, a smaller town in the Tokyo Metro area that represents a more laid back lifestyle. Our leader, Noam, an American from San Diego who is married to a Japanese woman and has lived in Japan for 14 years, wanted to give us a taste of the high end Japan and the Japan of every day. 

We also got a lot of food history in. It turns out that many of the foods we associate with Japan come from elsewhere or are relatively recent inventions.

We started off with sushi

We then went through the basement of a large famous department store

We found out that just about every major department store has a food that provides regular groceries, ready to eat food, and gift food. Who knew? No one told me this before going to Japan. This would have changed our eating in the country substantially. We found that this store had a huge sushi and sashimi selection.

Fresh wasabi root...very hard to find

In addition to the regular food, there was food for gifts

Gift giving is a big thing in Japan and they tend to use food as apartments are small and people don't want more things.

So let's say you have a need to by de-I a gift

How about some beautifully perfect, wonderfully packaged mangoes?

Very nice...only $162

What you say that you want to show de-I respect but has a tad lower sticker price

How about some perfect cherries?

A steal at $97

But no. You want to show de-I the respect he truly deserves

How about some melons?

$233 worth of melons buys you a lot of de-I appreciation.

Want to give some great looking sushi?

This sushi packaging one some kind of award for design

Beautiful cut up fruit cups

And a sponge cake whose roots are Portuguese

Then we took the train to Kichijoji

This mural is in the Shibuya Station. Looks Mexican doesn't it

Turns out that this was done by Japanese artist for a Mexican hotel that went belly up before it could  be installed

In Kichijoji, this sign which means nothing in the context of our story

A key market street in the town

Here our goal is minced meat cutlets

Not croquettes

Not Beef cutlet on a stick or pork cutlet on a stick

No Minced Beef Cutlet

There was a long line

They were making them in droves and we stood in line for a while to get them

The finished product

Need some primo meat while you're waiting?

While our minced beef cutlet costs about $2, the meat above costs between $40 and $100 a pound

Enjoying Minced Beef Cutlet goodness

Then on to the artisanal rice cracker shop

Three generations now in the family

The current matriarch 

The current maestro

At his work

Samples of their wares

A good luck piece over the door to the small workplace in back of the store

They buy this from a local temple each year

Next up 

Takoyaki! Octopus Balls!

Who knew that Japan was a major player in the maintenance of octopus fertility?

Japan makes millions and millions of Takoyaki a year

Many of these never make it to the creatures but are shunted aside for food,

Takoyaki production line

Happy octopus ball making guy

Next it was off to a yakatori place

Food on a stick!

We tried all kinds of things including heart, liver and tongue

Boo no chicken skin available today :(

Our group looking very happy sitting traditionally on the floor

We weren't

Even the younger ones were in agony by the time we were done

Next off to a traditional Japanese drinking establishment

An Izakaya where you drink and eat small bits of food

One happy, one not

Mr. F (an Italian working in London) has taken a food challenge from me 

Wife has not

Mmmmm guts

Stewed offal

It was actually really tasty and not chewy or off flavored

Bitter Melon on a stick

A bit...well bitter

As we were drinking and eating away, some candid shots

A customer across the way giving us a toast

It is so interesting to see the behavior of Japanese when they are letting their hair down whether as tourists on the train as we saw earlier or at an izakaya

The lovely Ms. K, an American from Chicago now working in London

After almost 7 hours of activity we took the train back to Shinjuku