Taroko Gorge

Today we took a trip to Taroko Gorge; I've visited Taiwan seven times in the past two-and-a-half years, and people have always banged on about the need to visit Taroko Gorge, so finally we booked a tour through Golden Foundation Travel. (You can use Expedia to book with them online - 200 USD at the time of writing - if you don't like faxing credit card details around.)

Hotels in Japan with strange names

Today I spent some time being pedantic about how you classify hotels in Japan, and not just because I'm a pedant. Or because one of my hobbies is classifying Japanese hotels. Oh no. Part of my job involves long arguments about whether to class a hotel at Chitose airport as a Sapporo hotel, or a hotel in Chitose, or both, or something else.

(One of my hobbies is arguing the toss over whether Gatwick is really in London or not, but I doubt anyone reads this for the glamourous geolocation of airports.)

Up in the air

Clooney never had to deal with this.

The enormous plume of ash continues to spew across Europe, as those wily Icelanders wreak havoc on the hated bankers of Europe/flee in terror from their exploding glacier.

Seoul'd out

The day started horrendously; bright light was streaming into the room, harsh enough that I had to wear sunglasses to navigate the route between bed and writing desk, and my girlfriend was being sick in the toilet from the comedy wine that she'd drunk in 7-11 the night before. After I'd finished my account of the night's travails, we staggered out to a taxi and sped over to the Holiday Inn, to meet up with everyone from the night before for a bus tour of Seoul.

Our tour guide introduced herself with a string of syllables I had no ability to remember, 'but you can call me Jenny' – a name that bore no resemblance to the Korean that it abbreviated. That's different to Hong Kong, where people also have an English name that bears no relation to their Chinese one, but while the Koreans have names that are recognisably English ones, half the people in Hong Kong have English names like 'Banana' or 'Centipede' or 'Laboured Stereotype About Another Culture'.

Travelling again

A quarter of the year has passed, and at last I'm back at Hong Kong International.  There's a certain joy to travelling through this airport, from the spectacular ease to everything.  This can leave some people confused - it seems whenever I queue up for tickets for the Airport Express, the person in front of me never believes that you can actually check in for your flight at the station, and the machine isn't just going to gobble up your ticket and leave you standing like an idiot in the middle of Hong Kong, having to pay again to get on the train.

Did we British teach the people of Hong Kong nothing while we had the lease?  Surely 150 years is long enough to inculcate confusion, disappointment and mindless adhesion to overcomplicated bureaucratic procedures in a population.

Nobody loves a tourist

I've been reading A Corkscrew is Most Useful, a book about travel writers in the nineteenth century.  I've learnt several things from this:

• Thomas Cook, possible inventor of the package holiday, started off with outings for members of temperance societies.  And 150 years later, we had Club 18-30.  I think that's known as 'emergent behaviour'
• Even in the 1850s, people were already complaining that tourists had got to all the best places and were ruining them for proper travellers
• Richard Burton (the writer, not the husband of Elisabeth Taylor) was tutored by a man whose chief pedagogical device was a horsewhip.

My own father never paid for me to be tutored by anyone who employed any form of flagelation as a classroom aid.  More's the pity. I'd have lost the skin from my back and gained some useful experience for later life.

Future transport of delights

Last night I booked flights for Seoul, the most expensive ones I've purchased to fly within Asia.  I found that a little bit of a daunting prospect, but then it will be only the second time I've left Hong Kong this year - after my triumphant return to Britain in February.  Or unless I scamper over to Macau in the meantime.  So perhaps I have the right to treat myself to the joy of sitting in a metal cylinder thousands of feet above the ground for a few hours.

Singapore

Went to Singapore. Didn't die. Went home again.