travel – dangermouse.net

New Zealand, day 4

I had another poor night’s sleep in our hotel room in Auckland, meaning I hadn’t had a good night’s sleep since we left home on Friday. So I was very tried this morning. We slept in a little and crawled down to the hotel breakfast buffet where I just had a bowl of muesli with yoghurt.

We packed our luggage and checked out of the hotel, placing our bags in the car until we left later. Then we met up with my in-laws and they showed us around the centre of Auckland a bit, since they’d been here once before and knew the area. While they and my wife grabbed a coffee from one of the good coffee shops, I explored Albert Park and tried to see if I could spot any more interesting birds for the trip. But all I saw were blackbirds, gulls, sparrows, and pigeons.

Rejoining the others, we walked down to the waterfront area to see what it looked like during the day (after last night’s dinner at the restaurant there). My wife checked out a large souvenir shop while I looked for nearby light lunch options. We needed to eat something before leaving for the airport, but it wasn’t really time for a full lunch. I found a place that does focaccia style pizzas by the slice and grabbed a pepperoni slice, while my wife got a toasted bagel with cream cheese from the shop next door.

Then we headed back to the car park to take the car back to the airport and drop it off at the rental place. We navigated first to a petrol station near the airport to fill up the tank before dropping it off. Once dropped off, we used the shuttle bus to get to the terminal.

We went in through security and passport control and then had some time to kill, extended a bit as our flight was delayed by 20 minutes. Boarding was long and slow because the flight was very full, and it was a single aisle Boeing 737. They also took some passengers’ larger carry-on bags and forced them to check them into the cargo hold. Fortunately they didn’t target us, and we managed to find space in the overhead lockers neat our seats for our bags.

The flight was again fairly short. They provided a dinner meal and I watched two more episode of House of the Dragon. I’m enjoying the series, but I won’t have any easy way to watch any more of it, unfortunately.

We landed at 18:01 Sydney time. Luckily there were no queues at customs and immigration, so we were out of the airport and on a train home very quickly, and walked in the front door just after 19:00. We decided to have a light meal before heading off to pick up Scully from our friends’ place, so I fried some eggs to have on toast. Then we drove over to pick up Scully, who was super excited to see us as usual.

Now we’re back home, and I’ve had a shower to freshen up before bed. Hopefully to sleep well tonight!

New Zealand, day 3

We got up at 07:30 and went out to seek breakfast. We tried Third Wheel Coffee, a place which had the best online reviews and which my wife wanted to try. They didn’t have a full cafe service on the weekend, only take-away coffee and a selection of baked goods. They have some slices, sweet and savoury muffins, banana bread, and an “almond croissant white chocolate blondie”. I tried this last one, which seemed to be a blondie inspired by the marzipan and almond flakes on a croissant. It was dense and sweet with almond paste and chunks of white chocolate. My wife had a slice of the banana bread, which was also very dense and cake-like, with choc chips and walnuts in it.

She also bought a piece of the coffee caramel slice to give to her mother and sister to try. We returned to our room at the motel, where we saw them emerging, and she gave them the slice to try. Then we packed our bags and checked out. We had to wait a little bit for the other two to be ready and check out too, and then loaded up the car.

For our first port of call we drove over to Kerikeri, a town about 20 minutes away, where there was a farmer’s market on in the morning. We got a parking spot very close and explored the market, which was not very big at all, having maybe 20 stalls. One of them was a woman in a caravan selling toasted sandwiches, and one listed in the menu was a Reuben toasty, which sounded good to me as a savoury second breakfast after the almond blondie. So I got one of those while the others explored. my mother-in-law had been craving a banana since yesterday and found a stall selling fresh bananas by the bunch. She asked if she could just buy one, and the man gave her one free of charge!

Having exhausted the market faster than expected, we went looking for a cafe so they could all get coffee. We found Cafe Zest & The Waffle Room, where my sister-in-law also got a blueberry muffin since she hadn’t eaten anything yet except half the caramel slice. As we were leaving, my wife’s younger nephew and his partner arrived. They took our table since they wanted to get spree breakfast too. And as we walked back to the car we passed the older nephew and partner coming towards the cafe too.

Back in the car, we backtracked out of Kerikeri the way we’d come to check out an arts and crafts market that I’d spotted on the way in. It was also right across the road from the Makana Chocolate Factory, which my sister-in-law had wanted to visit as well, so we went for a look in there too. The market was in a large old industrial building of some sort, with internal divisions into workshops, store rooms, and one large cooler room, but now mostly converted into spaces for market stalls. There were a few dozen stalls, as well as a bustling cafe and a butcher and cheesemonger. My wife got an orange and date scone from he cafe and I picked up their “famous Kerikeri cheese scone” for a later snack.

Across the road at the Makana Chocolate Factory we walked into a pleasantly air conditioned display room, which looked into a production room where a couple of workers were hand-finishing chocolate truffles. Another woman gave us free samples of their macadamia butter toffee crunch and an orange fruit jelly. The macadamia crunch was amazingly good, and she said it was their biggest seller by far. My wife bought a box of it as a gift for our friends back home for looking after Scully for us while we are on this trip.

Next we drove out to the old Stone Store, a historic building begun in 1832 and now the oldest stone building in New Zealand. Originally a storehouse, it now houses an antiques and knick-knacks shop. We parked across the river and had to walk across a bridge to reach it. It was a pleasant and scenic walk, with beautiful views up and down the river, flanked by lawns and gardens. On the way back across the river we saw some pūkeko (a.k.a. Australasian swamphens) with young, feeding them. And as we left the car park, we saw our nephews and their partners arriving to go see the Stone Store too.

Next stop for us was Rainbow Falls, another five minutes’ drive away. Here there was a short walk to a series of three lookout spots above the falls. There was also a path down to the river below, but we didn’t bother walking down there as we had another sight to see and were running out of time.

We drove another 20 minutes north-west, down narrower roads ending with a length of dirt road in a heavily forested steep-sided valley. Here was the Puketi Forest Kauri Walk, a short boardwalk track through a stand of enormous kauri trees. As we followed the narrow dirt road down the hillside into the valley, we came across a tour bus ahead of us, and it had to pass another one coming the other way! We’d hoped to have the forest walk to ourselves, but it looked like we might have to share it with a whole bus full of tourists.

Fortunately the bus group took some time to get organised and we took off down the boardwalk ahead of them. We were never among the group, but we could hear the tour leader talking to them all over an amplified loudspeaker the whole time, even when we couldn’t see them through the dense trees. We could also here many birds high in the canopy above us, but never saw any. The forest was dense with ferns and trees, and after walking some way we came across the kauri trees, which were enormous. Huge thick trunks several metres across, towering high into the sky above. They were incredibly impressive, with only the giant Californian redwoods which we’d seen before on a trip to the USA able to compete with them.

Finished with the walk, we returned to the car to set off on the drive back to Auckland. We only backtracked a short way to the nearest intersection and then continued along the dirt road past the paved road we’d come in on. This road continued for several kilometres before eventually becoming paved again. We were headed south on Highway 15, rather than 1 which we had come north most of the way to Paihia on. This route led west around Whangerai instead of through it. It was a slightly longer route, but much more scenic and winding.

We stopped at the first town we came to for lunch, Kaikohe. This was not a big town, and being a Sunday nearly all the shops along the main street were closed. The only place we saw open for food was the Kaikohe Bakehouse, which was doing a roaring trade with people entering and leaving almost non-stop. It boasted an eclectic menu, offering American hot dogs, nachos, butter chicken and another type of Indian curry with rice, Japanese chicken katsu, a range of Chinese stir-fried dishes and fried rice and noodles, and steak, lamb chops, pork roast, and other European style dishes. Oh, and French toast! They also had a range of meat pies, including a butter chicken one which I selected for my lunch. And rows of cabinets full of delicious-looking cakes and slices! My pie was excellent, and I was very tempted by many of the sweets, but decided I’d had plenty of sugar on this trip already so I stayed strong and didn’t get anything.

Hitting the road again, we continued driving on the scenic Highway 15 south until we reached the junction with Highway 1. We stopped near here to fill the car with petrol, at a cost of NZ$82 for about 28 litres. Further along we stopped at the Dome Forest Lookout Walkway, which I thought would have a scenic lookout spot near the car park. But when we looked at the information sign, it said the lookout spot was a 40 minute walk away! We didn’t have time to spare, so we only stay long enough to stretch our legs. But my mother-in-law spotted a New Zealand pigeon in a tree and I spent a few minutes getting a photo.

We arrived back in Auckland just after 18:00. We grabbed a car parking spot in the Wilson car park next door to the hotel we had booked and then checked in. This gave us just enough time to freshen up and change before heading to for dinner, which was booked for 19:00 at Soul Bar & Bistro, on the Auckland Harbour waterfront.

We walked down as a group and found the restaurant facing the picturesque harbour and yacht moorings. The place was decorated all in pink for a special pink theme, with rosé wines featuring on the menu and also some special pink desserts. All the staff were wearing pink as well. We had a very friendly and helpful waitress who cheerfully took our orders. I had the John Dory fillet with Pernod romesco, cherry tomatoes, olives, and almonds, while my wife chose the corn and ricotta tortelli with jalapeño and zucchini. And for dessert I had a Snickers sundae with peanut whipped cream and chewy caramel. The meals were excellent, although honestly I slightly preferred last night’s meal.

After this we returned to our hotel for the night, walking along the beautifully lit main streets of Auckland, to spend our last night of the trip.

New Zealand, day 2

We got up just before our alarm at 07:30. I had a very poor sleep, as I often do on the first night of a trip, but my wife slept soundly all night. We wandered down the street to the centre of Paihia to find a cafe for breakfast. We grabbed an outside table at Letz Cafe, which had muesli bowls and also smoothie bowls, which was essentially a muesli bowl with the yoghurt replaced with one of their range of smoothies. I chose that and got a smoothie with blueberry and some other fruits in it as my choice, while my wife had the plain muesli. As we were finishing off, my wife’s mother and sister walked past and we said the food was good, so they joined us and ordered some breakfast too.

After eating we returned to our room to prepare for the day out. Our first meeting point was at the Waitangi Treaty Grounds, a historical site just a couple of kilometres north up the coastal road. This is where the Treaty of Waitangi, the founding document of New Zealand’s history as a modern country, was signed between the native Maori people and the colonial British. We wanted to walk there, but some others took one of the hire cars and we planned to meet there for our guided tour which was booked at 10:00.

On the walk I got a little distracted by spotting several interesting birds, including variable oystercatchers which I tried to get some photos of. We also might have underestimated the walking time, so we ended up arriving with only a couple of minutes to spare. My wife’s eldest nephew checked us in and we joined a large tour group of about fifty or sixty people. The staff gave us earpieces to listen to the tour guide’s commentary, which was good because we ended up a long way from the guide at many points on the tour.

It began with a walk through the gift shop, which I thought was very strange. Then we proceeded outside and down the hill to two large wooden canoes, built in the style of the old Maori canoes, out of kauri wood, and sheltered under a long wooden roof. These canoes seat upwards of a hundred people, and are floated and used for celebrations annually on Waitangi Day, 6 February, the anniversary of the signing of the Treaty. The guide explained these are not original historical canoes; because the wood eventually rots they build new ones every few decades.

From here we walked uphill to a grassy area with an expansive view of the Bay of Islands. Here was the Treaty House, the original house occupied by the British Resident minister, James Busby, from 1834. In this in 1840 the Treaty of Waitangi was drafted and translated into Maori, before it was signed in a nearby tent on 6 February. I went inside the house to see some of the rooms, including the one in which the Treaty was drafted. The house had magnificent gardens with many flowers in bloom.

Nearby is the Te Whara Runanga, a traditional Maori meeting house, built in 1940 facing the Treaty House to symbolise the Maori side of the Treaty. Here the tour group assembled for a Maori cultural display. We removed our shoes before entering the meeting house. Seated inside we were treated to various traditional songs, dances, chants, and weapon displays by a group of five Maori in traditional costume. The performances were really good, and sprinkled with lively and humorous commentary, really making everyone feel welcome. Following this performance we were left to explore the Treaty Grounds at our leisure.

We parted from the rest of the family, and my wife and I took a walk through a densely grown valley, where there were the two oldest camellia trees in New Zealand, planted in 1833. This led us back to the museum, where we browsed briefly to review the history of Waitangi and see various artefacts, Maori and British, and replicas of several of the original copies of the Treaty itself. (The originals are now kept in the National Library of New Zealand, in Wellington.)

After this we walked back into Paihia to get some lunch. After stopping briefly at our motel room, we found the Cafe 10, where my wife chose a vegetable frittata and I had the pumpkin salad.

After eating, we went to the wharf to get tickets on the ferry to Russell, a village on a long peninsula across the Bay of Islands. We had twenty minutes until the ferry left, and my wife spotted a small arts and crafts market across the street so we went there for a very quick look before retiring to the wharf to catch our ferry. The boat was a lot smaller than I expected, with bench seating for about 50 passengers. On the way across the bay we spotted an Australasian gannet flying alongside us about 50 metres up for a few seconds before turning to plummet straight down into the water, presumably to catch a fish. It surfaced and skimmed along just above the waves for a few seconds before veering off. Unfortunately I didn’t have my long lens on my camera and there wasn’t enough time to switch it to capture this bird.

We arrived in Russell after about 20 minutes crossing the Bay. There were several restaurants and bars along the waterfront and a parallel street with a few shops to explore. After looking around we headed on a walk up Flagstaff Hill to the lookout point and historic flagstaff there. This flagstaff has a long and complex history beginning with the Treaty of Waitangi, and was symbolic of subsequent friction between the British and Maori people. Besides the history of the site, the view from here on the hill was magnificent, with 360° views around the Bay and the surrounding lands.

While I was taking this in and changing camera lenses, my wife spotted a large bird walking up the path and yelled out to me to come look. But but the time I had my camera safely reassembled and dashed over, the bird had vanished into the brush down the hillside. She described it and I figured out it was a weka. I was extremely disappointed not to have seen it myself!

We walked back down the hill via the road rather than the foot track we’d walked up on. There was no footpath between the road and the steep hillside so we had to walk on the road and avoid cars coming up the hill towards us. Once back in Russell we walked along the shore back to the centre of the village. We passed my wife’s older nephew and partner who were sitting at the Duke of Marlborough Hotel having a drink on the beautiful verandah. We waved hi and continued on to look at the last few shops that we hadn’t seen. Then we decided to backtrack to the Duke of Marlborough to get a drink ourselves. The others had gone to walk up Flagstaff Hill. I had a local Kororareka Cream ale, while my wife had a glass of local Pinot gris. Later in the evening, the nephew told us that the Duke of Marlborough was the oldest hotel in New Zealand (established in 1827).

It was good to rest our feet after so much walking around. I spotted a tiny black and white bird flitting in a tree nearby and identified it as a tomtit, but it was too hard to get a photo of. After our drinks, we went to a small ice cream shop where I had scoops of hokey pokey; and fig & manuka honey ice cream. Here we met my wife’s mother and sister, who had also just bought cups of ice cream. We ate them as we walked back to catch the next ferry back to Paihia together. The ice cream was really good. On the trip back I had my long lens ready in case I spotted any more gannets, and I did, although they were much further away. I did manage to get a couple of shots at extreme range but the birds were pretty small in the photos.

Back in Paihia, we went back to the motel. I changed and went for a swim in the pool while my wife did some sketching in her sketchbook of scenes from today. After the swim I had a shower and changed for dinner. Tonight was the special birthday dinner for the eldest nephew and his partner (their birthdays are just 10 days apart).

We met up just before 18:30 and walked the short distance to Terra Restaurant. We had a reserve table on the balcony, looking out over the Bay. The setting was lovely, and the food was really excellent. I had a starter of squid and chorizo with chilli caramel and lemon mayonnaise, followed by a main course of pork kassler with harissa fried cauliflower and white bean puree. And for dessert a Black Forest combination of a chocolate marquise with cherries and cherry sorbet. Everything was delicious.

After this magnificent dinner we walked back to our motel room for the night.

New Zealand, day 1

We had an alarm set of 03:45 this morning to make sure we got up in time to have a bite to eat and then head to the airport for our flight to Auckland at 07:05. I had a bit of muesli and was ready to go. We walked over to the station and waited for the very first train of the day, due at 04:28. It arrived and took us to Central where we changed for the airport train.

At the airport there was almost nobody around. There were no queues at all to get through security and passport control, so these took only a couple of minutes. Inside the terminal, many of the shops and food places weren’t even open yet, but we found one where my wife got a coffee. While she drank it, I noticed a large group of people clustered around a departure gate near us. Looking up to the indicator board I noticed the flight from that gate, to Denpasar in Bali, was shown as cancelled. There was an announcement over the PA system that all passengers for the flight should assemble at the gate for news regarding their flight, which had been cancelled to to “an ongoing incident in Bali”. When the passengers began to disperse a few minutes later we heard them saying that it was due to a volcanic eruption.

Fortunately this didn’t affect us. We boarded our plane in the last group since we were right near the front. Oddly, the row we were in had no window on our side for some reason, although there was a window on the opposite side. But once the plane had loaded we were happily surprised that nobody had been assigned the “window” seat next to us, so we had three seats for the two of us.

The flight was very short, at just under three hours in the air, plus taxiing time at each end. They served a full breakfast however, and I had a potato frittata with beef sausages. The flight was barely long enough to watch a movie, so I instead chose to start watching episodes of House of the Dragon, the Game of Thrones prequel series. I just managed to fit two episodes in and I thought they were fairly good.

We landed in Auckland at 12:05 local time. The airport was not busy at all, and again we had no queues for either passport control or customs, and were out into the arrivals lounge in just a few minutes. However while traversing the terminal we kept hearing a warning over the PA system that we might be instructed to evacuate the area. When we reached the public area, we noticed large groups of people clustered around the escalators up to departures, and staff holding them back. There was an announcement about people not being allowed into the departures area.

My wife got another coffee from a cafe in the terminal and then we walked over to the shuttle bus area to get a lift to our car ire place. Soon a van arrived and the cheerful driver took us out to the car pickup spot. We checked in there and collected our car. The woman saw our Australian driver’s licences and was pretty casual and friendly with us about the whole thing. At the same time another woman at the next counter was serving an American couple and explaining very carefully a lot of things about driving in New Zealand.

We loaded our bags into the car and drove off, heading into central Auckland to pick up my wife’s mother and sister (our recent travelling companions in Japan!) from their hotel, where they’d been staying for a couple of days already. We had some trouble picking them up, because the street their hotel was on was full of parked cars. I tried doing a U-turn to grab a spot on the other side, but as I was in the middle of turning another car on the there side grabbed the spot! So we had continue straight and circle around the block, which took a long time because of some very slow traffic lights. By the time we’d done that there was a spot free where I pulled over so we could load their bags into the car and all climb in.

From there we headed out of Auckland, heading north on highway 1, over the Auckland Harbour Bridge. We proceeded until we’d left the outskirts of Auckland, and then exited the highway at the first town past the toll road section, a small place named Warkworth. It was after 14:00 and my wife and I needed some lunch, since this corresponded to midday in Sydney. We parked near some shops and walked across a small bridge to a larger shopping area. I found a bakery that sold “award winning” pies, so I got a chicken, spinach, and feta pie and also tried one of the delicious looking walnut tarts (which was indeed delicious). My wife didn’t fancy anything they had, so went for a walk to a supermarket she’d spotted to buy something. But she got lost coming out the other side and couldn’t find her way back to the rest of us for several minutes!

We continued north along the highway until we reached Whangerai, the largest place we’d been through since leaving Auckland. Our GPS navigation in the car told me to go a long way around it, but I thought we could just continue on, so I stopped at a tourist information centre to check Google Maps, and also to stretch my legs after well over an hour of driving. The map said we could indeed continue straight through the city, so we did that.

From there it was another hour to Paihia, the small town on the shore of the Bay of Islands where we are staying for the next two nights. We checked into the motel and then went to find my wife’s two nephews (her sister’s sons) and their partners, who had arrived shortly before us, having departed Auckland on the same drive a bit earlier than we did. The reason we’re all over here is to celebrate the 30th birthday of the older nephew, who currently lives in Auckland. They were having a drink at Zane Grey’s Restaurant and Bar, not far from our motel. In fact, everything in this tiny town is not far from our motel!

We’d arrived at 18:30, and the others were about ready for dinner, but my wife and I were still a bit full from our late lunch, so we said we’d walk around a bit and maybe do our own thing for dinner later, while they sat in at Zane Grey’s. So we went for a bit of a walk along the waterfront. We decided we could use a drink after the long drive, before thinking about eating, and that we may as well go back and sit with the family and have a drink while they ate. So we did that. Towards the end of them eating dinner, we decided we were ready for something light, and my wife suggested we split a vegetarian option version of the fish and chips that most of them were having – which was a beer-battered banana blossom with chips. She was intrigued by this and wanted to try it. It was pretty good, I thought.

We broke up after dinner, with the younger four heading to a bar for more drinks, while my in-laws headed back to the motel. My wife and and I went for a stroll through the shops and restaurants and I grabbed a couple of scoops of ice cream from Movenpick. I wanted a New Zealand ice cream, but this was the only ice cream place open.

Then we walked back to the motel for the night. On the way we crossed over the street to the waterside to stare at the stars for a few minutes, which were spectacular, since this area has very little human habitation and light pollution.

Reporting on Japan, preparing for New Zealand

This morning I worked on my report for Standards Australia on the recent ISO Photography Standards meeting I attended in Japan. I have to summarise all of the relevant technical and administrative discussions and resolutions of the meeting, which means going through my own notes, the official minutes, and about 50 separate reports on all of the work that was done at the meeting and since the last meeting (in Sydney back in October last year). It takes a good three hours or so to work through all of that and complete the document, and then submit it to SA.

I’d thought about taking a long drive with Scully for lunch, to get out of the house a bit since I don’t have any ethics classes today. But I still had some rye sourdough loaf at home and decided to use that up for my lunch instead.

I took Scully for a walk instead, around the harbour shore and past Bay Brew where I tried another of their sweet treats, this time a coconut rough slice. It was okay, but not as good as the caramel slice I had last week.

After we got home I worked on a new Darths & Droids comic, and then started preparing for our trip to New Zealand on Friday. I checked out the NZ Traveller Declaration site online, which is a form we need to fill out prior to arrival. But it says you are only allowed to start filling it out within 24 hours of your departure, so we couldn’t do it today and will have to do it tomorrow. We need the address of our accommodation in NZ, but I don’t know where we’re staying. My wife’s sister booked accommodation for the whole family, so I actually have no idea where it is. But my wife got the info so we can fill in the form tomorrow.

I also prepared my bird-watching apps, Merlin ID and eBird, by downloading and installing bird data packs for New Zealand. I neglected to do this before leaving for Japan, which meant they defaulted to generic common birds, making some IDs difficult when we were over there.

Lastly, I formatted my Japan travel diary into web pages on my site. These are essentially the same text as the daily posts I posted here while in Japan, but I’ve added a lot of extra photos for the first two days so far, and will add more as I get through processing them. Id hoped to have this completed by the time we leave for NZ, but I’ve run out of time!

The clutching tendrils of summer

We should be getting cooler weather with autumn progressing here, but today was one of the last gasps of summer. Overnight we had the highest March minimum ever recorded in Sydney, 25.9°C. We slept with the air conditioning on all night, which is a rare thing. I don’t imagine we’d have got much sleep without it.

By the time I had my 5k run this morning it was almost 28°C, making it another slow and exhausting one. And by mid afternoon we approached 37°C. There’s supposed to be a cold front change coming through after midnight, but until then it’s supposed to still be almost 30°C at midnight. Thankfully tomorrow is supposed to be much cooler. But the Bureau of Meteorology says this isn’t the end of summery conditions, and we’re going to have more hot spells throughout autumn.

In the middle of the heat I went to the lighting showroom to pick up our new light fixtures, which we’d ordered last weekend. I got a message yesterday that they were in from the warehouse, so I drove down to get them.

Some of the new light fittings say that they are DIY installation, not requiring an electrician. I checked and they involved simply unscrewing the existing light battens, fitting the lightshade over it, and screwing the thing back in. No need to touch anything electrical at all. However when I tried to do this, the shade didn’t fit over the existing batten base. So I think new smaller battens need to be installed, which is indeed a job for an electrician. I’ll call one tomorrow to make an appointment for them to come around and install all the lights.

DIY electrical work is simply not an option in Australia. I know that in some countries you can do your own electrical wiring work if it’s not too complicated, and honestly I feel confident that I could most probably do this job of changing the light fixtures. But here it’s illegal to do so. Anything that touches electrical wiring must be done by a licensed electrician. Otherwise you’ll void your home insurance and be liable for fines up to $40,000. So absolutely not something I want to mess with.

Three more ethics classes this evening, and some Indian curry vegetables with rice for dinner.

And some more Japan photos! Takeshita Street in Harajuku:

Okonomiyaki, before self-cooking:

And after:

In the restaurant Sakura-Tei:

Followed by dessert from a crepe place on the street:

More photos from Tokyo: Shibuya

Friday night was online games night, so I didn’t write up a blog entry. I picked up the grocery shopping in the morning. I order non-perishable stuff online for pick-up since it’s quicker, but I select fruit and vegetables by hand when I’m doing the pickup after some bad experiences with the produce that the supermarket picked for me the first few times.

Anyway, I normally buy an orange every week to go into a fruit salad that I use to top my breakfast muesli. But oranges are seasonal and when they’re not in season here in the southern hemisphere, like now, Australia imports oranges from the USA. But with all of the recent stupid/evil things that the Trump administration is doing over there, I decided it would be a good idea not to buy anything from the USA where I can avoid it. I’ve been keeping up with the news especially about Canada, how Trump threatened to annex Canada, and the resulting widespread disaffection with the US and boycotting of US goods by Canadians.

Trump hasn’t threatened Australia as directly, but he did in the past week initiate high tariffs on Australian imports. Which in economic terms makes no sense whatsoever, since Australia has a fairly large trade deficit with the USA, so any reduction in trade is only going to hurt the USA more than it hurts us. Probably exacerbated by the fact that politically savvy Australians like me will boycott American products, and because of the imbalance in trade even a small percentage reduction in Australian imports will have a much larger relative effect on the US than the relatively small amount of exports we make to the US. Most of our exports are to Asia, so Trump’s tariffs aren’t even really going to hurt us very much. It’s just crazy that he’s bullying a much smaller economy in a way that actually hurts the US more than us.

But hey, the more countries that stand up to this monster, hopefully the faster we’ll get to whatever action it will be that eventually stops this freight train to madness and starts returning the USA to a normal country.

At lunch on Friday I took Scully for a walk and got some fish & chips. It was a warm day, but thankfully my favourite lunch spot overlooking the harbour now has new tree growth near the seating to provide some shade.

After some ethics classes I had dinner with my wife up at the local Greek restaurant. It was a sultry evening, and dining al fresco is kind of nice, though honestly it would have been nice if it was a little cooler. We’re having a mini-heatwave covering Friday and the weekend. Overnight minimum temperatures are around 24°C, with high humidity around 90%. Today we had 32°C maximum, and tomorrow is forecast to be 37°C.

This meant my 5k run this morning was pretty awful. It was 25°C and 82% humidity at 9am, and my running was really sluggish. I recorded the slowest time I’ve run since 2021! I fear tomorrow morning will be even worse.

Today I stayed inside as much as possible, working on Darths & Droids, and some more photos from my trip to Japan. For dinner I made fusilli alla norma, with roasted eggplant cubes and a tomato sauce.

Today I processed photos from Shibuya on Tokyo. The famous Shibuya scramble corssing:

Shibuya Scramble Square, the building on the top of which is the Shibuya Sky observation platform:

A view of Tokyo from the top:

Looking north to the centre of Tokyo with the sun going down:

Getting back in the swing Tuesday

I got another good sleep, although I went to bed a bit late due to not finishing ethics classes until 10pm last night. Tonight should be an earlier night.

My first task today was writing the new lesson plan for the new week’s classes. The topic this week is “Always Connected”, discussing the modern phenomenon of being able to contact and be contacted at all times, no matter where you are, thanks to mobile phones and devices. I start with a story about myself, and the fact that when I was the age of the kids in the classes, I had a pen-pal. I think I’ll have to explain what a pen-pal is! And how over time, as technology advanced, we moved from exchanging letters to e-mails, and then onto social media. And along the way I ask the kids about the effects of this technology change on how we communicate and our well-being. In the afternoon I had two classes to finish off the “Danger!” topic from last week, then in the evening the first class on the new topic.

After completing the plan (before the afternoon classes), I went for a walk with Scully up to the pie shop to get some lunch. They had a new special today, a peri-peri chicken pie. This sounded great so I tried one, and it was indeed very good.

I also spent a bit of time processing some photos from my last day on Tokyo. Here are some from Nezu Jinja shrine, in Nezu, Tokyo. The entrance, with the market:

Torii gates:

Torii and a pavilion overlooking a koi pond:

Ema plaques and the main temple building:

A warbling white-eye. Taken with my phone!:

Tokyo day 8: Nezu Jinja, Yanaka Ginza, flying home

(I missed posting an update yesterday as I was away from WiFi. So this is Saturday’s and Sunday’s events combined. Also, I haven’t had time to upload any photos yet, so this post doesn’t have any photos.)

Saturday 1 March

We set an alarm for 07:30 this morning. We planned to message my in-laws to arrange a breakfast time, but we were ready to go well before them, so my wife and I headed over to the City Bakery by ourselves. I had the granola this time, which was good, but a very small serve. I’d normally have three times that much at home for breakfast. We were finished pretty much as the in-laws arrived, so we just said hi in passing and went back to our room to finish packing and check out of the hotel. We arranged to meet after checking out at 10:30. Everyone dropped their luggage at the hotel luggage room, to be picked up in the evening.

We caught a Yamanote Line train north to Nishi-Nippori, where we changed for a Chiyoda Line train to take us two stops to Nezu. This is further north than I’ve ever been before in Tokyo, seeing new sights and neighbourhoods. Right near Nezu Station is Nezu Jinja, a Shinto shrine. This one is smaller and less well known that some others, but notable for having hundreds of red torii gates, which are rarer in Tokyo than at the famous temples in Kyoto. I thought this would be a great finish to our time in Tokyo for my in-laws.

When we got to the temple, there were a handful of market stalls just inside the entrance, selling mostly foodstuffs: rice crackers, mochi, cakes, and one selling fresh vegetables.Beyond this was a small pond with dozens of tortoises sunning themselves on a rock. People were tossing food, and dozens of pigeons were flocking around for it, plus another couple of birds which I couldn’t identify until I looked them up on eBird: brown-eared bulbuls. I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen this species before. A bit later I got a decent photo of one, so that’s good too.

Near here was the beginning of the path under the torii. I was surprised how small they were, each one with an opening basically the size of a door, not much bigger than would allow a person through. I had been expecting them to be much larger, like the ones at Fushimi Inari Taisha in Kyoto. Still, it was fun and very scenic to walk through the corridor created by the gates, and there weren’t nearly as many people as in Kyoto. There was one Spanish couple who took forever taking photos of each other at multiple scenic spots, causing us to have to wait interminably for a photo without them in it, but for the most part it was pretty quiet and easy to get good photos.

After finishing the torii walk, we explored the rest of the shrine, with one large courtyard and building, and a few smaller outbuildings and features. It wasn’t a large shrine, so we finished without taking too long and then began walking towards the Yanaka Ginza shopping street for our next sight of the day.

On the way we stopped at the Art Cafe Polypus for lunch and drinks. My wife decided to go explore around the area on her own while the rest of us ate. I got a chicken curry donburi and it came with a drink as a lunch set, so I chose the house-made ginger lemonade. Both the food and drink were pretty good. We sat up in a room on the third floor which just had three tables in it, while the counter and a few other tables were on the second floor. We thought we were the only customers until we left, when we saw that the second floor was full of people.

Rejoining my wife, we walked towards Yanaka Ginza. This is an old shopping street that survived the war, with many older buildings crowding a narrow street lined with shops. As we got near, the tourist density grew, showing that this place was more well-known that Nezu Jinja. The shopping street itself was picturesque, but somewhat crowded, with hundreds of people walking in both directions. There were street food stalls, restaurants, and various shops, many with interesting things to look at. My wife bought us a ceramic bowl, like a slightly small rice bowl, in the wabi-sabi style with some asymmetry to the shape.

After reaching the end of the street we were at Nippori Station, where we boarded a train back to Shinagawa. We arrived there about 15:30. My in-laws went into the hotel to rest up a bit, while my wife and I ventured out again to walk around and keep moving, rather than sit and for a couple of hours. We walked back over to Gotanda to look around some of the shops there. On the way we passed two embassies, the embassy of Iceland, and one with the plaque on the door written in Cyrillic script that I couldn’t read but later searched and found it to be the Embassy of Serbia.

When we reached Gotanda, there was a small shopping mall, but it didn’t have a lot in it. After walking around a few of the streets M. decided she could do with a coffee and I searched cafes in the area, finding Café au Lait Tokyo. This was also up an unassuming old staircase on the second floor of a building. When we arrived they said they only had room at the bar for us, so we sat there. There was another room up the front with a window facing the street where there were a few tables with very plush lounge chairs and sofas. They only served café au lait coffee, but you could customise it in various ways with amounts of milk, amounts of sugar, different toppings, flavours, types of milk, etc. They guy behind the bar gave us each a small slip of paper and highlighter pens to mark our customisations. I was worried they’d ask me to order a coffee in order to sit there, but they were okay when we only ordered one drink. My wife also got a grilled cheese sandwich, asking for no ham on the ham and cheese menu item, and then having to say no mustard or ketchup either when the guy asked if she wanted those. I chose a mini dessert of a caramel mouse cake, which was a smallish serving, but enough to satisfy a sweet tooth. The coffee came in a small wide bowl without any handle, and she said it was good.

From here we decided to take a further walk down towards Osaki, along the Meguro River. I thought we might see some more birds, but the river was very canal-like and we didn’t see any. We found the Osaki New City shopping mall and looked around. It was larger and better than the one at Gotanda, but not very big, with only two moderate sized floors of shops.

Once done with that we headed back to the hotel, via another route. At first we passed mainly office buildings, but we turned into a residential neighbourhood and this was much more interesting, with a mix of old houses and some very new and expensive looking apartment buildings. We arrived back at the hotel at 18:00.

We met up with my in-laws, collected our luggage, and left for Haneda Airport about 18:20. We caught the Keikyu Line Haneda Express and arrived at the airport just before 19:00. We passed through security and customs, which were a little busy so it took some time, and then had a couple of hours to wait for our flight. My wife and I did some stretching exercises to help ensure we didn’t get stiff or cramped during the long hours of sitting on the flight. We boarded and departed just a few minutes behind schedule.

Sunday 2 March

Despite not really sleeping on the flight, the time seemed to pass faster than I expected, and before we knew it they were turning the lights on for the breakfast service. We flew into Sydney Airport from the north, and had a good view of the city out the left side of the plane. We landed just before 09:30.

Unfortunately there were several delays getting home. First, the terminal was full when we arrived, so the plane had to wait on the tarmac until a gate became available. Then there were a few flights arriving at the same time, and there was a long queue to get through the automated passport checking gates, so that took some time. We didn’t have to wait for checked luggage, so we left my in-laws at the baggage claim since were were heading to our respective homes by different transport, so there was no point waiting for them. My wife and I headed down to the train station and boarded a train to Central where we intended to change for a train on our own line that would drop us a short walk from home.

But as we pulled into Central it was clear that something was wrong. None of the other platforms in the entire station had so much as a single person on them waiting for trains. This could mean only one thing: the trains were not running. Obviously the airport train was, but it seemed no other train line was. Checking online, I discovered that the only trains running were essentially a shuttle between the airport and Central, and the Metro lin, which was also running a reduced service, with a shuttle between Central and Martin Place, and another shuttle from Martin Place to Tallawong. We could take the Metro and walk a longer distance from the nearest station to our home. Normally this would be a single train, but today for some reason we had to change trains at Martin Place. So our trip home had an extra train change and a walk about twice as long at the home end.

My wife stopped for an iced coffee in the Sydney heat and humidity that was a shock after being in winter Tokyo. We arrived at home, for one more shock.

When the lift door opened on our floor of our apartment building, we were greeted by the sight of a large plastic bin sitting in the corridor, catching a continual stream of drips leaking from a light fitting in the ceiling. The bin was half full, and the carpet in the corridor soaking wet!

We quickly went into our apartment and checked if the ceiling was leaking water anywhere. Thankfully it was all dry, but this was a definite moment of panic, thinking maybe our bedroom or living room might have been flooded while we were away. A building management representative arrived soon afterwards with a plumber, and I asked what the story was, and the guy said the leak only happened two or three hours ago, and was a hot water pipe in the corridor, which the plumber was about to fix. Phew!

That ends the travel diary, but we had a few others things to do today. We went grocery shopping to restock with vegetables and fruit and milk. My wife’s friend brought Scully back over to drop her off, and my wife went with them to catch up and have a coffee out while I prepared for my ethics classes. I had three tonight, and it was a bit of a struggle with tiredness, but I managed okay.

Time for an early night to bed and hopefully a good sleep before tomorrow, which will be my usual very busy Monday.

Tokyo day 7: ISO meeting day 4, Sekaido Shinjuku, Akasaka

Friday 28 February

We set an alarm for 07:30, to give me time to get ready and leave at 08:00 to walk to the last day of my ISO Photography Standards meeting. I had some leftover sweet food items as a makeshift partial breakfast before heading out, and picked up an onigiri and a cup of vegetable sticks from a 7-11 near the meeting venue to fill it out with something a bit healthier.

The last technical session was about image information content, measuring camera reproduction fidelity using metrics based on Shannon information theory. Following this we had the administrative closing sessions, going over action items and planning for future meetings. The next will be in Berlin in June, which my wife and I will also be travelling to. At the start of the lunch break I had to participate in editing of resolutions, a job which falls to one representative from each country. As the only Australian attending, I always end up doing this task.

For lunch I walked over to the MSB Tamachi building, which has a couple of floors of restaurants. I looked around before choosing こびんちょ (Kobincho) a place that had a lunch special of a bowl of udon noodles with a small tempura-don bowl of tempura prawns and vegetables on rice. It was pretty good!

After lunch, the meeting concluded at 14:29, one minute earlier than listed in the agenda.

I walked back via another different route, this time taking a walkway along one of the canals running north-south through Shibaura. This was a more pleasant walk, and I took my time a bit since I saw several different birds: mallards, tufted ducks, eastern spot-billed ducks, eurasian coots, a white wagtail, and lots and lots of black-headed gulls. I also saw what looked like an eagle soaring high overhead, but couldn’t identify the species.

As I neared the hotel, walking through Shinagawa Station, I spotted a very bewildered looking young woman with a large suitcase looking around in obvious confusion. I asked her if she needed help finding anything and she answered in an American accent, saying she wanted to get tickets for the Narita Express to the airport and her phone had died and she didn’t know where to go. I knew there were multiple ticket offices in the station for different train companies, and checked which was the right one on my phone, then pointed her in the right direction. She was very grateful – I hope she made it to the airport okay!

I got back to the hotel a bit after 15:00, and the others were waiting for me in the hotel lobby, keen to go out again! They’d spent the morning walking down to Kitashinagawa to explore the old style neighbourhood there, which we’d discovered ourselves last trip. But now, rejoining me, the plan was to head out to Sekaido, the giant art supply store in Shinjuku. My mother-in-law is a keen artist, working in pencil and watercolour, and wanted to browse and maybe buy some things that would be difficult to get at home. And my wife has recently taken up ink sketching and watercolour as well.

We took a Yamanote Line train to Shinjuku and headed across to Sekaido. The walk passed through a vibrant shopping district, and the others stopped to check out another of the shops before we got to our destination. Once in Sekaido, we explored the third floor with painting supplies, then the second with paper and drawing supplies. This took some time as there was so much to see, and everyone but me bought a few things. We briefly looked around the ground floor, which had stationery, before leaving to head back to Shinjuku Station to catch a Marunouchi Line subway train to Akasaka-Mitsuke Station.

Here we walked a short distance to Hitori Shabu Shabu Nanadaime Matsugoro, a shabu shabu restaurant which I’d booked for dinner. When we walked in the door, a woman asked if we had a reservation, and when I said yes, she knew my name instantly without having to check. She showed us to four adjacent bar seats that were part of an oval surrounding the central kitchen area, and then explained the menu to us in moderately good English. She was extremely friendly and helpful, and after our meal my wife gave her one of the Australia stickers we’d brought to give to helpful people.

We all ordered food, my wife getting the vegetable plate, while the rest of us got a meat plate, which came with vegetables as well, and we all ordered an additional bowl of rice. The meals came with ponzu sauce and sesame sauce, and additional condiments of chopped spring onion and dried garlic to mix in to taste. There was also a small bottle of chilli oil, which my wife mistook for soy sauce and poured a lot on her rice before tasting it and realising her error! My in-laws had never had shabu shabu before and were very impressed with the variety of ingredients and flavours of the sauces, and the fun of cooking everything yourself in the steaming hotpot, which was really pleasing. I was a little worried they might not like some of the new food experiences, but it’s been a positive experience for them, which is great.

After the meal, we pondered finding some place to have drinks and maybe a small dessert. I searched the area on Google Maps and located the Bar Wagokoro Akasaka, which was described in Maps as a “cocktail chocolate pairing bar”, which sounded ideal, and it was only two short blocks away. We walked there, but had trouble locating it until my wife spotted a photo outside one building which showed cocktails and chocolates. There was a logo with Japanese on it, but no other indication what sort of a place it was, and the indication that it was on the third floor.

We went up in the tiny lift and emerged in an intimate room with only 15 seats: two tables of four and seven along the bar, facing an impressive wall of whiskies. The top shelf was entirely Japanese whiskies, the second shelf entirely Scotch, and the lowest shelf had other whiskies and various other bar essentials and liqueurs.

The bartender, immaculate in a blue pinstripe suit, brought us English menus and explained the various chocolates and selection options. I chose an “oriental chocolate cocktail” with cinnamon and cardamom, my sister-in-law got a “ruby chocolate and raspberry” cocktail, my wife got a non-alcoholic version of the same, and her mother chose an apple one.

I ordered the sweets assortment, which allowed two choices from the menu of 21 different types of chocolates, plus it came with a selection of other small chocolates, bites of gateaux, and dried fruits, presented on a spectacular patterned plate, while my in-laws chose individual chocolates each. The bartender also brought us complimentary rice crackers.

The drinks and chocolates were extremely well presented and delicious. The bartender was the only staff present, and also the owner according to some online reviews, and very friendly. M. gave him another of our Australia stickers in appreciation. This was a truly delightful find and a delicious way to end our last dinner before heading to the airport tomorrow.

We walked the short distance back to Akasaka-Mitsuge Station and caught a Ginza Line train to Shimbashi, where we changed for a Tokaido Line train to Shinagawa. The Tokaido Line trains are more express and Shinagawa was only one stop away. We got off there and headed back to our hotel for our last night in Tokyo.