October 31, 2007 – Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia

Darwin is the most northern point on the continent of Australia and has a tropical climate similar to Central America. It was very hot and very humid. We had heard many times how “vast” this land was but it never made much of an impact on us since Australia is almost the same size as the US. The vastness comes, not so much from the size of the land, but from the distances between the people. Darwin has a population of only 100,000 and that is half of the total population of the entire Northern Territory (like our states). We drove for 2 hours out of Darwin and only went through one small town. What the drive called “the bush” just goes on and on. Even our deserts have more people and services per square mile than this place does. We drove out to Litchfield National Park and saw the famous giant termite mounds as well as a couple of beautiful permanent waterfalls. October is the end of their dry season and there has not been any rain for 4 months. If we came in January, we would not be able to move around very well because of all the flooding that goes on during the wet season. We also got to see some of the wild life such as birds, a sea turtle, a couple of wallabies and this friendly little critter who had its eye on Millie. All in all, we found the area to have wonderful natural attractions; friendly easy going people who sort of speak English, but lots of flies, heat and humidity that would kill us in about two weeks if we had to live here.

October 28, 2007 – Bali, Indonesia

We like Bali! In fact we like it so much that we have bought a little rice farm near the village of Nongan (you can find it on the map just south of Klungkung). The farm comes with a brown cow (we can work and eat the brown cows but not the white cows since they might be family), several chickens and of course our own Hindu temple in the back of the house. We will grow rice for our own use and cloves for sale so we will have some extra money to come visit family. Seriously, these people have it figured out. They are exceptionally happy people who are constantly worshiping some thing in their life everyday. They worship trees, flowers, every animal on the earth, the rice they eat, and the water they drink. They take nothing in their life for granted. They are extremely superstitious and have a god that covers every aspect of their lives. Every home, village, rice paddy, or car has some version of a shrine and they are being used continually by someone.

During our travels around the East side of the island we saw several different worship ceremonies that encompassed the entire village. We saw women carrying plates of food on their heads to be offered to the particular god they were worshiping that day.

We went to an 18th century Royal Court and Pavilion from the time when therer was a royal family ruling Bali.

One stop was to the 11th century Hindu temple that has a shrine to virtually every god worshiped by the Hindu. We had to put on sarongs and a sash around our waist to separate our ying from yang.

It is a absolutely beautiful island of terraced rice paddies, coconut and papaya trees, friendly and happy people. Maybe we will buy a rice paddy or two. On to Darwin, Australia.

October 26, 2007 – Borobudur, Semarang, Java, Indonesia

Today we arrived at the port of Semarang on the island of Java in Indonesia. Semarang is the capital of Central Java province and is primarily an industrial city. Tourism has not yet made a significant impact on the life of the local Javanese people so we got sensory overload as we drove out of the city into the jungle toward our goal of seeing the 1200 year old Buddhist monument, Borobudur. Borobudur is only 56 miles from Semarang but it would take a 6 or 7 hours to get there if we had not had a police escort. The route took us through many small towns and villages and could have been an end attraction in itself. Picture 5 touring buses running the 56 miles non-stop through truck, motorbike, pedestrian and donkey cart traffic, weaving in and out of traffic jams so we could complete the journey in only 2 hours. We felt uncomfortable about getting the special treatment but the motorcade was greeted along the entire route by waving, smiling people who seemed happy to show off their country. We hope that is the case! We arrived safely at the Borobudur temple and started our climb. Borobudur is a 6 layer monument that is decorated with 2,672 relief panels and 504 Buddha statures. The main dome at the top is surrounded by 72 Buddha statues seated inside perforated stupa (they look like bells to us). The monument was abandoned in the 14th century and lost to the jungle and layers of volcanic ash until it was rediscovered in 1814 by the British. It is every bit as impressive as some of the temples we saw in Egypt last year.

An amazing day!

October 24, 2007 – Singapore

Today was spent driving around a very unique and interesting city. Singapore is a city and a country all rolled up into one big melting pot. They must import virtually everything they need from fuel to food and even population. The country is ruled by what we would probably call a benevolent dictator who has somehow managed to establish a thriving economy and culture through imposition of very strict laws and rules to “manage” the behavior of the population with the intent to benefit all of Singapore. Little things like wanting to live in a certain place, buy a certain car or chew gum are decided for you by set rules. What was very interesting to us was that the people seemed to truly embrace the reasons for all of these rules and seemed very proud and happy with their life and with their country. Most are of Chinese desent and as such have a cultural acceptance of rulemaking authority so it seems to work very well for them. Singapore sits in a perfect spot on the world trade routes to serve as a global warehouse and container transfer port. The port area covered the entire southwest coast of the island and must have had hundreds of container cranes all working around the clock. As we drove around the island we noticed what must have been hundreds of ships anchored in the bay waiting for cargo. Very impressive! Singapore does not have any raw material for manufacturing and does not allow anything but non-polluting businesses so the air is clean and clear. Cars are controlled by usage taxes of 100% on the value of the car as well as a requirement that all cars are scrapped after 10 years. The roads were well built and not very crowded. There are trees everywhere since there is a law that requires everyone to plant a tree every year….this led to a problem of upkeep of these trees so they imported labor from Bangladesh and the Philippines (about 600,000) to maintain all the greenery. When they ran out of land area near town, they imported dirt from Malaysia and filled in part of the bay. All in all, a very different place but one that seems to be working.

October 22, 2007 – South China Sea

Here are just a few fun pictures that we have in our “collection”:

Formal Blogging

Casual Blogging

A Chinese Relic getting scratched

Millie contemplating the Great Wall of China

Millie looking for a toilet in a Chinese rock garden

Two Happy Buddhas

And then there was also the time that Lee found Millie laying across the laps of 4 old gentlemen up on the Promenade Deck. He asked her what she was doing and she showed him the sign that read "4 Laps = 1 mile".

October 20, 2007 – Hong Kong, PRC

This is certainly not the old Hong Kong that Millie saw or that Lee was told about. The junks, sampans and boat people that used to inhabit Victoria Harbor are all but gone. There are massive office and apartment buildings as far as you can see. Everyone speaks English and seems very prosperous. The Kowloon side of the harbor used to be good place to visit to see the Chinese markets and get great bargains on just about anything you could want to buy. Today it is the site of the largest shopping mall that we have ever seen with upscale shops from around the world and prices about the same or even higher than at home. We visited Victoria Peak and got a birds eye view of the harbor and surrounding area; then over to the other side of the island to Repulse Bay and the homes and condos of the mega-rich. We took the famous White Star Ferry and walked around both Hong Kong and Kowloon until our legs about fell off then back to the ship for a beautiful laser light show the city puts on every night. It truly is a beautiful city; just not as unique and exotic as in years past. On to Singapore.

October 12 – October 17, 2007 – Peoples Republic of China

We’re back! The past 5 days has been an exceptional experience that I do not have the literary skills to properly describe so I will simply give you brief captions on a sampling of pictures and leave further comments for face to face visits after our return.

First stop was the Temple of Heaven in Beijing. This is the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests and is where the Emperor came to with the religious elite to pray for a variety of good fortune, including a good harvest.

Beijing is alive with Construction cranes (the National Bird) and pollution. 20% of all construction cranes in the world are in China right now. About 70% of those are in Beijing or Shanghai.

The side streets, between the high rise buildings still give a glimpse of life for the average city dweller. There is a massive difference between the rich and poor. There is virtually no middle class.

On to the Forbidden City which is a huge set of buildings and walls that seems to go on forever. Various Chinese emperors lived here in total isolation from the people for centuries until WWII and the immergence of Communist China.

There are over 9,000 rooms in the Forbidden City. It covers over 250 acres and is completely walled with 3 inner city walls. This was the only place the emperor could feel safe from the hordes of peoples outside, however most of the assassinations came from within the walls of the Forbidden City.

The emperor’s garden inside the Forbidden City was one of our favorite spots.

Just after sunset we made our way to Tiananmen Square and saw the Olympic countdown clock for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

…and across the road (pedestrians do not have the right of way – we made it though) was the Peoples Congress Building and Chairman Mao’s tomb. Mao is preserved and laying in an open casket for all to see. His is elevated upright each day and then laid back down at night. Sorry we missed that! Tiananmen Square is huge. It can, and has, held over 1 million people (that would probably be about 500,000 Americans).

We had a very nice dinner of Peking Duck and stayed at the Sheraton Great Wall Hotel in Beijing. It was an exceptionally nice hotel but very cold. It is against the law to turn on your heat throughout China until November 15th. This is fine for the southern provinces but up in the North it is cold at night already.

In the morning it was off to the Great Wall. This wall was started during the 5th century BC but was not completed to its present form until the reign of Qin Shihuang who is the first emperor to unify all of the Chinese warlords under one ruler. It was design to keep out the northern nomadic tribes and was quite effective at doing just that.

After the Great Wall we drove to the Wild Goose Pagoda (not sure where the name came from…..not a goose in sight). The Pagoda was 15 stories high at one time but was destroyed in an earthquake.

We caught a flight from Beijing to Xi’an (pronounced she-ann) and stayed in another wonderful hotel, the Sofitel Hotel.

The highlight for the day was to visit the Terra cotta Warriors Museum. This is a collection of thousands of life-size terra cotta warriors, and their horses which was discovered in 1974 by a local farmer digging a water well. So far they have found 4 pits of buried warrior statues. The army was intended to protect the emperor, Qin Shihuang in his afterlife. His tomb was found about 1000 meters away. Each warrior is different and originally included all the weapons carried by an army.. It is an unbelievable sight.

Dinner show….by now we have the use of chopsticks down so we are not starving.

The next day it was off to Shanghai to meet up with the ship.

Shanghai is the largest city in China with about 16 million people. Overall China has about 1.2 billion people with 85% of them living on 10% of the land area. This is becoming a major policy problem for the government along with air pollution and lack of clean water. There are almost 5000 building over 10 stories and over 200 over 50 stories tall in Shanghai. We are still looking for the "developing country" that China calls itself. Looks pretty developed to us already.

We visited the Shanghai museum and then made a stop at the Old Town area which was unique but far too pushy and crowded for us.

We got back to the ship but as planned (at least that was our plan) but the Chinese officials had not gotten the word somehow so we had to spend another hour on the bus while they figured out if we could get off or not. China seems to have its act together most of the time but apparently there is a great tendency to make up new regulations and rules on the spot which causes everyone (everyone but the rule maker) loads of problems.

By now we were pretty tired but we still had a day trip to Suzhou to go before we could really rest. Suzhou is outside of Shanghai and sits on the Grand Canal that was built between Beijing and Shanghai.

We took a relaxing ride down the canal and some of the off shoots. The canal was a very ambitious venture that took 30 years to complete and eventually caused the collapse of the ruling emperor at the time.
Well, that is about all of it for now. We are on our way to Hong Kong. Add a comment to the blog or drop us an email if you have any specific questions along the way.

Thursday, October 11, 2007 – Dalian, China

The immigration people from China traveled with us from Cheju so our arrival at our first Chinese port went very smoothly. Dalian is located at the northern end of the Yellow Sea just west of North Korea in the area that used to be called Manchuria. This city has been under the rule of multiple nations in recent years including Japan and Russia and their influence is apparent in the architecture. However, there is a massive building program going on in all major Chinese cities to take down anything that looks old and replace it with new high rise structures. Dalian is a very busy and lively city. It boasts the cleanest air in China (which makes us really worried about what we will be breathing in Beijing and Shanghai). The parks are beautiful and the people were very friendly. The sights we were taken to all had a similar theme that the future of Dalian, and China as a whole, is in the hands of their children and that prosperity is dependent upon education and the willingness to embrace good ideas from around the world. Not a bad sentiment for us all.

This is our last posting until we return to the ship in Shanghai on October 16th.

Wednesday, October 10, 2007 - Yellow Sea

We got pictures....finally. We have gone back and added pictures to some of the prior blog posts so you might want to scroll through them if you are interested. We dock in Dalian, China tomorrow and will make one more post before we leave the ship for 5 days in China.

Tuesday, October 9, 2007 – Cheju City, South Korea

We had a brief, six hour, visit to South Korea on our way to China. Lee had been here about 37 years ago so it was interesting to see the changes. The comparison with Japan was dramatic. While in Japan we had a feeling of organization and a certain feeling of peacefulness, but Korea is just as ragged, muddy and unsettled as it was back in 1970. The people were friendly and there has been considerable modernization in the port and down town areas, but there is still the same coarseness and lack of precision that seems to be part of the Korean culture. One thing that was noticeably different was the lack of armed guards in the port and bus stations. That is progress and relates to either improvements in relations with the North or at least less fear of the North’s ability or desire to make trouble.

Tomorrow is a sea day and then we start 6 continuous days in China.

Monday, October 8, 2007 – Kagoshima, Japan

Kagoshima is at the southern most part of the large Japanese islands. We took a quick half day tour to visit a 300 year old Samurai village and also to see the Peace Museum in Chiran. Chiran is about 15 miles south of Kagoshima and during WWII served as the major training base for the Japanese Kamikaze pilots in the final months of the war. The Peace Museum is a well done memorial to the 1036 pilots who died in this last desperate attempt to keep allied forces away from the Japanese home islands. As many of you know, one of those pilots destroyed the SS John Burke which was the ship that Lee’s uncle (his dad’s brother, Lee) was serving at the time. There were no survivors. In the museum there were pictures of each of the pilots as well as final letters to family. It was very strange to know that one of those faces was responsible for the death of a family member.

After the museum we went to the Samurai village which has been continually inhabited by samurai and their descendants for the past 300 years. We got into the tail end of the typhoon so we got drenched while we walked around what the Japanese call their “dry gardens”. There were not very dry today but they were very beautiful.

Tonight we went to the specialty restaurant on board to celebrate our anniversary. It was a wonderful evening but we ate way to much. It means lots of walking and only salads for food tomorrow.

Saturday, October 06, 2007 – Kobe, Japan

Another very busy day in Japan. The ship sailed through Osaka Bay and docked in the Port of Kobe at about 7 am. This was the msAmsterdam’s first visit to Kobe and is also the 140th anniversary of the port opening its doors to trade with western nations. This gave them a double reason to celebrate and they came out in force to welcome us with bands and dancing. Our tour for the day took us through Kobe to Osaka and then on to Nara which was the first permanent capital of Japan established in 710 AD. Prior to that time, the capital was moved from city to city with each change in ruler. We visited the Nara Park which is the site of the largest bronze image of Buddha in the world. It stands just under 160 feet tall and is enclosed in a wooden building that dates back to about 1567 and is supposed to be the largest wooden structure in the world (what about the Tacoma Dome, I ask?). Nara Park is huge with dozens of important historical and cultural sites. We could have spent a week just in the park. There are both Buddhist temples and Shinto Shrines in the park. We visited the Kasuga Shrine and walked among the 3000 stone and wooden lanterns which line the walkways. While we were at this shrine a traditional wedding was just finishing and the bride’s family came out in full traditional dress and talked to us for awhile. We were surprised that they were so willing to have a bunch of American tourist bugging them about the wedding and their traditions on what was a very special day for them. I doubt we would have been so gracious had our roles been reversed. We would have loved to stay in Nara Park and just walk around. The grounds are immaculate and have hundreds of deer roaming round that have become accustomed to humans so that you can feed and pet them if you like.

After lunch we drove over to the Horyuji temple which is the oldest temple in Japan. An impressive 5 story pagoda was on the site as well. We saw some of the oldest historical relics in Japan at this place but could not get to close or photograph anything inside. Most of Japan’s relics were made of wood which, naturally, does not survive wars and time too well. This site has accumulated hundreds of items that have in fact survived. We arrived back at the ship about 6 pm. Instead of dinner they had put together an unannounced western barbeque out on the open deck. There was steak, ribs, hot dogs, hamburgers, beans, potato salad, corn on the cob and lots of beer. Great fun!

Tomorrow is a day at sea and then stops in Kagoshima, Japan and Cheju, South Korea. They tell us that it may get a bit rough as the ship passes the typhoon that is moving up the coast of China.

Thursday, October 04, 2007 – Yokohama, Japan

We continue to be amazed by Japan. Yokohama is a beautiful very modern city. It was almost totally destroyed in WWII and rebuilt, but beyond that they have continued to expand the city, filling in the Port area and have developed an international city that is clean, friendly and very welcoming. We left for a 5 hour tour of a city just to the south of Yokohama, Kamakura which was the capital of Japan from 1185 to 1333. This city had no military significance during the war and contained many historical sites so it sustained very little damage. We visited the site of the Daibutsu, or Great Buddha, which is about 42 feet high and was made from bronze around 1252. We then went to Tsurugaoka Hachimangu which is a Shinto shrine dedicated to the god of war. It dates from about 1100. We came back to the ship and had a great lunch and then headed out on our own to see Yokohama. We found it to be a very easy city to get around in, as long as you are walking and not trying to drive. We also had to remember that the cars are coming from the left when we go to cross the street. We visited a silk museum and learned how they harvest silk thread from the cocoon of the silk worm. We also visited the Yokohama historical museum. All in all, a great day! Tonight we sail for Kobe, Japan.