Another hotel, another view. This one completely different from the Yokohama view! I am now in the Imperial Hotel in the heart of Tokyo (the centre of the Ginza district is just a few minutes walk from here). Earlier this week Japan’s Princess Sayako was married here at this very hotel and started her new life as a regular person (losing her royal status by marrying a commoner).
The view from my room at the Grand Intercontinental Hotel, Yokohama. I am here for the ET 2005 trade show, where I presented a seminar today.
I don’t use BART to get the airport that often, but when I do it never ceases to amaze me how badly planned it is; was it even planned I wonder, or did it just happen that they ended up at an airport? Firstly, at Lake Merritt where I got on the train there is an up escalator to the street, but not a down one so you have to carry all your luggage down the stairs into the ticket area. Next, there are still no wide barriers to allow people with luggage to pass through easily (they have these at SFO to get on and off there, but apparently it never occurred to them that people might need access with that luggage at the other end of their journey).
Once on the platform, they announce a 4 car train (at peak commute time) for the airport which arrives packed to overflowing. Squeezing onto this without luggage would have been difficult; with luggage made it no fun at all. Onboard there is no place to stow luggage of any kind, letalone suitcases; I guess people are meant to fly without luggage if they plan to use the train to get to the airport.
Finally, to add insult to injury, they then announce that there are delays getting trains into the airport. Lucky I left early (the taxi driver had another job at the same time as my pickup, so he turned up 15 minutes early and I had left plenty of time for delays having used BART before). I don’t know whether the shuttle van would have been better; probably not given that it is commute time.
Stay tuned for postings from my destination… I have my camera with me for this trip 🙂
Picked this up last time I was in Tokyo and have been meaning to scan it ever since I got back. If you are heading out that way, and would like to check the place out, I scanned the back of the card too.
Also known as the Scorpionfish, or even a Hawaiian Turkeyfish. This one is another resident of the Maui Ocean Center, but we really did see some of these in Kapalua Bay. In fact, we saw a lot of fish in Kapalua Bay – many more than we saw at the reefs off of Lanai’i during our snorkel trip there. Of course, we did actually see reef sharks and green sea turtles, the latter up close and personal, on the snorkel trip…
This whitespine surgeonfish is a resident of the Maui Ocean Center. There were also plenty of them in the water at Kapalua Bay, though they are a lot harder to photograph, especially with the 20D. I am looking at getting a waterproof housing for my girlfriend’s S500 as I think that would work much better than the disposable film cameras like the one we took on our snorkel trip.
By the way, the Ritz Camera store in Whalers Village was the cheapest place we found to buy the Fuji disposable film cameras on Maui if you are looking for one, and the photos we got were good, it is just difficult to swim and shoot through the small viewfinder at the same time!
Following the sugar museum, we decided to spend the afternoon at Maui’s aquarium: the Maui Ocean Center. While perhaps not as large as the Monterey Bay Aquarium, the Maui Ocean Center is nonetheless impressive. In addition to a section full of tropical Hawaiian fish, there were green sea turtles, hammerhead sharks and a walk-through tube in a tank filled with sharks, stingrays, puffer fish and many others.
The turtles were only too happy to swim over and investigate any humans standing alongside their tank, as you can see from the photo (you can see another photo in my Flickr area).
While on the subject of turtles, I was looking for a smaller print of a turtle photo by Victoria McCormick that I saw in a few places on Maui, but I can’t even find that photo on her website. Instead, I bought one called Ocean Light by Monica & Michael Sweet which I liked almost as much. I also liked the one called Covered in Sand – picking just one was a difficult choice.
Finally, a word of warning to those visiting who are also members of the Pacific Whale Foundation: there is a 10% discount for members, but the staff on the ticket counter did not tell us this even when asked directly about it.
Tuesday morning we had planned on taking a snorkel trip with the Pacific Whale Foundation to Molokini and the Turtle arches, but they were fully booked so we moved that to Wednesday morning. Instead, we decided to visit the Alexander and Baldwin Sugar Museum. A small museum, detailing the history of sugar production on the island and showing living conditions as well as the tools of the trade and the history of the Alexander and Baldwin company. It is a small museum, but worth a visit if you have a couple of hours and any interest in the island’s main crop; in 2001 the single sugar mill opposite the museum produced 5% of the US’ cane sugar, and 7% of Maui’s electricity.
Our first day of snorkelling, just off the beach at Kapalua Bay. We rented snorkel gear from the hotel’s beach activities store (right on the beach), and before you’re even waist deep in the water you are surrounded by fish. The reef extends down both sides of the bay, although the right hand side (looking out to sea) was much better. Also, the further out you go, the more impressive the corals get – inshore they seem to be suffering a little from human contact.
There are also sea turtles in the bay, although we did not see them; talking to people around the pool in the evening, several had seen them that day. Keep your eyes open if you swim there!
Mid-afternoon we took a break from the snorkelling, and went down to Whalers Village to pick up the marathon certificates and DVD (which we had not been expecting), then back up for some more snorkelling. I think we spent about three hours in the water total, and saw a lot of different fish, including Hawaii’s state fish, the Humuhumu-Nukunuku-Apua’a, or reef triggerfish.
Finally, a relaxing evening around the hotel’s pool area, waiting for the sunset and testing out the hammocks, which is where the photo of the sandals came from (oh, and our feet in them of course).
This little fellow was found on a flower at one of our stops on the Hana trip. Somewhat surprisingly he came out pretty well, although the photo has only been cropped down (not scaled) so he was very small in the original image. Click the photo to get the popup larger version so you can see him clearer.
