Cairns > Kobe
Six o’clock saw us surging into action and by half-past we were showered, shaved (at least I was) but not shampoo’d and ready for the Continental breakfast downstairs.
It’s hardly a scientific approach, but a quick check of the levels of the various spreads available for the morning toast revealed a preference for orange marmalade with, believe it or not, Vegemite sneaking into second place ahead of strawberry jam with peanut butter a distant (and, in my humble opinion quite understandable) last.
A quick survey of adjacent tables showed a similar level of depletion in the stocks of Vegemite, scotching any suspicions that the table we were occupying had attracted an unusual number of Australian chauvinists eager to indulge in the left-over brewers’ yeast.
This posed an interesting question to ponder while waiting for a boarding call for the flight to Japan.
I assumed supplies of the various items started at around the same level when the bistro opened for breakfast. Presumably the sole employee in sight filled the receptacles to the top each morning as part of her duties. I couldn’t see that there was all that much she would need to do.
I felt that it was also fairly safe to assume that there wouldn’t have been too many dinkum Aussies in the crowd that had passed through the breakfast area before us. More than likely the previous clients would have been backpackers or tourists grabbing a bite to eat before heading off on a day tour of the Daintree or a white-water rafting expedition in the mountains between Cairns and Tully.
Admittedly, anyone partaking in these particular pastimes might be looking at maximising their Australian experience but observations of overseas reactions to Vegemite suggests that, for most foreign visitors, once is more than enough.
So what happened to all the Vegemite?
I had visions of overseas visitors surreptitiously sneaking sachets of the substance into their pockets with a view to smuggling them back home as evidence of the Australian lack of sophisticated taste.
And, Muriel, can you imagine? They spread THIS on their morning toast! What strange people...
Anyway it gave me something to ponder while we were waiting.
By seven-thirty we were on our way to the airport and Hughesy’s first encounter with the vagaries of international travel.
Arriving at the International Terminal I was mildly bemused by the lack of activity. A few people were being checked in, a group of Japanese tourists were being marshalled outside the check-in area and there were a couple of terminals occupied by staff waiting for the arrival of customers.
No waiting, no delay.
I suspect that ‘Er Indoors, being quite the experienced traveller, had been looking forward with considerable amusement to watching the fun as Hughesy tackled the various administrative procedures prior to embarkation, which was, more than likely her motivation for allowing me to hand over my passport first.
And everything went smoothly.
Once the Japanese passport came into play, on the other hand, matters became somewhat more complicated. Our operator required assistance, first from the girl on the terminal next door, then a supervisor appeared on the scene, followed by further assistance from higher up the echelon.
In the end it was, we gathered, some minor glitch or typographical error - a zero entered as letter O or some such.
Several years ago I took great joy in describing my version of what happened when a lone traveller on her way back to Japan left an unattended bag in the midst of a Japanese tour group while she made use of the conveniences, returning to find the group had moved on and an unattended bag was the subject of serious scrutiny from the security staff.
However we’ve frequently been warned about the inadvisability of joking about security issues in areas like check-in counters, so I was forced to give the flick pass to such potential rib-ticklers as That’s funny. It should have worked. Surely the ink’s dry by now.
Anyway, once we were past that little hurdle it was a case of up the stairs, round the corner and through Immigration where my previously pristine passport received its first exit stamp.
There was still a good ninety minutes to kill before boarding and the departure area was almost totally deserted when we walked through Security and ‘Er Indoors once again attracted the attention of the guy with the little wand that scans you for traces of explosives.
Over the last dozen times we’ve passed through a security set-up I’ve walked straight past the individual in question while the strike rate where ‘Er Indoors is concerned in something like 50%.
Lack of crowds meant that we were the only customers in sight when we walked into the duty-free store, making a predictable beeline for the wine department.
It wasn’t as if we were necessarily looking top buy anything. There were three half bottles of Rutherglen Tokay tucked away as presents and I didn’t fancy the prospect of lugging extra weight around as we made our way around the Land of the Rising Sun.
On the other hand I thought it would be interesting to see what was on offer. While I suspected that the usual Aussie wine icons would feature prominently, I suspected that we might encounter a couple of items that you wouldn’t normally be able to find in your local liquor outlet.
When we visit the Lolly Shop we are usually looking to restock the wine rack with a couple of dozen value for money wines and when we do venture into the quality section we tend to head towards areas where we’re likely to find something from a winery we’ve visited, so I have no idea whether Jacob's Creek Steingarten Riesling is widely available or whether it’s a label that has somehow managed to slip past without attracting my attention.
The Steingarten vineyard was something I remembered reading about back in the mid-seventies when I was just starting to get interested in wine, Steingarten being a relatively high-altitude vineyard with a gravelly soil (Steingarten, of course, translates as stone garden) which had been developed and planted with a view to producing a German-style riesling.
Interesting, I thought. And proceeded with further investigations.
Since the first night in Kobe’s accommodation was supposed to be a 4.5 star establishment with water views, I started to think that perhaps a nice bottle of red might be an acceptable way of celebrating our safe arrival as we looked out over Kobe’s harbour.
And a bottle of Steingarten in the backpack wouldn’t be that much extra weight.
I’d run across frequent references to Heathcote as one of the emerging wine regions in Victoria but hadn’t (as far as I can recall, and my memory can be a most unreliable conveyance) tasted anything from there, so I selected a bottle of Brown Brothers Heathcote Shiraz as a possibility for a night-cap after a hard day’s travel since, judging from the Limited release label, it wasn’t a wine I’d be likely to run into at the local bottle-o.
Having made those purchases I found myself a comfortable seat and devoted myself to writing up the events of the previous twenty-four hours while ‘Er Indoors indulged herself with a further wander around the shopping options.
Once the call was made, boarding went smoothly enough but some difficulty in the luggage compartment downstairs meant that the load needed re-stowing, delaying our departure by half an hour or so.
While we were taking stock of this development, a further announcement - first in English, then in Japanese - advised that the temperature on the ground at Kansai was a far-from-comfortable eight degrees Celsius. Obviously, the majority of the passengers, being Japanese, either tend to zone out while the English version of such announcements goes across, preferring to wait till they can get the information in their preferred tongue or else they just don’t understand English.
If that sounds like I’m being uncharitable, the English announcement had concluded, ‘Er Indoors and I had finished discussing the need to adjust our luggage to counter such extremes of temperature when the Japanese version of the same information went across, resulting in a noticeable shudder from the majority of the plane’s population.
Looking back on it, we decided that the announcement was probably a tactical move to provide those on board with something to talk about, or, if travelling alone to occupy their minds while the necessary rearrangements were being made down below.
Once we were in the air, there was nothing for it but to sit back and try to find something to occupy the mind over the flight’s seven and a half hour duration. Under normal circumstances I’d have a book to read and with the iPod supplying a suitable soundtrack that would be quite sufficient. But since, for reasons outlined above, I was carrying one book that needed to last me for a bit over two weeks, the time from take-off to touch-down was spent toggling between various modes - Customs paperwork, reading, writing the travelogue, eating, meditating on various subjects, listening to the iPod - and despite dire predictions from certain quarters I found enough variety to prevent the time from dragging unduly.
Once a wave of excitement went through the group of homeward-bound home-stay students in front of us as land came into sight we were able to spend the remainder of the flight trying to figure out exactly where we were.
That wasn’t as easy as you might think, given the haze that covered most of the visible countryside. The fact that we were looking directly towards the afternoon sun didn’t help matters much, but as we approached ever closer to Kansai International (KIX, in case you’re wondering, in Airport Code - KAN has presumably been allocated to Kansas City) ‘Er Indoors spotted more and more familiar landmarks until eventually we were over Osaka Bay on final approach.
Once we had landed, a lengthy taxi took us from the runway around three sides of the terminal building to the disembarkation point. The air bridge delivered us into the terminal building and, by the simple approach of following those in front of us we ended up on the monorail that carried us down to the inevitable encounter with Customs and Immigration
Among Hughesy’s circle of acquaintances it’s frequently been noted that when you wander into the local Post Office to find yourself on the end of a very long queue, by the time you’ve made your way to the counter and concluded your business you almost invariably discover that the previously-lengthy queue is now totally non-existent.
In most cases, apart from the Post Office staff, you tend to find you’re the only person in the building.
I had no idea the same principle applied in busy international airports.
Arriving in the Immigration Hall, ‘Er Indoors (of course) headed for the Japanese-passport-holders’ section, where her entry to her homeland proceeded without incident. Then she settled down to wait for Yours Truly.
For my part, I attached myself to the end of a queue comprising, at a rough guess, several hundred people. Part of the problem was the fact that our flight was half an hour late. Had it been on time, I guess I would have found myself in front of many of the people who were now in front of me.
As the serpentine line inched towards the processing area, we passed large notices advising that, as of late last year, all foreigners entering Japan needed to be fingerprinted and photographed.
In some cases the procedure seemed to take a couple of seconds, but by the time I found myself second in line from the processing point and was looking forward to whatever lay on the other side of the barriers the guy being processed in front of me seemed to encounter all sorts of obstacles.
If I didn’t spend five minutes waiting before the opportunity to move into another spot presented itself it certainly felt like five minutes.
And over the forty-five minutes or so I spent standing in line it seemed there had been no more than a single international flight arrive, and I watched as the handful of foreign passengers who’d arrived on that flight disappeared into the distance towards the baggage carousel while I waited for a suitable vacancy to allow me to shift to another line.
But eventually I found my way through another processing point, headed down the passage way, collected the luggage and passed straight through the rest of the process in no time flat.
Faced with revealed form one would have expected further delays from the airport to the hotel, but we arrived at the shuttle bus departure point with about five minutes to spare and the fact that rush hour was well and truly past meant that the scheduled sixty-five minute trip to Kobe’s Sannomiya Station took more or less the advertised time span.
‘Er Indoors, for some reason, decided to install us on the port side of the bus, generously allowing me the window seat, which meant that the first half of the journey had us passing dock-lands, skirting industrial estates and crossing waterways on the port side while the other side of the bus looked out over the fairyland twinkle of a major conurbation.
In fact it was some forty minutes after we’d started when I spotted the first obvious residential building on our side of the bus.
I was just reflecting that one dock-land/industrial area around the world must look just like any other one when you remove the neon signs (and the neon signs were conspicuous by their absence at the time) when a voice from beside me said:
Look over there - that’s Osaka Castle.
At which time I sent an important email to myself.
Self. Next time we take this trip we sit on the starboard side of the bus.
Alighting from the bus at Sannomiya Station, Kobe’s main rail terminal and the hub of a number of transport options it took us a few minutes to locate the departure point for the next shuttle bus, which was going to transfer us to the Meriken Park Oriental Hotel. Since the next bus was due in about five minutes, that gave us the time for a brief debate about the night’s eating arrangements.
There were a couple of options close at hand but I felt that if we went for a look we might well miss the bus and face a half hour wait. In any case, after a substantial meal the previous night and a couple of snacks on the plane (beef rendang and a pastrami sandwich, both of which were considerably better than my previous limited experiences with airline food suggested they were likely to be) it wouldn’t do us all that much harm if we failed to find an acceptable snack option at the hotel.
And if we were going to go hungry there was a bottle of Heathcote Shiraz to deaden the pangs.
Once the shuttle had delivered us to the hotel we were speedily checked in, offered an impressive explanation of the breakfast options and handed over to a porter, who conducted us to our room.
Arriving outside the door, our friendly porter embarked on a lengthy demonstration of the correct use of the key card, which might have been understandable if the explanation was in English and directed towards a certain hairy foreigner, but it was in Japanese and directed at ‘Er Indoors who’d been privileged to receive a similar, though somewhat shorter, explanation downstairs. All in all it seemed somewhat pointless except as an exercise in repeated bi-directional courtesies.
Once inside the room, he proceeded to repeat at length the explanation of the breakfast options we’d already received at the check-in counter, before graciously withdrawing.
Throughout this lengthy process I was left alone to ponder that this guy bore a remarkable resemblance in the mannerism department to a certain ex-pupil who’d been known in Year Four circles as Harry Houdini.
When I mentioned this remarkable resemblance to ‘Er Indoors the look I received in return suggested significant further evidence had been added to the prosecution brief in the case of The Crown versus Hughesy’s Sanity.
After a few minutes on the balcony taking in the view across the harbour, a chance encounter with the room service menu revealed the availability of various reasonably-priced snack options, so we ventured downstairs and ended up with a club sandwich and a fruit parfait which provided the stomach lining we needed when we attacked the Shiraz, which we’d left quietly breathing upstairs.
And very nice it was, too.
Lights Out was some time after eleven, but with a midday checkout and the prospect of a lengthy and substantial buffet breakfast in the morning, the lateness of the hour was never going to be an issue.