David Frodsham

It’s 6:30 in the morning as I walk to Nagasaki station to take the Limited Express to Fukuoka. The train is surprisingly busy for a Sunday morning, and we speed through some gorgeous countryside; mostly mountains on the left and sea on the right (logically, with Nagasaki being in the extreme South-West and Fukuoka in the North-West I rather expected these to be the other way around). I am sitting on the right (sea) side, and there are a number of fishing villages and small ports. The beaches are all a bit grubby and, other than a single sandy beach, not enticing for a swim. As Nagasaki is holding its annual Jellyfish festival, perhaps that’s just as well.

Breakfast bought at the station and eaten on board the train is the Japanese version of the sandwich: Mother’s Pride type ultra-white bread, unrecognizable contents, and shrink-wrapped in clever plastic that opens itself at the right spot however you pull at it. It’s washed down with peach juice. It does look more edible than most Japanese food, I suppose, and it slips down.

Two hours later, we pull into Hakata station; Fukuoka airport is another 10 minutes away by metro. I’m glad I’ve allowed an extra hour, because buying the metro ticket and taking the bus between terminals take rather longer than expected.

I have no idea why Cathay runs a flight from Fukuoka to Hong Kong. There are 6 people in Business Class, and Economy is not full either. But they serve some excellent Burgundy, so I’m not complaining. We stop briefly in Taipei to refuel and take on more passengers, where there is an intense tropical storm. The Captain warns us that he will be doing a “full-power take-off”, which the more fragile of us might find disturbing. The Airbus 330 certainly picks up speed at quite a lick, and with a very short run we take off and power our way successfully into the stormy sky without any screams from the passengers.

In Hong Kong the weather is beautiful and for once, the pollution levels are low and the view good. It’s late afternoon already and there’s not much time for anything. I buy a wallet to replace mine which has fallen apart and in true HK shopping style get superb pricing, an additional discount and a free gift. What a great place this is for shopping.

It’s another early start on Monday morning. Train to the airport, and plane to Guangzhou, which is just over the border in the manufacturing heartland of mainland China. From there I change terminals with the help of a keen teenager who carries my bags and chatters away in rudimentary English as he shows me the way, and is delighted with his 60p tip, although clearly wouldn’t have refused more. The airport is new and impressive, reminding me a bit of San Francisco with smooth tiled floors and metal frame dome roof. I have time for lunch in a café near the gate, and try and order something as safe as possible. “Shanghai noodles” sounds good. It turns out to be boiled fatty belly of pork, swimming in an unappetizing brown soup, with some unidentifiable vegetable with a brownish tinge. But it’s delicious. The green tea arrives in a glass mug and rather like a larva lamp has about half its leaves floating at the top and half at the bottom, with some going down or up at any one time. I have to drink it by using my teeth as a sieve, and spend much of the 5-hour flight to Urumqi picking the bits out of my mouth.

Urumqi must be bigger than I expected, as this is a wide-bodied aircraft and I’m in row 41. It’s very full, and I’m the only non-Chinese as far as I can see. The approach is all desert, with some of it marked out in perhaps 500m x 500m squares, but with nothing inside most of them. Is it for later construction, perhaps? There is quite a lot of strip mining for what looks like construction material. The airport is communist-era compared with the splendour of Guangzhou, with dingy lighting and low ceilings. The advertisement for the local Sheraton looks out of place. I have trouble finding the person picking me up and have to phone round to find out where they are, or if they are there at all. It turns out the sign for me is written in Chinese, so no wonder I couldn’t find them. We eventually meet up, although she can’t speak any English, other than the words “taxi” and “hotel”.

Riding to the hotel in a taxi is the usual dodgem-style Chinese driving as we overtake on the inside, weave in and out, and hoot at everything that moves. It’s such a surprise that we not only don’t hit anyone, but also the seatbelts have clearly never been used.

Urumqi is an oasis, and the surroundings are a mixture of dust, sand and greenery. There’s some new construction, and lots of what look like run-down factories but which I suspect are apartment blocks. A lot of the writing is in Cyrillic (Russian), which is perhaps the way the local dialect is written. The oasis makes the region quite agricultural, and there’s oil too. We pass a hillside with houses built into the side of the hill, but I’m not sure whether I’m observing ethnicity or poverty. The timezone here is the same as Beijing, even though we are geographically about 3 zones west, being quite close to Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and even Pakistan, so the sunrise / sunset is out of kilter.

I’m here for a conference, and hopefully to do some sightseeing. I will write some more as things unfold…