Author: Steve Barru

Photographer, bookworm, traveler, born in the United States in 1949, left the United States in 1987, spent years in China, settled in Vietnam in 2016.

Morning Sun Shines on Tokyo Towers

My Tokyo hotel was in the Ueno area of the city. It was a walk of several minutes to beautiful Ueno Park, which is home to several prestigious museums, a zoological garden, Shinobazu Pond, the surface of which is completely covered in lotus plants, lovely tree-lined paths, and what seems to be obligatory in Japan’s public parks, at least one Buddhist pagoda and a small Shinto shrine.

To get to the park from my hotel, I walked through Ueno Station, a huge public transportation hub where more than a dozen subway and rail lines serving various parts of metro Tokyo come together allowing transfers. Tokyo has an extensive municipal metro/subway system that I assume is publicly owned; several lines serve Ueno. In addition to operating the inter-city Shinkansen (bullet trains) and other long distances trains, Japan Rail also operates urban commuter rail systems, and some of its Tokyo lines pass through Ueno. JR consists of a complicated mix of regional companies, some government entities, others privately owned. Don’t ask me to explain how this works, because I have no clue. Finally, several other commuter rail lines that serve Tokyo run into Ueno Station, and I assume these are privately owned.

The sheer size of Tokyo makes dealing with public transportation in the city daunting, and figuring out how to get from point A to point B can be more than a little confusing to a visitor. If you need convincing, search “Tokyo subway map” online and take a look what comes up. The good news: larger stations have information desks staffed with people who will point you in the right direction to get a train to your destination. Even better news: You can pay modest fares to get virtually anywhere in metro Tokyo on surface or underground trains. Trains run frequently (during the day and into the evening, I never waited more than 3 or 4 minutes, usually less), service is reliable (I experienced one brief delay, 2 or 3 minutes, during two weeks loaded with multiple trips on public rail in Japan), train cars are clean and well-maintained, and while crowded at times, the crowds compare favorably to crowds I have experienced on metro systems elsewhere in the world. If you are an American reading this and are not wondering why passenger rail service of all kinds in the United States is so pathetically bad, you should be.

I joined a couple of Japan travel groups on Facebook to help me plan my trip. Some of the more amusing threads featured questions about how to use public transportation in Tokyo and which of the various pass cards for tourists is best. These cards, of which there appear to be two primary competitors amidst a larger field, allow users access to trains in Tokyo (and in some cases, elsewhere in Japan) by swiping the card to get through turnstiles, avoiding having to buy individual tickets for each ride. You put a certain amount of money into the card, and can top up the card as needed. The two primary cards offer similar if not quite identical services and at least one, maybe both, can be used to buy goods and services other than rail travel, not unlike Hong Kong’s Octopus Card, if you happen to know it. There are various rules about returning the cards to recoup any unspent money that remains in the card. The amount of angst many people had about which of the two cards to buy, and which would cost more or less money produced comment threads that were downright hilarious in some cases. Here you had people who were spending considerable amounts of money for air travel and accommodations working themselves into an absolute lather about whether card A or card B would save them a bit of money during a 10 day stay in Japan. Pro tip: Think big picture, a few bucks more or less is not going to matter. Take a deep breath. Relax.

I quickly gave up on trying figure out either of the two top-up cards, and for roughly $10 purchased a 72 hour Tokyo Metro pass with unlimited rides on the municipal system. Tokyo subways took me everywhere I wanted to go in Tokyo, or perhaps more precisely, everywhere I had time to visit during a brief stay. In a couple of cases, I could have gotten off a bit closer to my destination if I had had a card that allowed me to take more than just Metro trains. I survived to tell the tale and there was zero angst attached to the decision to buy the Metro 72 hour pass. For the record, I also saved money going this route. The $10 card offers 72 hours of unlimited rides for that price; the top-up cards charge “retail” price for each ticket, you just don’t have to stop to buy a ticket each trip. So, there.

The area around the Ueno station is packed with restaurants, from ramen shops to fine dining, and there is plenty of shopping as well, if you are so inclined. All in all, unbeknownst to me when I booked the hotel using Agoda, the Ueno area was a great choice of location for my five day visit to Tokyo.

The image is taken from the shore of Shinobazu Pond; the lotus plants that cover the surface of the pond are barely visible in the bottom left foreground of the image. See below for a better look at the pond. The traditional building is a reconstruction of a 17th century Buddhist pagoda. It is mid-morning of my third day in Tokyo and the sunshine on the three high-rise buildings suggested to me that the showers and clouds were ready to give way to sunny autumn weather. It turned out that assessment was overly optimistic. But more on that later.

Raw Rainy Day Morning, Tokyo

My Vietnam Airlines flight to Tokyo (Narita) left Da Nang at just past midnight on 8 October and arrived at 7:30 the same morning. There is a two hour time difference between Japan and Vietnam; flight time was roughly five and a half hours. Narita is some distance from Tokyo, and there are a number of options for covering the distance. Taxi or car service would have busted my trip budget before I checked into my hotel, so they were out. My choices boiled down to an express train taking 50 minutes for around $20 or a limited express train (i.e., a train that makes several fewer stops than a local train) taking about an hour and fifteen minutes and costing about $7.

I opted for the $7 ride, first because I am cheap about expenses like this, and second, during a trip to Japan I would rather spend my money on sashimi than spending an additional $13 to save 25 to 30 minutes on a train ride. A third not unimportant consideration: Whichever train I chose, I would be arriving at my destination in Tokyo a bit before 10:30am and check-in time at my hotel was 3pm. Three o’clock? A bit late in the day for a check-in time, don’t you think? But all of the three hotels I booked in Japan had check-in at 3pm and check-out at 10am. And the place in Tokyo would not cut me even a little slack. Four and a half hours wandering around the hotel’s neighborhood on a couple hours of sleep after an all-night plane ride made for one grumpy curmudgeon by the time 3pm rolled around.

By the way, have I mentioned it was raining? I have lived almost 35 years in East and Southeast Asia, and this was my first visit to Japan. Rain on the first day of that long-awaited visit was definitely not on my wish list. It was not a hard driving rain, but it was hard enough that I used an umbrella, among various reasons, because I didn’t want my new, well-engineered, expensive, water-resistant but not waterproof camera directly exposed to the rain as I walked around waiting for check-in time for my hotel room to roll around. And just to dot this particular “i”, holding a camera and composing a photo while juggling an umbrella is not really my idea of a good time. Grumpy curmudgeon indeed.

It rained on my second day in Tokyo as well. Though after that, with the exception of a bit of drizzle in Kyoto, the weather for my remaining 13 days in Japan was lovely.

Fiery Sunset, Hoi An, Vietnam

Hoi An was treated to a fiery, magnificent sunset last night. The brilliant colors of this sunset may just be serendipity for those of us who got to watch, or they may be a warning announcing the arrival of tropical storm Trami, which is somewhere in the East Sea heading for central Vietnam. Generally speaking, I am not particularly interested in weather and am not fluent in weather folklore, so I cannot say one way or the other. The exception to my general rule of being uninterested in weather is when big weather events are headed my way. And with top wind speeds well over 100 kph and a deluge of rain on offer, Trami qualifies as a big weather event. Being in the path of such a storm gets me interested, in this case, interested enough to download the Windy app so I can track Trami’s movements. From the looks of things, the center of the storm with its destructive high winds and rain will make landfall quite a distance north of Hoi An on Saturday 26 October. Here we are almost certain to get bucket loads of rain over several days – after all this is the rainy season in central Vietnam – but with some good luck we will avoid Trami’s howling winds and the damage they cause. Or maybe we won’t. One report in a Vietnamese publication suggests the storm will turn south after making landfall. At that point it would be headed towards Da Nang and Hoi An. Just have to wait and see. In anticipation, I did a lot of food shopping yesterday.

As some of you know, I just returned from a couple of weeks in Japan. I have loads of photos from the trip, and had planned to get started processing and posting yesterday, my first full day back in Vietnam. That plan was derailed by a ten hour power outage, during which time a crew of a dozen or more guys in orange suits worked on the big power box at the end of my street. Said power box has been acting up for a couple of months now with several outages of short durations, and hopefully the extensive refit it got yesterday has put recent problems to rest. I can at least hope the repairs give me a better chance of having power during the storm. Whatever, I will get started with the Japan photos in the next day or so.

Untangling the Nets, Phan Thiết

Along a street near the big Phan Thiết fish market, a group of mostly men were at work untangling the nets used to catch the fish. These days, no natural fibers in sight – the nets are made of a thread-fine synthetic of some kind. After watching for about 10 seconds, I realized I had no clue how these people went about sorting out and making sense of the huge piles of netting they were working with. Better them than me. I would go off the rails completely in a matter of minutes trying to untangle all those tiny threads.

The Fish Market at Phan Thiết

Phan Thiết, a city of more than 200,000 people, lies on the coast of the East Sea about 165km east of Saigon. For ten or twelve km on either side of its urban center, large areas administered by Phan Thiết stretch along the coast. To the east is Mũi Né, a well-known tourist destination drawing both Vietnamese and international visitors to its beaches, sand dunes and recreational activities.

Phan Thiết has a large fishing fleet and a wholesale fish market that sells the fleet’s daily catch early in the morning pretty much every day. It seemed worthwhile to visit the market with cameras, so my Ke Ga host, Mark, and I got ourselves up and on the road to Phan Thiết by 6am. The market was still active when we arrived around 7am, though there were already signs of people getting ready to pack up and go home.

No shortage of hairy eyeballs targeting the guy with the camera.

This guy gave life to the expression “built like a brick shithouse.” He did not have a warm, friendly look on his face, so I decided a profile shot was the better part of valor.

The market was definitely the place to go in Phan Thiết for fashion statements.

It’s a long, early morning at the market.