Nagasaki

Good morning from Nagasaki. Today is Wednesday the 21st of January and depending on how things go this might be the last post for a while. Once we leave Nagasaki, probably sometime tomorrow or the day after, it will be about three weeks before I'll be able to post again. We start our long stretch across the Pacific and our next port will be in Texas around the middle of February.

This has been a nice break from the ship and a good opportunity to see a bit more of Japan. I'm glad that Dale, Dieter and I opted to take this little side trip.

We left Nagoya after a lengthy interview with Japanese immigration officials; apparently they deal with very few entries from ship-based passengers and none at all from passengers aboard cargo vessels. The one woman agent did express some jealousy after seeing the trip brochure on my laptop.

All told it took about an hour before they issued the entry visas and then we had to make a stop at customs before heading into Nagoya. The local agent was very helpful in assisting with securing our hotel and train reservations. Nice guy, but I think he was quite relieved when we reassured him we could handle the rest on our own and he was free to leave.

For the trip to Nagasaki we boarded one of the high-speed shinkansen bullet-trains in Nagoya and rode about three and a half hours until Hakata where we transferred to a limited express train for the remaining two hours to Nagasaki.

This was my first experience on the shinkansen. Very fast and comfortable, but no indication of the speed as we had in the Chinese express train.

The last part of the trip was actually much more scenic as our express train made its way along the coast to Nagasaki. The pace wasn't as hectic as with the bullet-train and we passed through a number of interesting and scenic fishing towns.

We wandered around the central part of Nagasaki yesterday evening and it's a fairly compact city and easy to get around using their system of somewhat outdated trams. The price for the trams is right, though; just Y100 for any trip regardless of length.

Today our plan is to look at some of the other sights and I at least need to do some shopping to stock up on some more books for the long trip.