Qatari interlude and conclusion
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| Fanar Mosque, Doha |
HND-HKG: UO629, 0220-0600
I spent almost the entire 8h40 flight from Hong Kong sleeping and so was reasonably rested when I arrived in Doha, albeit at a very early local time. Doha Hamad Airport is enormous but assumes that you only want to transit through, and there are only a relatively small number of people who were leaving the airport. By the time I went through immigration and customs control, it was still a bit too early to do anything or even get into the city and so I spent some more time in the nicely air-conditioned airport.
As I arrived on a Friday, everything was closed in the morning: after all, this is one of the most religious Muslim countries in the world. This even includes the metro - which only starts operating from around 1400 on Fridays - and so I had to figure out how to get into the city centre. The airport information desk advised taking a cab, but I wasn't about to do that - instead, I noticed that there were local buses to the city from the airport bus station. The local buses are mostly used by airport employees and so go to the residential areas of Doha instead of the city centre, but route 757 went regularly to the suburb of Mansoura around 2 km away from the old city. 2 km is usually a trivial walk for me.
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| A local bus view of real Doha, where ordinary migrant workers live. Despite the oil money hoarded by the country's elite, it's a view no different to the suburbs of any other middle-income country. |
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| Bus 757, which I took from the airport to nearly the city centre. Contactless tap-on, tap-off. |
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| Old street outside Souq Watif |
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| Souq Watif |
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| Lunch at Al Koot Cafe. It was a lot of flatbread. |
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| Dhow harbour on Doha corniche |
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| Museum of Islamic Art |
Designed by the Chinese-American architect I M Pei, both the interior and exterior of the building were very clearly influenced by Islamic architecture and patterns. It was an excellent museum too, showcasing 1000 years of Islamic art, design, architecture and science. I spent a whole afternoon there - a serious mark of approval from me of all people - and not just for the drinking water fountains and air conditioning.
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| Sunset outside the museum |
As with many Arab desert places, the city gets much more lively after sunset when the temperature becomes bearable (and even comfortable) outside. The old city which was empty during the baking daytime was now bustling with both locals and tourists, though I was never really going to be interested in buying tat from the souq. I took the metro from Souq Watif back to the airport, where I paid 70 QAR (~£17) for a shower and was very pleased to change into clean clothes again.
DOH-LGW: BA2032, 0105-0620
I was exhausted, but fortunately was able to then sleep for almost the entire 7h15 flight back to Gatwick. It was a great relief to sleep in a proper bed back in Suffolk after three successive overnight flights, even if I did sleep reasonably well on all three. Thus ended this incredible adventure.
Conclusion
One of the themes that I keep discovering when I go travelling is that the more you immerse yourself in everyday local life, the more you learn about the place you're visiting. Similarly, you can see and learn so much more by travelling overland rather than by teleporting from airport to airport.
It was my first time visiting Hong Kong. It certainly lives up to its strapline of Asia's Global City: it's very much a child of both China and Britain, which was particularly interesting to me as a British-Chinese in that it has taken Chinese culture and everyday efficiency while also inheriting (at least an imagined version of) Britain's style of understated decorum and order and queuing. The food was excellent, everything worked in a modern and international way (it was the only part of my trip where contactless payments were almost universally accepted), and it was really nice to hike around Lantau Island as well for a completely different experience to the metropolis. I shall certainly return.
Mainland China spent a very long time closed off from the rest of the world through the pandemic, continuing its isolation for a couple of years after other countries had reopened. I didn't spend very long in the country this time around just because I wanted to spend more time in places where I haven't already been, but the gist of my experience this time was that the country is as good at food as it's ever been, everything's done much more digitally than really anywhere else in the world, and it's still a country that takes infrastructure properly seriously with its brand-new metros and high-speed rail everywhere. It was nice to see that foreign tourists are slowly returning; it's really an exceptional country to visit both for the history of one of the world's great historic civilisations and for the country's rapid transformation in the last 20 years.
South Korea was fascinating to visit. It's a country that spends 10% of its GDP on research and development, and it shows. The history and architecture were similar yet different to its neighbours, but certainly have their own characteristic Korean traditions. I particularly liked how the national museum had a sarangbang built in the traditional way, just like how the British Museum commissioned South Korean artisans to come to the UK and build a very similar one in the BM's Korean room. I did end up having enough of the gochujang by the end, though. Some day, I'd love to visit the DPRK too.
If anything, Japan was the part of the trip that I was most looking forward to. I'd bought the Japan Rail Pass just before its significant price-rise in 2023 and so got excellent value from it, travelling from Kyushu all the way to Tokyo via so many different places along the way. The food was of course delicious, the history fascinating, the scenery beautiful, and there weren't too many other tourists in October. It was great to meet up with local friends and explore around Kyoto and Nagano Prefecture in particular, and Strong Zero was quite an experience in itself. Yet I did also notice quite a difference between metropolis Japan and provincial Japan, and got a glimpse of the country's own bureaucratic way of doing things when I collected my rail pass. Similarly, I really didn't expect Japan to be the country where I walked around with coins jangling in my pockets with its cash-only businesses. For that matter, even with how much I travel by train around the world, it was quite a surprise to see Edmondson rail tickets being used in the real world in 2023 - I'd previously only ever seen them in museums. That said, maybe it's rather representative of the country as a whole: antique tickets being issued for the local line at the same station as the Shinkansen; a curious mix of old and new, tradition and ultra-modernity at the same time. Overall, I think I expected a kind of Oriental version of Switzerland, whereas of course the country is much more complex than just that.
I learned so much about all of these countries by passing through at overland speed. You see so much more when you don't fly.
5355 km by rail. 650 km by ship. £1949.50 total cost (compare that to just one European ski trip!). Five countries and territories. I do believe that I'll have been the first person to have made this journey from Hong Kong to Tokyo overland post-pandemic: truly an incredible, once-in-a-lifetime adventure.
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