Let’s get this straight right now: these aren’t those sorts of honeymoon videos. If you’re here for those sorts of honeymoon videos you’re going to be disappointed. If you’re not here for those sorts of honeymoon videos then you’ll probably still be disappointed but for completely different reasons.
Way, way back in 2008 I got married and went on a trip to the Far East with my wife, cruising around the South China seas on the Diamond Princess and taking in a number of stops too: China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Singapore, and Thailand. Not long after that I wrote about our general experience of cruising, specifically as it applied to Princess Cruises in this article: Your First Princess Cruise. But what I didn’t do on this website was go into the details of the trip, share pictures, or upload video. In the lattermost case the reason for that was quite simple; I neglected to upload any videos until very, very recently. I figure seven years is a reasonable time to wait for these things.
By way of getting back into the habit of occasionally updating this site and justifying its hosting costs I thought I’d take advantage of the recent video uploading spree on YouTube and share some of the filmed experiences of my honeymoon.
The entire set of videos can be found in this playlist – Honeymoon, November 2008 – and it’s mostly in the right sequence except for a few at the end which had stupid dates on the files and YouTube doesn’t really make it easy to rearrange the playlist order.
Some “highlights”:
Short pan from on the Great Wall of China showing some of the surrounding hills and large number of tourists, mostly from China, making some form of ascent. This was part of a trip lasting just a few hours and we only had a short time on the wall itself. Bizarrely, some people who came long with us seemed more content to do some shopping at the gift shop near the base rather than engage in any climbing. Not us, though. We made the most of our time by hiking up as much as we could before needing to turn around and return to the coach. We stopped often as we ascended. It was very steep in parts. And we were very unfit. We’re still very unfit.
Tiananmen Square. Very large and while we were there it filled up quite quickly with tourists, again mostly from China. Now, you would think that tourists going to Tiananmen Square might want to queue up at the mausoleum or take in the sights and, generally, this was true, but it turned out that there was something else that the Chinese tourists wanted to do too. After we’d taking in a circuit of the square and were standing around gazing at the crowds I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to face a young Chinese woman who asked in suttering English if she could have her photo taken with me. I know. Weird. I don’t like having my photo taken but I smiled and said yes. She stood next to me, I made sure that the image of Chairman Mao was behind us, and her friend took a photo; they both bowed and thanked me. And that’s when my wife and I noticed the queue that had suddenly formed of other Chinese tourists wanting a photo. For the next five minutes we smiled and posed with complete strangers. So, bizarrely, somehere in China there are photos of us in Tiananmen Square on our honeymoon.
If you’ve ever wanted to see what it would be like to hop in the back of pedicab and take a ride through Beijing to the hutongs then here’s your big chance. Lovely trip and visiting the hutongs and talking with a local Chinese woman afterwards was a fanstastic experience.
Without a doubt my favourite place in Beijing has to be the Temple of Heaven where groups of mostly elderly Chinese people come together to ballroom dance, line dance, sing, play music, play cards or mahjong, take in some Tai Chi, etc. Utterly fascinating, utterly engrossing, and I could have stayed to watch for hours. I took a load of videos from this part of the city and this is just one showcasing two of the different but adjacent groups of dancers.
One of the things you’ve got to do by law when going on a cruise for the first time is complete an entire lap of the ship on the promenade deck, filming it. It also helps if it’s incredibly windy. Luckily it was windy so here’s a nice windy promenade around the Diamond Princess somewhere in the South China sea. You’ll notice only a few other passengers braving the conditions and taking in the majesty of the waves. Our next planned cruise is to South America and I’ll be hoping to repeat this sort of video as we head around Cape Horn.
How do you compete with video from a pedicab in Beijing when you’re in the water town of Zhujiajiao, Shanghai? A water taxi video! Lovely place to visit. We decided not to take in the city of Shanghai itself simply because we’d had three days in Beijing just before and wanted to mix up our excursions on the cruise.
Chiufen, Taiwan, is a very green place. It’s very green because it doesn’t appear to stop raining ever. Weather notwithstanding, though, this ex-mining town was a lovely place with fabulous architecture and great tea houses. Our tour group stopped for a drink in one of the tea houses and had a lovely cup of tea. Most of us. Some of the group – why, yes, yes they were Americans – loudly asked for coffee instead. Because when you travel to a tea house in an old mining town up a mountain the thing you’re after in that tea house is coffee. I can’t be certain but I wonder now if these were the same Americans who moaned in the restaurant on the third day in Beijing “oh, not Chinese food again.” Americans, eh? What can you do with them?
We had an extra day in Hong Kong because the Japanese went into a full panic about norovirus and wouldn’t let the ship dock there. In the evening of the first, unexpected extra day the Diamond Princess passed alongside Hong Kong Harbour and caught the spectacular light show put on by the buildings. That night the ship provided tender boats for any passengers wanting to go ashore. My wife and I wolfed down our meal then made our way to the boats. A mass of people were ahead of us but, amazingly, they all parted to let us get off the ship first. It turned out that a lot of the crew were taking advantage of the stopver in Hong Kong but very few passengers; if more than a dozen of the 2,500 got off then I’d be surprised. We, of course, did. Tender boat to the island, then ferry to the mainland near Aberdeen, then for some exploring and purchasing of a new camera lens in the night market at midnight. A scary experience as we thought we were going to be mugged at one point (probably our imaginations), but a great experience nonetheless. We then made our way back to the ferry only to discover they’d stopped running. Suddenly panicked again we considered getting a taxi through the tunnel when we bumped into some Dutch tourists who seemed to know what they were doing, noticed our terrified faces, gave us a map, and ran with us to the underground railway where we just caught the last train of the night. Thank you European comrades! Tender boat back to the ship, shower to remove to the fear, and room service finished off that night of excitement. The following day many cruisegoers took an optional tour to the market but since we’d done it the night before we went for an explore of the space museum. As you do. And it was wonderful. The baffled looks on the faces of our fellow travellers when we caught up that evening was wonderful.
The best excursion we took on our honeymoon cruise was in Singapore. The Long Bar in Raffles (as shown in the video) to enjoy a Singapore Sling, a visit to the museum to see how Chinese immigrants lived (not very well would be the answer there), and a trip to a pewter factory which was the surprising part of the day’s activities; after hearing about pewter manufacture we got to take part in making bowls ourselves, got to keep the bowls, and got aprons and other tidbits too. And since we’d all had Singapore Slings beforehand we were all quite merry doing it. Compared to friends who’d headed off to explore gardens and wildlife and not been that impressed we had a fantastic time.
So, there you go. Only seven years after the event, but videos from our 2008 honeymoon trip to the Far East on the Diamond Princess cruise ship are now finally online.
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