traveller's checks
Richie pickings
A resident of Japan for more than 60 years, Donald Richie is best known as the man who brought Japanese cinema to the west through countless magazine articles, festival appearances and several books on the subject, including biographies of a couple of the country's top directors. But Richie, now well into his 80s, is also an accomplished travel writer, and a newly published book of his essays offers a unique insight into Asia from someone who has been doing the rounds since the 1940s. Travels in the East is a compilation of previously published articles, written over the past 20 years and covering a diverse selection of destinations such as Bhutan, Myanmar, Mongolia, China, India, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam and Japan. Richie remains, despite so many years on the road and the observed loss of so much culture and beauty in the region, an enthusiastic traveller. 'To be in a new place is to find a new self,' he writes. 'Maybe that is why we love travel - we leave behind a person grown stale with familiarity, ourselves. We find, for a time at any rate, an attractive stranger, ourselves. We walk along new streets, all eyes, all ears, noticing as we never do back home, back where everything is memorised.' Travels in the East is available from bookstores for HK$120.
Room boom
Plane spotting
Travellers with time on their hands at Tokyo's Narita International Airport should head to the impressive Museum of Aeronautical Sciences, which is just a few minutes away by bus. Highlights include flight simulators, a Boeing 747 cockpit and hundreds of models and memorabilia charting the history of international and Japanese aviation. There are also observation areas from which you
can watch aircraft taking off and landing at the airport, and a reasonably priced restaurant. Outside, there is a grassy field for children to play on, surrounded by several aircraft that can be explored inside and out. The entrance fee for the museum, which is closed on Mondays, is 500 yen (HK$37) for adults and 200 yen for children. To get there from the airport, take the bus from gate 30 in Terminal 1 or from gate 13 in Terminal 2, which is used by Cathay Pacific and Japan Airlines for flights to and from Hong Kong.
Deal of the week
Set in train
A long-awaited railway connection between Thailand and Laos is due to open next month. Train services will run from Bangkok to Nong Khai and over the Friendship Bridge, to
Tha Nalaeng, which is about 3.5km inside Laos. Tourists will also be able to buy tickets for the train at Nong Khai for the short trip across the Mekong River. A 30km rail extension to the Lao capital, Vientiane, is currently underway but there is no word on when it will be completed. Laos is, in fact, the only country in the region without a rail network, although it once had a 6.5km line, which was built by the French to carry freight in the southern province of Champasak. Trainspotters can still find remnants of the line, torn up and adapted for a variety of practical uses, and a rusting French locomotive, around the village of Ban Khonetai.
Just the business