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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

InterContinental Hotels & Resorts opened its first Vietnam property earlier this month. The InterContinental Hanoi Westlake (above; www.intercontinental.com/hanoi) promises 'a resort-like ambience ... torch-lit Venetian promenades and hard-to-find airiness in Vietnam's bustling capital'. The hotel has 340 rooms and 19 suites, each with a balcony overlooking the West Lake or private tropical gardens. Vietnam looks set for a hotel boom in the next couple of years. French corporation Accor alone has scheduled 12 new hotels by 2010, including a potentially controversial Novotel in Ha Long Bay, which will be the Unesco World Heritage site's first international property.

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

Tiglion Travel is offering a two-night package to Fukuoka in southern Japan that starts from HK$3,990 per person, twin-share, for accommodation at the Hakata Excel Hotel Tokyu (www.tokyuhotels.co.jp). The only international hotel on the list is the Hyatt Regency (above; www.hyatt.com), which is available for HK$4,390, with a HK$210 surcharge for stays that include a Saturday night. Also looking impressive, at least on its website, is the Jal Resort Sea Hawk Hotel (www.hawkstown.com/hotel/english), which is on offer for HK$4,190, with a HK$360 Saturday surcharge. Round-trip, economy-class flights with Dragonair and daily breakfast are included in these prices, which will be available until the end of next month. For more details, call 2511 7189 or e-mail [email protected], quoting package ID 4814. See www.fukuokaguide.com for useful travel information on Fukuoka, which offers easy overland access to other interesting cities not served by direct air links from Hong Kong, including Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

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

The Metropolitan hotel on Old Park Lane in London's upscale Mayfair district is running a Time for Business promotion, which is designed to provide business travellers with 'a sleek and efficient experience'. Priced at GBP279 (HK$4,375) a night, the package includes single-occupancy accommodation in a City Room, guaranteed early check-in from 10am, a Nobu bento box and Isake Premium sake delivered to your room in the evening and a takeaway breakfast on departure. For further details, visit www.metropolitan.como.bz.

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