The early worm catches the bird
For many people, one of the delights of a trip or vacation is sleeping in. Yes, stuffing your face three times a day with fine foods is fun as well, not to mention the opportunity for multiple beverages inserted in between the meals, and checking tourist traps off the bucket list that you created in order to go to the same places everybody else is going to as well. Yes, sleeping until noon helps cure that Covid 47 hangover you obtained by staying up late, very late, the night before, but dragging your ass out of bed at mid-day like a wounded wooly mammoth guarantees that you will miss what I consider to be the most interesting part of any day, which is dawn. That is, unless you are in Reykavik or Anchorage in the middle of winter where the sun doesn’t come up at all in which you should never go there on vacation. If you are concerned about your beverage intake, you shouldn’t go to either place at any time. In fact, I have a long list in regards to the topic of beverage intake, but let’s move on.
Picture this. The Norwegian fjords are the number one tourist attraction in the world. How do they measure that statistic? Are they the most beautiful? Is it cheap and easy to go there? Is Norwegian food the best in the world? The answer is that Norway was famous for herring before the country struck it rich with oil under the North Sea, so if you like pickled herring then Norway is just the cuisine for you. The Norwegian kroner is worth about five times the US dollar, so you will feel broke the minute the server brings you the dinner bill and you burst into tears. No, the fjords are the number one attraction in the world based on the beauty of the landscape and the great number of people who go there to stare at the fantastic views. What you need to know, preferably in advance, is that if you sleep in you will miss out on all the beauty.
An Italian cruise ship company that will not be named in order to avoid litigation had somehow tracked me down and offered me the vacation of a lifetime. Would I care to fly to Europe at their expense, lecture on board a cruise ship about my amazing global adventures to an audience of elderly British pensioners that thought a ski hill was a wilderness, cruise the Norwegian fjords in luxury and enjoy six months of free room and board visiting several countries? My first thought was that I would rather endure a colonoscopy than spend a week aboard a cruise ship eating cafeteria food cooked five stories down next to the boiler room, but the beauty of the Norwegian fjords beckoned with their seductive siren call, so I signed on for a month.
After enjoying (or enduring) hundreds of press trips around the world I have long since learned to study the fine print. “Enjoy lunch at your own convenience in the fine downtown restaurants for which Oslo is famous” means you are on your own and will pay five times as much for a hamburger that it would cost you back home, if you could somehow afford to eat a cheeseburger in Oslo. I studied the departure and arrival times of the cruises of the fjords and then matched them to Google Maps. If you left Oslo at a certain time, when would you arrive in Stavanger? If you left Stavanger after dinner, when would you arrive in Flaam, a village at the far end of the longest and most beautiful fjord in the world?
The cruise ship that I refuse to name, except to say it was Italian and did not sink while I was on it, arrived at Flaam at 8 in the morning, a respectable time to shake the cobwebs out of your head and enjoy a breakfast buffet of scrambled eggs and toast. The only problem was that if you set your alarm at 8 a.m. you would have already arrived at the dock and therefore missed all the scenery altogether. It’s rather far north in Norway where they have put the longest fjord in the world for you to explore, and the sun rises at around 4.30 in the summer, which is the season when you want to go. The best scenery is between 4 and 7 am, but it is dark at 4 a.m. so best to rise and shine at 5 or 6 a.m. and watch the show and enjoy a leisurely breakfast after, listening to the outrage of all the dunderheads who slept in late because they hadn’t done their homework.
No one on the staff of the ship will tell you this. It’s a secret and I am the only anal retentive researcher in the entire world who would investigate such a tiny detail way in advance. When you wake up and eat the breakfast buffet and wander around tiny Flaam village and pay a small fortune to take the train up the mountain and back, you can say “next time I’ll remember to research.” The view of the fjords on the way back to Oslo is also good, but it’s a sunset and the colours are all different. Also, a reminder it doesn’t get dark until around midnight in the fjords in the summer and by that time many intrepid travellers are hammered in the top deck nightclub taking advantage of drink specials and don’t give a damn about any stupid scenery out the window.
If the Norwegian fjords are the top tourist attraction on the planet, simply because of the peace and beauty of the landscape, let’s change pace and discuss the opposite. The Mong Kok district of Kowloon, a city across the bay from Hong Kong, boasts the most densely populated landscape in the world. Last I looked the density was 264,000 people per square mile, packed into hundreds of cheap high rise towers, but they may have added a few hundred thousand since then. That’s even more than Mumbai, India and a good reason not to travel to either place. For reasons based on economy, which is to say I was actually paying for this trip myself, I stayed in the Dragon Inn in Mong Kok, where I paid $24 to sleep in a broom closet. I had a flight to New Delhi in the morning to catch, which meant I had to get up at the crack of dawn and get to the airport in time to absorb my fair share of abuse. I set my alarm for just before dawn.
For $24 in Hong Kong you don’t get a lot of amenities. You could buy an absinthe and cucumber cocktail in a Kowloon nightclub at that price, but best not to so so if you are getting up at 5 a.m. The streets of Kowloon are packed at virtually every hour, especially at night when a million people go looking for dinner. It was dark when I stumbled down the hallway to the elevator on the 22nd floor of what was an old office building gone to seed. The elevators didn’t work, so I stumbled down 22 flights of stairs where the lobby doors were locked. Descending down to the basement, I crawled out of a parking lot window to the sidewalk where I encountered 500,000 people in a mad rush to go to work. The phrase “rush hour” takes on different definitions in different places. The effect of emerging into a vast sea of surging humanity first thing in the morning had the same effect as drinking a gallon of high caffeine coffee. I was swept along like a cork on a beach on an ebb tide. I can’t recommend this kind of dawn experience to the faint of heart but I am glad I did it once. Never again though.
Perhaps my favourite city in the entire world is San Francisco. Chances are the only time you will greet the dawn in San Francisco is if you stay up partying even later than everyone else. It’s a west coast city, though, which means its three hours behind the east coast cities who set the schedule for the nation. It’s also a banking headquarters and adheres to the old refrain “early to bed, early to rise, makes a man wealthy and wise,” so you may find some busy bees out and about as early as dawn, getting a jump start on the rat race. For me, I snagged a great photo of a fireball rising over the Oakland hills in the east while aboard a small ship cruising west to the Farallon Islands to go cage diving with great white sharks. Since sharks seldom seem to sleep, you have to get up early to catch one napping. The Golden Gate Bridge is a great sight at any time of day, even without caffeine.
Should you be infatuated with the sight of the sun rising in the eastern skies you could do no better than pre-book a vehicle, get up in the middle of the night and drive to Sarangkot, a small mountain just north of the city of Pokhara in western Nepal. You drive to near the top, stumble the rest of the way in the dark, and arrive at the top to discover with amazement that you are not the only dingbat crazy enough to do this, because a viewing platform has been erected and literally hundreds of people are there before you, all clutching expensive cameras and standing ready for the magic moment.
The first flickers emanate over Mt. Everest, hundreds of kilometres to the east, even further if you count in miles. As soon as the sun crawls forth over Everest the entire Himalayan mountain range lights up like a bonfire, reds and yellows bursting forth like fireworks along dozens of peaks over 25,000 feet high. The closest peak to Sarangkot is Machupuchare, or Fish Tail, and when the tail explodes in fire the show is over and you have to wonder why there isn’t a Starbucks nearby, serving up lattes and croissants. Whoever said its harder to go down a mountain than going up must have had Sarangkot in mind, given that the descent among a huge crowd on a tiny goat path is much like running with the bulls in Pamplona. Arriving back in Pokhara you will be amazed that not a single restaurant is open yet because normal people are still in bed, so plan ahead in advance with an egg sandwich stashed back in your room next to the empties.
One could easily argue that watching a sunrise over the Himalayas is the best possible way to wake in the morning and take in a mind boggling sight, but in fact I give that top honour to watching Poumaka Tower emerge from the clouds in the morning mist over the island of Ua Pao in the Marquesa Islands. Chances are you haven’t heard of it. I suspect very few people have heard of Ua Pao or even the Marquesas. The Polynesian Tourism Board a thousand kilometres to the south in Tahiti claims that the Marquesa Islands are the most remote island group in the world, given the distance from any other large body of land like a continent. There are six tiny islands spread out in the vastness that is the South Pacific Ocean. The only way to get there is via a cargo ship that departs every two weeks from Tahiti.
Of the six islands, Ua Pao is the furthest west and most remote. The only town is Hakahau, a few hundred souls clustered along a beach on the northeast sector of the island. The freighter stops there to load and unload, and on a very rare occasion it makes its way to the west coast of the island to drop off cargo at the tiny village of Hakahetau. The village is ringed with several towering volcanic peaks, remnants of an ancient eruption. Poumaka Tower stands like a giant jagged tooth over 3,000 feet high, a basalt fang thrusting forth from the jungle pointing towards heaven.
I had made previous inquiries about the west coast of the island from a guide on the freighter, mainly to find out what amenities were available in the village. A store perhaps? He made casual remarks about the unique topography and suggested I rise before dawn and stand by my porthole with camera ready. No mention was made of the Tower, and when it emerged from the morning mist in ghostly glory I managed to shoot a minute of video footage to show the world what I was seeing, one of the few people in history I suppose to ever witness such a staggering apparition. I attempted to share the footage with some other diners at the breakfast buffet but a cook came out with a big basket of steaming croissants and I found myself overshadowed, so to speak, the gigantic peak outside the windows lost in the clouds. Next time I go, I hear there is a restaurant in the village, but I suspect it only opens for dinner.
Poumaka Tower on Youtube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmrY4H0BRjM&list=UUFGnXSeX0CwFKqugn3pcrCg&index=52&t=0s