Nagasaki Notations

The official pre-conference tour started today and we took part in the traditional tour activity, we rode on the bus for two hours. In keeping with ancient Asian wisdom which has noted that undertakings often encounter “difficulty at the beginning” today was delightfully error prone.

We started the day with a tour of Dazaifu-Temmangu Shrine. It is a marvelous old Shinto temple but clearly a tourist magnet as we had to walk from the parking lot up a street filled with shops selling jewelry, statuary, clothing and food stuffs. I was fascinated by the food as there were dozens of types of snack food being offered most of which I had never seen before and could not identify. On the way back to the bus I bought a bag of what I termed “Japanese Cracker Jacks.” Indeed they looked and tasted similar to Cracker Jacks but are made with puffed rice rather than popcorn. One of the other passengers on the bus bought a box of plum flavored mochi and we had a high time passing both around the bus for everyone to try. The tour company is quite professional and courteous. They provided us with a snack which consisted of warm crepe like dough filled with a sweetened bean paste and bottled water.

From there we took the two hour bus ride to Nagasaki. It had started raining while we toured the shrine and it rained the entire bus trip. At Nagasaki we were taken to Chinatown where we had an excellent lunch of Chinese food. That is when the fun began.

The original plan was to go to the Nagasaki Port to travel by jetfoil to Fukue Port on Goto Island. (Nagasaki, by the way, is a very scenic port city with a large bay surrounded by hills. Similar to but at the same time quite different from San Francisco Bay.) At lunch we were informed that the jetfoil was cancelled due to the weather, still windy and raining, so a ferry was to substitute. When we arrived at the ferry terminal, however, the ferry too was cancelled. So we spent an hour at the ferry terminal watching sumo wrestling and talking about growing magnolia trees from seed with Steve, a camellia and magnolia fancier from Britain.

The poor harried kids running the tour (three girls and one boy who look to be in their early twenties) had to scramble to arrange lodging for us in Nagasaki as we were supposed to be in the Campana Hotel on Goto. They did a fantastic job getting us into the Ana Hotel Nagasaki Gloverhill.

As we had a couple of hours to kill before dinner we went for a walk around the area. Fortunately Frank, who is the head of a botanical garden in Virginia that is contemplating adding a camellia section and had been to Nagasaki previously, acted as our guide. We climbed the hill behind the hotel to Glover Garden “named after Thomas Glover, a 19th-century entrepreneur who helped provide arms to supporters of the Meiji Restoration. He also married a geisha, who was widely believed to have been the inspiration behind Puccini’s Madama Butterfly.” Frank was able to tell us that the area around the house was where the European traders, mostly Dutch at first, built houses and lived.

We had a fabulous dinner at the hotel talking (well, in my case listening) about camellias, grafting, hybridizing, showing and so on with a group that included Australians and a couple from the island of Jersey. In order to get back on schedule tomorrow we must be on the bus and off to the jetfoil port at 7 a.m. so I need to sign off and hit the sack. Hopefully I can be more leisurely and detailed in the future.