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It’s been a couple of days since Quentin sailed into Qingdao and for the last few legs he and Rachel (another crew member) have been doing the shopping for the leg ahead.

Each boat has a 15-strong crew and the next leg will be around 24/25 days.  On top of this they need emergency rations for another five days.  Scale this up to ten boats, add the food you’ll find (or rather not find) in Chinese supermarkets and you’ll quickly have problems.

We’ve spent the last two days in two of the big supermarkets in Qingdao… the Jusco and the Carrefour.  We have more or less cleaned both of these places out of tinned meat, tinned fruit, pasta, tinned tomatoes, Frosties, etc.  The only thing they did have enough of was, surprise surprise, pot noodles!

While checking out our six trollies of foodstuffs we had to pay twice… the till wasn’t up to either the number of items we’d had, or the sum total!  In the end we’d still only spent about 300 pounds at the one shop… not a great deal more than two large families might spend for their big shop!

Our big advantage over the other teams was having Xiaoxiao on hand to help with translation… both of packets and to help ask the shop workers if they had more Frosties, pasta, etc.  In the end a lot of the things we ended up putting in our trolly had come straight from the back warehouse.

We had a tough time convincing the store staff to let us drive the shopping carts across the road to our hotel.  In the end they agreed but only on the condition that one of their workers came with us to ensure they got them back.

It’s not every day you get to drive into a five-star hotel lobby with supermarket trollies.  We got some great looks going past the check-in desks and heading into the lifts.

This evening we booked our flights to Seoul at 5.30PM, returning Friday evening.  It’s a very short trip, but we knew this in advance.  I’m looking forward to seeing some of the sights, but it’s a shame that some bloke torched the oldest structure in the city just a week ago.

First full day in China and I was woken up by housekeeping at 12PM.  I got dressed and headed to the Crowne Plaza to wake my Mum up at about 12:45.

As it was already quite late, we caught a taxi to xiaoyushangongyuan (xiao = small, yu = fish, shan = mountain, gong yuan = park) but were not terribly impressed with the pagodas.  We picked up four pairs of earmuffs, which cost us just over 25p/pair.

We’d planned to visit a big park nearby, but as it was already getting late (and cold!) we instead walked along the no. 1 bathing beach which was very enjoyable.  Due to season it was very quiet, but we saw some athletic training going on and surprisingly quite a few young couples on the beach (today being Valentine’s Day).

I wanted to pick up some small pads for making notes of newly-learned Chinese words, or to remind myself to check some grammar/phrases out so we headed to the Carrefour where I was utterly amazed to discover that a fold-up bike sells for as little as 350RMB (about 25 pounds).  We both enjoyed the massage chairs, which again were at give-away prices (it looked like around 1000RMB for the top-of-the-line model… roughly 60 pounds!)

There are many nice touches to be found in China… when things get busy in KFC, walkabout sales people come up to you in the queue and take your order.  There’s no fancy electronic stuff going on here… she just wrote it down onto a piece of paper and handed it to us.  This did make things quicker when we were at the front as we just handed it over.  I guess this is what happens in a country where labour is a commodity.

Today I got a chance to flex my Chinese… on the whole it went very well.  I was glad to find that most people could understand my basic questions… my work on learning the tones and pronounciation is paying off, as past experiences did not go so well.  Only one ‘big’ mistake today was ordering in KFC… I asked for a red tea (as opposed to green tea) and a Coke with no ice.  I then pointed at the characters the girl had written for the tea and said ‘and milk’.  Somehow we ended up with three drinks: a red tea (no milk), a Coke (no ice) and a cup of hot milk!  Easily solved and next time I will remember to ask for red tea /with/ milk and not red tea /and/ milk!

Fatema Indian for dinner… a very very hot chicken vindaloo for me and the jalfrezi for my Mum.  Not the best Indian food I’ve ever had, but still good.  The naan was a little different to what I am used to, but this may just be because I’m set in my ‘English Indian’ ways.

We met a number of other Clipper people at the New York Club (more of an expat bar) after the meal, but as it was noisy and we’d only met three people before, this wasn’t an ideal location.

In many bars they play a skill/chance game that involves ten dice and two cups.  Each person gets five dice and a cup to shake them up.  Number one is a wildcard and can count for 1 through 6.  You make educated guesses at the total number of any given number (i.e. I think there are three fours in total) until eventually somebody calls their opponent and you reveal your dice.  If the number you came up with is less than or equal to the actual number then the person who called you up loses.  But if you said there were five fours and you said three… you lose.  The loser takes a swig of their drink and a new game begins.  Tough to explain without demonstration, but very good fun.

We were introduced to this game by two brothers, one of whom was called Angelo.  Angela is studying in Shanghai and hopes to visit either Australia or England to study marketing.

Due to worsening weather conditions the race was ended before the boats reached Qingdao.  The result is that Hull & Humber/Quentin came in forth, which is a good position.  H&H are due to arrive around 9AM on Saturday, so we’ll be on the pier with our St George’s flag to welcome them in.

Xiaoxiao should finally receive her Korean visa tomorrow morning, so she’s now booked onto a flight from Hangzhou to Qingdao in the afternoon.  She’ll have to get from her city (Taizhou) to Hangzhou, but this only takes around two hours by car.

It’s 3:30AM now and having caught up with my blog I think I should really try and get to sleep.  Need to be up at 9:30 tomorrow morning so we can head to the marina for a tour and certain other events.  New York (leg winners) are due to sail in at 2PM.

Yesterday we arrived in Qingdao.  In total we spent close to 36 hours travelling without sleep (well, one hour on the connection between Beijing and Qingdao).

Matt Johnson kindly gave me a lift from my place to Woking station where I caught the shuttle bus to Heathrow airport.  I met my Mum here (who had caught the train from Doncaster at 6AM the same day) and we had a bite to eat before catching the (delayed by one hour) flight to Beijing.

Arrival time was around 9AM, outside temperature -11C!  At this point things took a turn for the worse…

In LHR we’d asked for our luggage to be checked right through to Qingdao.  As we’d arrived at 9AM and our connection to Qingdao wasn’t until 14:55 we quickly tried to arrange an earlier flight… everything looked set for a 9:50 flight up until it came to our luggage… we traipsed to and fro all over the airpot, speaking to different people with varying degrees of fluency in English until we were finally told that Beijing airport does not allow bags to be checked through to internal destinations.  By now we’d missed the 9:50 flight and headed back into the arrival area to collect our luggage which was now at lost and found!  Imagine if we had not tried to arrange an earlier flight—our bags would have stayed in Beijing while we flew to Qingdao!  Very disappointing service from BA when we checked our luggage in LHR!

As if this wasn’t bad enough, when we tried to check in for our 14:55 flight we discovered we DID NOT have e-tickets as lastminute.com had told us.  DHL lost our initial tickets and after three weeks of arguing with DHL/lastminute.com we were issued with e-tickets.  I had lastminute.com confirm three times that we didn’t need anything else for our flights.  Extremely poor service on behalf of lastminute.com and I will be making a formal complaint when I get back.  Had we not had such a long wait for our connection it is not inconceivable we would have missed the flight due to their incompetence.

Finally we were checked in.  Again, bad news… the alcohol my Mum had bought in LHR was not allowed as carry-on luggage on internal Chinese flights.  Why had we not been told this in LHR?  Why, when checking in for the connection, did the attendant not tell us then?  Only when we got to the security checks did we find out, and this meant another wait while we had to go and buy cardboard boxes (glass containers) and check in two more items of luggage!

The last mistake was our own… we believed we were departing from gate 37, and so waited there.  Only when we began to queue to get on did I spot in fact it was gate 47!  A quick walk to gate 47 and they were more or less waiting for us to show up.  Neither of us heard any boarding announcements for the flight, but as we thought we were sat opposite we weren’t paying a great deal of attention.

At around 5PM we’d got a taxi to the hotel (5-star Crowne Plaza near the marina where Quentin will sail into) and my Mum was very impressed with the room.  I decided that I could save myself some cash by staying at the Home Inns (a chain similar to Travelodge in the UK) which was a five-minute walk down the road.  I checked the room out and happy with it, agreed to pay 118RMB/night (about eight pounds)—this is roughly 1/10th of the cost of my Mum’s room… obviously nowhere near the same standard, but the Home Inns is clean and comfortable.  And I enjoy talking to the staff who don’t speak much English… there’s no challenge in a 5-star hotel!

In the evening we met the manager of the Hull & Humber boat Quentin is sailing on and we’ve arranged passes to gain us close access for when Quentin arrives.

I foolishly bought a roll of 50ASA B&W film months and months ago… unsurprisingly, I never did manage to use it in the UK, but comfortable in the knowledge that Vegas was 30C average, I took it along with me, and ended up shooting it on our trip to the Grand Canyon.

For a 50ASA film it’s actually rather noisy; presumably because the emulsion is so old by comparison with the likes of Ilford HP5 (a 400 speed that has similar properties in terms of noise)... but I really quite like it.

I’d expected a very smooth, low contrast film, but that’s not really how it turned out… it’s nicely contrasty and while it has plenty of grain, it’s very small and adds to the film.

Here’s a Grand Canyon shots that I edited very quickly (8-bit in the GIMP)... click for a larger image:

So, last week I was in Las Vegas on business… I’d planned on holding back until I had some really great photos to include with a proper beefy blog entry.

I’ve just got my 12 rolls of film back from Peak, and I’m very upset to discover that every single frame that I took with the F100 I bought second-hand the day before I went away is out of focus. I was using Vlad’s Sigma 24-70 1:2.8 for most shots, but not all… I took a whole bunch with my 50mm 1:1.8 and a few with the 28mm 1:2.8, and these are also OOF.

I had originally planned to shoot a roll, take it to a one-hour processing place and see how they came out. I later didn’t bother, figuring that the chances of the metering not working, were very slim. I guess I was right, the metering was bang on… admittedly the scenes I was shooting were bright but fairly low in contrast.

Instead, it appears that the focal plane is misaligned in some way… serious bummer.

When scanning through 35mm frames all of the photos look great… but tbh, I was really hoping for some good shots this time. I knew I had a few killer ones from the Grand Canyon… the kind that I could put into a photo album for the future. No such luck.

It’s my own fault, I guess. I shouldn’t have been so blase about it all…

The only positive is that all of the F3 shots (another six rolls) appear to be well in focus. I shot at some low shutter speeds for many of them, so a fair few will be lost to camera shake, but overall the exposure and focus look good.

Once I’ve scanned and sorted through, I’ll get some up.

UPDATE on a closer look, it seems that the film back does not have a pressure plate to hold the film flat… serious bummer.  I feel stupid for not realising until now, but then again, is it something you’d normally check?

Just been doing my regular 2-minute refresh of the clipper website and it looks like Hull and Humber have just this minute crossed the finish line.

Not a bad first race :)

See tinyurl.com/yomhej for the full details.

This weekend I drove up North first to Manchester to hang out with Vlad, Samia, and Huseyin.  We had a nice meal out at Pizza Express in Prestwich, before heading to AMC in the centre to catch ‘Run Fat Boy, Run’.  Thandie Newton is damn gorgeous, which helps.

Saturday evening I drove the remaining 50 miles or so to Liverpool to join a few well-wishers see of my Uncle Quentin.  A very average meal was followed by a thirty minute drink in an impressive hall at our hotel.  Unfortunately everybody else had been up into the wee hours of the morning, which meant I was left stranded in my hotel room at 10PM with nothing to do.  For once I managed to remember my book; in this case Haruki Murakami’s ‘new’ novel, ‘After Dark’.

I’ve covered sixty or so pages of After Dark already, and it’s as good as ever.  What’s slightly odd is that this book is written entirely in the third person, which is very uncharacteristic for Murakami.  I’m not sure if this is a good thing, or a bad thing.  While previously I’ve been a middle-aged man (probably just divorced (or soon to be)) who enjoys cats, pasta and jazz… this time I’m a fly-on-the-wall.  A very big change.

The hotel, the Adelphi Britannia, which is opposite Lime St station, reminds me terribly of the Dolphin Hotel from an earlier Murakami novel.  I half-expected a high-class prostitute to turn up… that or for a professional young receptionist with a tight blazer to take a fancy to me.  No such luck.

Up this morning for breakfast at 8AM, Quentin and Angie would have been at the clipper preparing for half an hour or more… hopefully sorting out the 30Kg of porridge that appears to have been loaded onto the boat!  What’s more impressive is that 30Kg isn’t for the full ten month trip, it’s just for the first leg; a mere four weeks!

Quentin is one of the relatively few people who is planning to do the full ten month stint… other people sign up for one or more legs, depending on how much time they can set aside from work, or indeed if they think that they can’t put up with four hour on-deck/in-bunk shifts and weekly showers for that long.

This afternoon the boats peeled off, did a quick turn around Albert dock and eventually headed out into the Mersey for more parading before the official race start at 3PM… Quentin’s clipper, ‘Hull and Humberside’, headed out into the sea in second place, just behind ‘Durban 2010 and Beyond’, which is surely a good start, but is by no means indicative of the final result.  According to Quentin, in one of the previous races three boats sailed across the leg finish line within 23 seconds of each other!

Not too much more to say about it for now… plenty more info to be found at www.clipperroundtheworld.com and I’ll upload some photos when I got my slides/negatives back from processing.

As anybody who has ever visited China will know, public signs in Chinese and English are rarely the pinnacle of good English.  No doubt every visitor will have at least one or two holiday snaps of Chinglish at its best.

This is one of my favourites, taken at a checkpoint whilst at a section of the Great Wall called Simatai.

Specifically what “Please keep the facilities well don’t open the door.  Follow the staff’s arrangement please” means is anybody’s guess.

But, according to the BBC, Beijing is working hard to cut down on the Chinglish for the Summer Games next year.

More amusing examples at news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/6054726.stm :)

Sometime last week my new boss called me and a colleague into the ‘goldfish bowl’... first thoughts are always negative ones and as I’m still learning the ropes, I assumed that I’d ballsed up somewhere along the line.

As it turned out, I hadn’t… Steve wanted to offer us the chance to participate in Sun’s annual conference for engineers (CEC), this year being held in Las Vegas in mid-October.  The thing has been running a fair while now and by all accounts is a chance to meet other ‘Sunnies’ from around the world, do a bit of tech swotting-up, and get incredibly drunk in the evenings… certain tales I’ve heard haven’t limited the drinking to just the evenings, either.

Unsurprisingly, I jumped at the opportunity and earlier on today, I booked a flight to Las Vegas.  I’ll be flying from Gatwick on October 6th, and flying back on the 11th.  By the sounds of it, I’ve got a window seat (my choice—less being disturbed by other randoms) flying direct, non-stop to Vegas.  As the conference is during the week, hotels are supposed to be dirt cheap—this basically means that Sun is putting is up in a decent posh hotel.

As I find out more about what’s going on, which ‘break out sessions’ I’ll be attending, and what I’ll be doing on my free Sunday before the event, I’ll get some updates posted.

Until then, I’ll be answering the ‘phones.

Since starting my new job at Sun I once again have the option to buy a bike now for a tax incentive. The idea is that I cycle to work in return for a close-to 50% reduction in final cost to me. As I live quite close to work and am keen to get “back on the bike” (in a purely bike-related way, of course) this seems the way to go. To be honest, it seemed the way to go last year, but I didn’t pursue it hard enough (i.e. when they didn’t have the size I wanted, I gave up… I think I also got a car shortly afterwards).

But now, things are different. I’ve got the car and the tummy to go with it, so buying a bike becomes a sensible idea once more.

After talking to the two bicycling Chrises in my life I have come to the following conclusions:

1. A recumbent is not suitable because I don’t want to: a) break my legs; b) kill myself going up hills; and c) not see over the hedges


2. Racing bikes are uncomfortable if you just want to toddle around like I do


3. Touring bikes are probably in a similar class to racing bikes… on the plus side they have lots of storage space


4. Mountain bikes are big, clunky and have unnecessary suspension (weight, effort up hills, etc.)


5. Hybrid bikes… ah, I think we’re onto something here

So, I want a hybrid bike. It’ll hopefully be more practical for toddling around… I should be able to do tarmac and towpaths and the like.

So what do I want from a bike:

1. Mostly on-road use (minor roads, country lanes, not the M3)


2. Light off-road use (towpaths, well cycled paths and the like)


3. Not getting covered in crap (also known as mudguards)


4. Storage space (for cameras, lenses, film, waterproofs)


5. Hopefully something that doesn’t look like crap

(this is actually rather interesting as the last time I bought a bike my criteria where quite different. I wanted something to go off-road, that had no mudguards, no storage space, and had to look good)

Chris Gerhard ruled out a rather good looking Scott Sportster P1 I was eyeing up… it had front suspension. I was liking the fact I could lock or unlock it as required, but Chris convinced me it just adds weight. This got me thinking… logic tells me I want a nice light bike, but these days I doubt that the extra 2kg the suspension adds is really all that significant compared to putting me on top.

Anyway, since then I’ve decided to concentrate my research into a couple of different bikes.  I basically picked a bike that looked suitable from a bunch of different manufacturers:

• Scott Sub 10 – looks nice, has all the spangly bits.


• Trek 7.5 FX (disc) – a little cheaper than the Sub 10, also with disc brakes.  I don’t know that these are really a plus or not.


• Dawes Discovery 601 – another nice looking bike, lots of people seem to say good things about Dawes.  No disc brakes, but it specifically mentions mudguards and granny trolleys.  I’m put off by the really low ‘racer’ rating Evans have given this bike.  Sure, it’s not a racing bike, but does a rating this low indicate I’m going to be achieving a maximum speed of 15mph?  Probably not… from what I can tell, those Evans ratings are bollocks.


• Bianchi Camaleonte IV 105 – Evans gave this a way better racer rating; who knows why?  I always found the tilty handlebars on my old bike quite comfortable for some things… not sure if this is a plus or not, does it indicate wider-than-average handlebars?  Or the same size, but with less space for regular holding style?

This is about as complete as my list is so far.  I just picked hybrid bikes that fit my price range.  The next step is to go and pester Chrises and work from there.