Notes on Okinawa, Hong Kong and China

Fri, 15 May 2026 23:03:00 +0000

A spooky looking empty street in Chikan, China

I was recently travelling around Okinawa (with family), Hong Kong (by myself) and Guangdong Province in China (with a Mandarin-speaking friend). Here are some thoughts and observations I had during that trip.

The airport in Taipei (which I connected through to get to Okinawa) is incredibly nice and certainly the best airport I’ve ever been to. Pretty much all the stuff discussed in Dan Frank’s (very good) post on Taiwan applies in microcosm to the airport: everything was extremely clean, pristine looking and logically laid out; all the convenience stuff you want when you’re waiting around but are totally lacking and/or hard to find in other airports (like charging points, water refill stations) were plentiful (and working!); and most importantly, you get an uninterrupted view of the planes from pretty much every gate.
- Also, there’s a library area (in an airport!) near gate D8 which has a book on circa-2000 Japanese web design with pictures, which might make going through the airport worth it on its own.
The food in all the places was good to excellent in all the places I visiting, but I would say the best food was mostly in Okinawa. Which kind of breaks my theory on why food in Japanese is so much better than in most Western countries, which is that in most places its easy to get around on your feet or by train / bus, so restaurants have more competition and thus more incentive to cook good food. But Okinawa uses cars way more and has a much more skeletal public transportation system, and the food is just as good as on the mainland. This might be just because me or my family is better at picking out good restaurants in Japan, but we were pretty much eating at random restaurants we came across around our neighbourhood or in shopping malls. Also, Okinawan cuisine might just be to my tastes (I managed to get quite a taste for bitter melon, which shows up in a lot of Okinawan dishes, in my time there).
Overall, Okinawa didn’t feel all that much different from mainland Japan (though we stuck to mostly tourist areas and shopping malls, which would obviously be more homogenised), though the landscape looks a lot different, with no rice fields and buildings mostly made out of rather weathered looking concrete. The US military bases were very noticeable, but mostly were just annoying and time consuming to have to drive around to get anywhere.
Hong Kong doesn’t feel particularly British anymore, apart from vestigial bits of street furniture and infrastructure like the double decker buses and the tram, and the occasional old colonial building (which aren’t even that unique in Mainland China). But it still felt quite different from the mainland, and that’s mainly because it feels a lot more Japanese. There are plenty of familiar (to me) Japanese chain stores and restaurants, you can buy a vast selection of Japanese goods from Don Don Donki, and Japanese pop culture is especially prominent, even stuff that doesn’t really get exported to the west like Crayon Shin-chan.
The (mainland) Chinese infrastructure was as impressive in scale and operation as I expected it to be. The metro system in Guangzhou has 19 lines and enough frequency of trains that you never have to look up a timetable as a train shows up within a minute or two of arriving. The high-speed rail was perfectly on time always, and the stations are like airports in scale. Things seem to get rougher when you go beyond the ‘official’ physical infrastructure though. The Chinese apps were noticeably clunkier and slower than western ones, and the map apps really don’t tell you much about what there is in a particular area. In the nicely done up areas of Shenzhen and Guangzhou with lots of glassy skyscrapers its fairly easy to walk around, but in more mundane areas the footpaths are filled with all kinds of random obstacles: bins, cars and mopeds parked all over forcing you to squeeze between them, mud and debris from construction sites etc. Even in Guangdong, which is one of the (or possibly the most) developed provinces in China by whatever metric you choose, a lot of places have a distinctly ‘half-done’ feel to them.
Relating to the above, the strangest experience I had on this trip (and maybe across all the travel I’ve done) was in China. I’m going to provide my account of that evening with as little commentary as possible, as I’m honestly still not sure what to make of it:

I was with my Mandarin speaking friend in our guesthouse after having a pleasant day looking around the Diaolou of Kaiping (a town about a 1 hour train ride from Guangzhou). We looked around on the map and found a cluster of restaurants in a historic town called Chikan a couple of kilometres away. We decided to take the bus there. Due to being confused by the map app, we ended up getting off one stop early and having to walk some distance to get to the actual restaurant area. We walked through, seeing some of China’s infamous 99% completed but totally empty apartment complexes and a mysterious distant theme park looking thing along the way.

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Notes on Okinawa, Hong Kong and China