the magic basket

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afer a loathsome day of transit in the loathsome capital of malaysia - a country that g and i both know and hate - we arrived at the airport to find that our flight to indonesia had been cancelled. "air asia apologises - next!"

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we managed to grab a flight to indonesia, where we then bought a domestic flight to manado the following morning, after a night of traipsing about town watching the jakarta youth doing burnouts with their motos in public places, and a few hour's sleep on a bench outside the airport while malaria-bearing mosquitos dined on our 'actually we've decided not to take anti-malarials this time' bodies.

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we were a day late to our little scuba diving resort of froggies on the island of bunaken near manado in northern sulawesi, where an abandoned ang was waiting for us!

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of course the reason that we had come to bunaken island was to celebrate g's big FOUR-O! the staff at froggies had even found out about it (not from me though?) and baked him a cake on the night - how wonderful! in a nice coincidence, gerard did his 40th dive during our trip too!

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days consisted of diving, eating and sleeping and not much else. i completed my open water diving certificate and then joined ang and g as we explored the ocean depths during the day, and lay about reading at night :)

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i did take a short break from the diving one day when, after having spent the afternoon swimming off the pier - an area turgid with human excrement - i developed high fevers, shortness of breath, and started spraying large amounts of liquid out of both ends. at the time i was sure that i was going to die, despite having my own one-on-one doctor and red-bearded nurse, but in retrospect the whole smelly drama turned out to have just been a great way to lose some excess weight.

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so back to the diving - because unlike ang and g, this was actually my first time. initially i gazed in awe at all that surrounded me - this new universe under the waves. after a couple of days (it may even have started in a creeping sort of way on my second dive) i started to get a funny sort of feeling. i would be hanging there - weightless - 25 metres below the surface of the sea, looking across at walls of coral, hundreds of different species of fish, turtles, sharks, nudibranch, sea cucumber etc etc thinking to myself "haven't i seen this before?". the weightlessness was cool, but i found the tanks bulky, and just wanted to throw them off and swim out alone with my snorkel and fins. that's right readers: i was bored. as much as i tried to deny it, listening to other divers recounting stories of what sort of fish they'd seen and exclaiming that they hadn't seen this rare species of turtle/shark/crab in over 500 dives and wasn't it amazing?, i realised that i just didn't give a shit. for me, the excitement of swimming is in the action. not hanging there weightless like an oil particle in an emulsion, but moving against the water, being tossed around by the waves.

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we did spend a few occasions just snorkelling - and that was cool. we got ot use our underwater camera that we had bought at aldi just before the trip and then returned for a full refund just after the trip after uploading all our photos. thank goodness for their no-questions-asked policy :)

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froggies has a francophonic customer focus - maybe the name is a giveaway. though there were a few dutch people in the first few days (the manager was an amazing polyglot and seemed to able to communicate with anyone in their native language), in the second half of our stay almost every single other person staying there was french. rude cunts. i have never been in a situation where you share breakfast lunch and dinner tables, not to mention a small resort with people who go out of their way not just to not say hello, but to avoid all eye contact or recognition of your presence whatsoever for your entire stay. it was as if we didn't exist, crowded as it had become! what the devil was all that about? when we finally made it back to manado after our trip, a couple of tourists came to talk to us about our experiences. i almost jumped with the shock of their casual friendliness after the silent treatment at froggies. shame on the french! honte à la france!

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at some stage during the trip i looked about at all the rude rich white people sitting around the resort, completely distanced from the poor village surrounding us, who had flown in from their comfortable lives and comfortable jobs in the first world for a few days to be hideously pampered ('because they deserved it'), and i realised with horror that i had become one of them. oh the shame! it was this more than anything that put me off -this lack of realness about staying at these resorts - and reminded me of the time when i was on the other side of the fence in cairo so many years ago. i have not abandoned you young ondrej! the heart that beats in your chest still beats in mine with the same passion, the same fervour!

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and though being served and having everything pre-planned left both gerard and i feeling uncomfortable (however convenient it was), there was one aspect of it that we just loved: the magic basket. on our first day at the resort we found a basket in the corner of our room - an ordinary wicker basket like any other. we decided to put our dirty clothes in there to store until we could clean them, but when we came back from diving on the following morning the basket was empty, and when we came back from diving in the afternoon the clothes had appeared on our bed, all clean and dry, tied up with a ribbon! it was a religious experience! close inspection of the magic basket did nothing to reveal its secret, but it kept working in the same way, day after day, no matter how much dirty laundry we chucked inside. if only we could have a magic basket at home in cremorne!

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and that was all. a few lazy days with lovely ang and the celebration of a big milestone in my lover's life, and it was time to get back to an increasingly hotter melbourne for what i reckon is going to be a ripper of a summer :)

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after the mountain

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we checked out the other side of daisetsuzen national park - featuring foot onsen - but after the glorious conquerhood of asahi dake, nothing seemed real.

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we found that the most interesting thing about the other side of the mountain was in fact ourselves, and rediscovered the joy of the jumping photo. i reckon one of them is a cut above the rest - which do you like best?!
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we headed up to abashiri, the most southerly point at which one can see (and iva and nick have seen!) sea ice (though not in the middle of summer!) and checked out their northern people's museum. it was pretty damn interesting, and i was enjoying myself until g let off a ripper of a fart and we became acutely aware of the museum's lack of ventilation and the dagger stares of all other breath-holding customers.
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we foxed about on the coast for a bit before heading up to io-zan, a sulphur-yellow stained collection of egg smelling geysers. it seems that domestic tourism has gone bust in japan, as our guidebook said we'd struggle to get past the crowds, but we were practically the only ones there. it was high season: the billion-car capacity carpark (now empty) certainly spoke of more prosperous times.
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mashu-ko in akan national park - at one stage the clearest lake on earth - is the jewel in hokkaido's crown. the first day that we visited we couldn't see anything because of cloud cover and had to console ourselves by playing with the local squirrels: かわいい! we were gagging to get a glimpse of the lake, however, so we shlepped back the following day. it payed off: the clouds parted and we saw that shimmering jewel.
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after an unutterably boring tourist train journey through kushiro national park, it was time to make our way back to chitose. here we had our final dinner with iva and nick, crashed at a cool ryokan tucked away in a side street and caught an early morning plane back to tokyo.
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and that's the end boys and girls :( a lazy tokyo morning and a shibuya lunch that tasted like congealed cum on my plate marked our final hours in the land of the rising sun. it was time to say goodbye! goodbye to public toilets that are actually clean. goodbye to the biggest city in the world that has somehow retained its civility. goodbye to maid bars and porn shops full of women shoving different species of marine life into their clackers. goodbye the drum machine to which i involuntarily gifted the skin of my first interdigital clefts. and of course it was time to say goodbye to vov and nick (our diamonds in the rough) but only until next skype! time to head back to a beloved sunburnt country, choke on the miasma of impending exams, and get on with this wonderful business of being alive.

さよなら!
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the water flows, but back into the ocean; the moon sinks, but is even in heaven.

asahi dake

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click for map!
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after a marathon train journey and a night in a capsule hotel (where the bamboo roller-doors didn't block out the sound of the other male-only occupants farting and snoring like pneumatic drills, nor did it prevent entry of the choking cloud of cigarette smoke coming from...where? were these people smoking in their sleep?) we finally met up with vov and nick near sapporo for our hokkaido adventure!

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after a quick grab-dash for some pizza, cheese and pumpkin flavoured icecream, we headed out to daisetsuzen national park to conquer japan's highest mountain: asahi dake (2,291m).

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we took a gondola up through the mists to the base of the mountain. the feeling of imminent victory among the group was almost oppressive.

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up we climbed. around us we could hear the rumble of thunder (or waterfalls?), ahead only a few metres of rock disappearing into the thick fog. we felt young, we felt hardcore - stopping only occasionally to catch our breath, be overtaken by groups of 70 year old grandmothers, or to allow the passing of couples in shorts and t-shirt walking their little city-dogs.

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but do not cast aspertions! nothing can detract from our mighty subordination of the highest mountain in japan!

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the clouds parted on the way down, revealing lush green hillsides and - not waterfalls or thunder after all - but volcanic geysers spewing forth their fetid fumes all aroud us!

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and then we were down from the mountain, and the dignity of the climb gave way to the panicked rush back to our funky little hostel to make sure we got a place at one of the dinner tables! but fate had turned the light of her smiling face upon us: we conquered the dining room and got the good table right in the middle. it was almost too much for one day! dinner was well deserved :)

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before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. after enlightenment: chop wood, carry water.

the golden marsh

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click for map!

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our penultimate stop before busting it up to hokkaido was kanazawa on the north western coast of the central part of honshu. here we stayed in a cool little ryokan in a bad part of town :) typical futon on tatami mat room around a nice little central courtyard.

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kanazawa has the second of the three most beautiful gardens in japan - kenroku-en - and this was g's favourite of the three...
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it's also the site of the 21st century museum of contemporary art, the best art museum we went to in the whole country. this may not sound like a grand statement for a couple of hobo tourists, but in fact art was probably the main focus of our holiday; one could not wrongfully describe our 6 weeks as a veritable modern art tour of japan. we went crazy for it. kanazawa's art museum was - hands down - la crème de la crème.

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it had it's own commissioned anish kapoor - g's favourite artist and fast becoming my own - which didn't fail to blow our minds, and a couple of other cool pieces, including the photogenic 'swimming pool' that you see here.
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we loved it.
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...and that was it for the southern leg of our holiday! we did pop over to mito for half a day to visit the third of the three most beautiful gardens (kairaku-en), but the only amazing thing there was the service at the local post office. we chilled out (in the 30+ degree heat) in wonderful tokyo for a few days before our marathon train journey to japan's final frontier: 北海道. see you there next blog!

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