the best thing i've ever done in my life (on that day at least, and nothing to do with the deer)

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nara was the first japanese capital, and apparently packed full of ancient temples and tourist sites, so i was quite resistant to the idea of visiting at all. even the thought of temples precipitated a dull ache between my own. g's sister, however, had highly recommended it, and we all know that little brothers have no choice but to obey their big sisters, so off we went.

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there were the usual pagodas and temples, but the difference was that this city was chock-a-block full of deer. rank deer. deer were apparently messengers of the gods, so now they run amok throughout the city parks and temple grounds like cows in varanesi. the city is so smitten with them that the symbol of nara is a buddha with deer antlers, which g and i found awful beyond description.

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you could smell the deer before you saw them, and though i was somewhat taken by the cute things, g (after a previous night of tekken tag tournament with pottsie and kanami) was ready to do a double backflip roundhouse to the nearest doe-eyed face or neck. KO!

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the largest wooden building in the world is in nara, and it was indeed beautiful. within, a huge seated statue of buddha blissed out, nostrils the size of a human pelvis plus 5 millimetres.

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the action, however, lay at the back of the building behind the statue. here, in one of the huge wooden pillars supporting the roof, a hole the size of the statue of buddha's nostril had been carved through the pillar. legend has it that people who can pass through the hole are assured of attaining nirvana! check out my attempt below.

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oh man i was so blissed out after doing it! it made the whole trip to nara worth it. i entered a state of nirvana and couldn't get the smile off my face until we got hugely ripped off for a french-fries meal deal at MOS burger down the road.
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and then, after zenning out in some gorgeous gardens (free for foreign tourists but not for japanese - how would you feel if you were local?) we headed back to osaka!

the japanese alps

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off we went to takayama, an old town which we used as a gateway to the japanese alps. even though we were told that it was peak season, the place was practically deserted, and all the old streets with traditional architecture that had been converted to shopfronts like everywhere else in the world were either closed or only pretending to be open.

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we stayed in a hostel that was attached to a buddhist temple (zenjoji). the monk was away, so the guy running the place said that we could use the monk's sleeping quarters if we were keen. we were keen. it turned out that the sleeping quarters were the altar itself and the few tatami mats in front of it, so we just threw a few mattresses out and pulled a curtain so people couldn't see us. i wonder if two men sleeping together on a buddhist altar amounts to sacrilege? behind a thin veil of acceptance, we all know that buddhism is as misogynistic and homophobic as the rest of them. incidentally, when we tried to take a photo of the two of us in the temple, g turned into a wispy spiritual being - caught on camera!
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underneath the altar was a circular maze into which one could descend by some steep wooden stairs. it was pitch black in there - but if one followed the wall around and kept their hands receptive, they might find a metal lock attached to a door leading to an inner sanctum. finding that lock assured that the person would find happiness in this life. we both found that lock baby!

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then it was time to head up into the alps themselves - the reason we'd come up to takayama in the first place. we took a series of buses up to kamikochi and then did a fairly easy 10km loop either side of the asuza river.

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it rained the whole way there and back, but that only served to make the hike more excitement!
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for myself it was another private victory on the bung leg front.
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the whole way we were surrounded by forested peaks covered in a shifting blanket of mist and cloud. there was a magical feeling to the area, not in the sense of believing something for which there is no evidence, but in the sense of being awestruck by the beauty of what actually exists.
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back in takayama we went to a traditional merchant's house and a village of transplanted or recreated traditional buildings around an ornamental lake. they were so boring we were ready to gouge each others' eyes out.

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here's a video of g doing the single most interesting thing at the folk village hida-no-sato.
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this food collage shows 90% of our travel diet in japan - 1L fruit water, green tea icecream and chocolate snacks that were supposed to last all the way to the next town but were invariably devoured within the first five minutes of boarding any train. incidentally, this rare photo of g shows him doing his 'i've been a nasty cunt but now i'm going to be irresistably cute and you won't be able to help not just forgiving me but being totally smitten' pose. works every time god damn it.
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and then it was time to get back to tokyo and springboard it over to kansai for a while. join us next time for some pottsie adventures!

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japan camera incident number two (the bad one)

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we popped into matsumoto to check out the castle there on the way home from magome. you can just do that when you're travelling almost at the speed of light on these shinkansen. it's japan's oldest wooden castle and one of the four national treasure castles in the country. in fact it was fucking good and i'd recommend it to anyone, despite what i have previously said about tourist destinations. check out the pics.

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it was unfortunately the site of japan camera incident number two. somehow, i yet again got my feet stuck in the camera cord whilst it was around my neck, but this time the camera and cord somehow separated, and i had one of those slow-motion experiences where you see an expensive gift from your partner's mother falling towards the ground at one hundredth of normal speed but your arms are also reacting at one hundredth of normal speed so you end up just watching it fall for a few minutes like a feather on a mildly gusty day until you hear the sound of an LCD screen pulverising itself against an ancient castle's flagstones and suddenly time speeds up again and your arms start working again and you let out a gasp before looking up to see your lover's eyes staring at you filled with something that can only be described as a mixture of love and the realisation that they are in a relationship with the most irresponsible fuckwit that ever walked the earth. sorry my frog :(

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liquid-smiquid!

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preserving trees by exporting deforestation to the third world

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i remember reading in 'collapse' by jared diamond (a great read of a book that correlated good environmental management with success of societies) that japan was 75% forest and i thought 'what?!?'
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how could that be in a country that is so densely populated? and though there were great expanses of parkland in tokyo itself, most of the time one couldn't see the forest or the trees.
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but then as soon as you leave tokyo - there they are: the forests. huge, lush, thick, dense, beautiful, magical forests, carpeting those volcanic hills from horizon to horizon, and they keep you gagging for more. perhaps my most vivid memories of japan are of the train journeys up and down the valleys of central honshu, surrounded by walls of green.

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there is a walking track between the old towns of tsumago and magome, and it made for a fairy-tale like hike, all the more so as i was being pursued by a wolf the whole way! woof!

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the town of tsumago was like a museum and we both had a visceral reaction to it - yuk. the town of magome seemed much more lived in - vibrant and fun, so spend more time there if you end up going!

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the trek between the two was even better. highlights included being caught in tropical storms, invited in to an old man's house who gave us some traditional tea around a fireplace and charged us the knowledge of where we came from (which he then google-earthed) for the pleasure, and of course the forests surrounding the track. the fact that it was the first long hike i had done in over a year made for big smiles and a private celebration :)

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築地市場

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no trip to tokyo would be complete without a trip to tsukiji shijo - 築地市場 - the biggest wholesale seafood market in the world. we got there too late to witness the famous fish auction in the morning - arriving only to see a few discarded tuna that - having been rejected by the japanese - would now be offered to john west.

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the market only recently re-opened to tourists; a ban was enforced after tourists were caught kissing one tuna and riding another like a rodeo bull.

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the market itself was a boring, shabby affair, and an undeserving penultimate destination for the corpses of endangered species stolen from australian waters, only to be fed to hungry japanese mouths for research purposes. with 5 years of tuna locked in japanese fridges, flaunting of international conservation conventions and no respect for scientifically backed reductions in fishing quotas, this blogger gives a resounding 'fuck you' to the japanese fishing industry, and an equally impassionate 'fuck you' to the country that supports it.

. g supports the japanese fishing industry

onsen adventures

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what's the japanese word for getting together with lots of other naked men and splashing about in hot water? onsen.

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being a volcanic chain of islands, there are hundreds and hundreds of hot springs throughout japan, and visiting an onsen is a quintessential japanese cultural experience not to be missed.

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we first visited the onsen in nikko, famous for its 7-11, and our second in the mountains high above the town at a fetid 'source'. here we had a little bath all to ourselves for a few minutes, so all photos come from our second onsen.

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in nikko, after being dropped off by our servant and telling her to come back in an hour to pick us up, leaving our shoes near the door and paying our money, we were given locker keys and towels the size of a small white handkerchief. 'what's this for?' we wondered - to blow our nose? to cover a single nipple? to cover our dicks or balls but not both? i'm still not 100% sure.

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we stowed our clothes in our lockers and then proceeded into the onsen room, arranging our handkerchief discretely over various parts of our bodies as we saw fit. in the main room we found several baths and a low wall peppered with shower heads, buckets, soap, and japanese men of various ages scrubbing themselves raw before a dip. we didn't want to be the dirty white people who missed a spot, so both made a great show of scrubbing until we were lobster-red, then proceeded to the hot baths.

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i'm not a big fan of hot water, and basically it was a case of immersing oneself in progressively hotter water ranging from bath-warm to fuck-that's-hot, then cooling down outside or under cold water. the only other thing to do was hit the sauna, but we were so hot already that within a few seconds of entering each time, all the proteins in our body were threatening to denature, and we had to rush back out again.

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now though the onsen is naked except for the handkerchief, i was surprised to see what i initially thought was a japanese man entering the onsen with a small carry-bag, hanging loosely between his knees. and then reality slammed home. i will never forget for my entire life the size of those enormous balls. was he half man half cow? now i've seen some low hangers in my time but this was abnormal. they were so impractically large it was as if he'd walked straight off the page of a comic book in an akihabara manga porn store and into our onsen, and then right into my face. i couldn't look but i had to look at the same time - you know how it is. you could even see them from behind hanging off the stool that he was sitting on, so there was no need to even be discrete. somebody should have called the guinness book of records. or the police.

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our second onsen was high in the mountains near a forest lake, where the sulphuric waters of hell itself bubbled up through the mud. g came out unscathed but i had some sort of reaction and developed a bodywide rash which drove me insane for almost 2 weeks and precluded any further onsen frivolity. but not to worry - there was much more to see and do in 日本!

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Nikkō

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no, not my brother-in-lafacto's name in japanese, but nikkō: japanese for sunlight, and site of the UNESCO world heritage 'shrines and temples of...*yawn*

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who cares about temples i hear you cry in disgust? not us! suffice to say that only minutes after buying the bare-bones-minimum pass for 3 temple sites and passing under the first tori, we were already crawling around on our hands and knees smitten with boredom. we decided to only look at the forest behind the second site (the trees in japan are something else altogether - check out some of these pics), and skipped the third one altogether for fear of inducing boredom-seizures.

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our guest house was pretty awesome - it was our first of many tatami mat and futon related good nights' sleep, and the owner was lovely, but seemed to be addicted to servitude (at which she was admittedly a master), and sort of went on a bit about how poor she was, before taking some happy snaps of us with a $3000 camera and running back to her pad to have them printed and laminated on her very own equipment. maybe japan poor is like australian not poor.

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but the highlight of nikkō was: the 7-11. who would have thought that in the middle of the night you could cruise out to your local convenience store for a steaming hot three course meal double-wrapped in plastic casing/plastic bag/plastic staff and plastic greeting? it was enough to make us have two dinners.
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if only this pagoda could have housed a 7-11 to have made it more interesting...

there were two shock events in nikkō, both involving the camera. the first was where i somehow got my neck and foot trapped in the camera cord at the same time, resulting in "japan camera accident number one". both the camera and your correspondent survived - scratched but essentially functional - so it was ok.

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the second was where gerard took a photo of me from behind communing with the forest wearing my favourite shorts ever. when i later blew up the picture and saw the back of my arse in the aforementioned favourite shorts, my whole world came crashing down, and i was almost ready to call the whole thing quits. perhaps change my identity and start afresh. the offending article of clothing is now on the garment equivalent of death row with no chance of absolution, and has only the funky reality of easy clothes shopping in japan to thank for not being murdered on the spot in self-defence.

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oh god my eyes!

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i leave you with what g and i consider to be the best photo we took in japan. peace.
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