Japan from the Canadian eye

Cheerless Murmurings - Week 53 (May 19 - May 25)

2009-08-27T07:56:00.000-07:00

Cheerless murmurings

Week 53

Time rolled on much as it had the past year in Koganei. Classes drifted by as though in a haze of laughter, talking points and target language structures. The high of having stayed in Japan for more than one year continued to drive me forward. Summer was just around the corner and the weather was really starting to get warm for the first time. The cicadas would soon be chirping their way to oblivion and the summer flowers would be enjoying their short bursts of glory.

Much like the cicadas and flowers, news of unusual and interesting events were short this week. The usual barrage of karaoke singing and plastic instrument playing echoed through the streets of Shimo-Kita-Zawa on Monday, but otherwise this week remained not much more than a mishmash of the rest...

Writing somewhat gloomily...

Ian "Mello Yello" Cantello

American Bowl - Week 52 (May 12 - May 18)

2009-08-21T08:40:00.000-07:00

Since almost every picture this week has students in it I can't post it publicly on the net. So instead you get Sean harvesting the booty of Kayoko and I!

American Bowl

Week 52

This week marked not only my birthday, but also my receiving of what is likely the worst birthday present I could possibly ask for: Kayoko leaving. She was returning back to Wisconsin in order to continue her education over the summer at University. Good move, but sad to see her go.

That Saturday was her last day teaching at Musashi-Koganei before she returned to the US to pursue her studies over the summer at university. It was a pretty emotional week at the school with few of her classes finishing with perfectly dry eyes. Definitely a bittersweet week if there ever was one.

Friday afternoon was great though because I had a most awesome of surprise parties. It was in one of my afternoon classes. Right after the class I was surprised to see one of the new sub teachers that would be taking over for Kayoko come into the class with a little tree of cupcakes. It was super awesome and I was kind of embarrassed. I got really nice gifts from my students too, including one for my mom which I will give to her when I get home. I was still super shocked and embarrassed though. I really wasn’t expecting it.

I was also starting to get to know Sakurako, the new manager! She’s very cool (I’m actually sitting next to her while she researches hiking routes for me as I write this) and had just started before golden week.

But that really wasn’t the big part of the week. The big deal was Sunday’s good bye party/birthday party thing. It happened in Koganei park, and featured what is now tradition when teachers leave the school: a nice, big, barbecue. Japanese style of course, so yaki-soba and yaki-niku, not burgers and hotdogs.

It was a fantastic party actually. Sean came along as well, which was nice because he got to reconnect with his old students. Sakurako was also really meeting many of the students for the first time. It went splendidly. This was despite the rather cold, windy weather. Didn’t matter though, the conversation kept us warm! That or climbing trees, which I did between snapping pictures of students and talking to everyone. The beer helped too.

The BBQ broke up around 5 after a few group photos and a tearful goodbye speech by Kayoko. After a long walk to the parking lot Kayoko and a few of the students acquired transportation to the bowling alley for the second half of the party. Sean and I dropped by my apartment to drop off some supplies before following them.

Bowling was much the same as the barbecue. Great time, everybody was really happy and we even had a few students that don’t usually turn up to the parties. I can’t say that I kicked ass, I think I only came in around 8th of 19, but I was pretty content with my bowling prowess after I got into the swing of it. One of my younger students was there, Taiki, and we totally dished out massive high-fives. It was great fun. I think Mr. Clarke (some of you know who I mean) said it best when he quipped ‘it’s your own fault if you don’t have fun at bowling. You should be excited and ebullient’ or something along those lines.

We finished off at around 10 and everyone went their separate ways. It was a great send off for Kayoko, I think it really helped close that chapter of her career and life.

Monday…well…you know what I do Mondays, reprise my erstwhile position as rock singer at Ben’s place in Shimo-Kita-Zawa. How can you beat that for a weekend though? Parties all weekend long!

Partied out…

Ian “Mello Yello” Cantello

Annual Encounter - Week 51 (May 7 - May 11)

2009-08-18T10:25:00.000-07:00

The waterfall I passed by early on in the hike.

Shortly after spooking the deer, this mountain ahead and the ridgeline to the right of the picture I would navigate on the way to the hut for the night.
Sunset. Bad news for yours truly.

At the time the sunset I had already navigated that ridgeline. I had another crest to conquer before reaching the hut.

Accommodation. Check it out, kotatsu, and my gear. The gear is also pretty light as you can tell. I was trying to keep the weight down. This is the morning of the second day at about 5 am

Out the door, a nice view of the hut at dawn.

0.2 km? Really? It's that close? What a joke...

Summit of Kumotori-san, 2018m, mmmmmm Fuji.

Kung Fu, cause, you know, I used to do it.

And one final view from the top before it was time to get out of there.

The emergency hut at the top of the mountain.

You know, the one problem with Fuji is it's very difficult to shoot anything else without making it part of the centerpiece...

Fighting a war in the South Pacific would have sucked.

This doesn't look like it, but it's a view straight down the trail...you can't faintly see the switchbacks in the foreground. This is nearing the end of the hike.

Ah, the small mountain town of Oku-Tama. Nice to be out and back in civilization.

Annual Encounter

Week 51

Well, back to the grind again. Fortunately it was a very short week back from holiday. Golden Week ensured that it was only a three day week to get back into the habit of things, which I adjusted to no problem. It also meant I didn’t have very much time to plan a very big event (in my mind). The weekend of the 10^th and 11^th would mark my first multi-day hike and entirely solo no less. Kayoko was kind enough to set up my accommodation at a mountain hut for the night and so, after a short week, I was up and ready to hike on Sunday at the crack of…10.

So…that’s not good.

The mountain I was climbing that day was Kumotori-san, the tallest mountain in Tokyo prefecture, but only just. It sits right on the border of Saitama, the prefecture that begins immediately north of Tokyo and runs further into the mountains. Unfortunately, I didn’t spend very much time examining the outline of the hike in my guide book before heading out. I’d thought the trailhead was only a couple of hours out from Koganei. It turned out to be closer to 4. Not only that, but bad connections resulted in an even longer trip to the mountain than I expected. There was an extra bus ride and train trip involved...

After previous experiences I had promised myself to avoid starting a hike late enough in the day that darkness would ever be a concern. Unfortunately I violated this tenant at the beginning of this hike. Having hit the trailhead at a little past two PM, I started out on the hike anyways. It began nicely enough, crossing a bridge over an extremely deep river valley. I was too rushed to snap a photo though.

A short hike up the slope saw me arriving at…a construction site.

There was supposed to be a cable car there that would cut out 1100 vertical meters of the ascent. This was a serious problem, as I was already far behind my original schedule and now was definitely not going to make it in time for my 6 PM dinner deadline.

Fuck.

So, being foolish and bull-headed, I started trudging up the mountain to get to Mitsu-mine-jinja where the more horizontal portion of the hike begins. Let me just also state that the first sign I passed on the trail was one warning about kuma (bears), so I was put on edge pretty early.

I passed by a beautiful waterfall low on the trail and shortly afterward, while traversing across a fold in the ridge, startled a few deer that dashed off quickly into the undergrowth.

By the time I achieved the ridgeline I’d already drank all of my water and was panting with the exertion. It wasn’t a hard climb but it was extremely warm and humid for early May. Also, as I would later learn in the South Alps, having a hydration bladder leads to much better water conservation.

Anyways, I still had a good few hours of hiking ahead of me, so quickly buying a couple more bottles of water at a hut, I soldiered on across a pretty level and well defined path.

Things went well at first. The first hour or so was quite easy and level, so I was lulled into a false sense of security. It wasn’t until I had the first of the two rugged rises that the path would climb over that I realized I’d perhaps bitten off more than I could chew. It really didn’t help that my concern about the 6 PM deadline had lead me to forget about pacing myself.

Having summited the first of the two peaks I would attain before walking down into the col that held my hut for the night, I noticed that the sun was now only about 20 minutes away from setting which spelt really bad news for me. After snapping the last two pictures of the dusk I pushed on through the woods, wary of the approaching gloom that signalled night. Before long I’d lost enough light that I could no longer see properly and had to breakout my headlamp that I carry with me at all times. It was around this time too that I noticed my right knee start to hurt. I have a tendency to favour my right leg when stepping up, so I figured that I just put more strain on that one. It had been a while since I’d been out hiking anyways, the one in Malaysia having been not too difficult. Guess I was a bit out of shape.

The second rise conquered, I headed down towards the place I’d be staying, Kumotori-sanso. At this point, walking along with my improvised walking stick in the pitch dark, I was getting kind of nervous. The path certainly wasn’t very precarious, but I was tired and worried about running into some forest denizens that might be unfriendly. I’d spooked a number of dear on the way from the first to the second rise, which was initially surprising then quite impressive as I watched them bound lightly up extremely steep pitches. But, with my iPod on in one ear and singing out loud I kept on plugging forward.

That was until I looked to my left about 10 meters into the woods and saw two eyes illuminated in my headlamp light.

Needless to say, that scared the shit out of me. I froze initially then yelled “Hey” loudly. Whatever it was that was looking at me quickly ran about 3 meters to the right and stopped, looking at me again. I yelled again and it moved a little more before stopping to gaze at me again. At this point I decided it was time to book it. So, moving slowly away while facing the eyes, I pushed on ahead through the woods. After moving out of sight I started to walk faster, casting frequent gazes behind me to make sure I wasn’t being followed.

Whatever it was, it didn’t follow me. My guess is it was either a tanooki or a monkey. I think it was probably too small to be a bear and didn’t sound big enough to boot, unless it was rather young. Regardless, this encounter dissuaded me of ever risking a late departure for a hike again. Going through woods like that is scary as hell at night.

My encounter with the unknown life form occurred about 10 minutes before I reached my hut. 8:30 PM, fully two and a half hours late. After sitting and resting I ran into one of the hut owners. She set me up for the night in a private room that looked like it was ready to sleep about 10 people but just held me and a kotatsu for that night. The hut was very well appointed and comfortable, although I wasn’t yet used to the routine of mountain huts.

At 9 PM it was lights out, whether you wanted to go to bed or not. I wasn’t quite sleepy yet since I had made the fool’s mistake of staying up until 3 AM the night before. My sleeping schedule wasn’t adjusted enough to permit me to fall asleep easily so instead I read a bunch of my William Gibson novel by headlamp light.

Soon though, it was bed time. I slept poorly and intermittently.

The lights snapped on and the intercom rang out an alarm at 4:30 AM.

Awesome.

I wake up, still exhausted from the ordeal the night before, pack up my gear, and stumble to the dining room for a Japanese style breakfast. For the uninitiated, that would be fish, rice, a raw egg to go on the rice, as well as some pickles, natto (if you want it) and, of course, tea and miso soup. Doesn’t sound great from a Canadian point of view, but I got pretty fond of this fare in my later adventures.

After belting down breakfast (I missed dinner the night before) I brushed my teeth, bought some water at 500 yen a bottle, and headed out.

The actual climb to the summit of Kumotori was a huge anti-climax. It was a very gentle, short walk up to the top, as it was only 20 minutes from the door of the hut. Woo… Even then, at 2018 meters, Kumotori-san was the highest mountain I’d been on since Fuji in the August previous. I spent a little while hanging around at the top striking kung-fu poses and looking at a snow covered Fuji off in the distance before packing up and heading down.

I must say, the rest of the day was fairly unremarkable. It was just a long, slow 8 hour walk down to the end of the hike in Oku-tama, the same place I’d hiked out to a few months early when I went for my hike at Mitake-san. It was nice enough walking through those woods, enjoying the few views I had of Fuji before the really thick forest closed in.

I saw a bunch of birds on the way down, including a little black capped chickadee-like bird that followed me from tree branch to tree branch for five minutes. That was pretty endearing.

But yeah, there really wasn’t much to report from that hike out. Just a long slow walk. I was out of the woods and back in civilization by 2 pm, having begun the journey out at 5:30 AM or so. Long hike.

And that was it! This hike was sort of a celebration for me. It marked the one year anniversary of me arriving in Japan, the day of my landing in Narita having been May 10^th, 2008. And what a year it’s been! I had a second celebration the next week, but that’s for the next blog.

Remaining scared of the dark…

Ian “Mello Yello” Cantello

Singapore and The Trip Home - Week 49 and 50 (May 4th - May 6th)

2009-08-07T06:59:00.000-07:00

Pulau Tioman departures committee.

The pier at five AM. Nothing better.

Our breakfast. Roti in Mersing.

Hindu temple in Singapore.

Buddhist temple beside Hindu temple in Singapore.

I got yelled at by a security guard for taking this picture...

I thought this was a particularly precarious way to dry your clothes.

The market we checked out in Singapore. It was pretty busy.

Okay...sorry about the long obscure quote, but it must always accompany this picture: "A man has a choice...I chose the impossible. I built a city where the artist would not fear the censor. Where the great would not be constrained by the small. Where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality...I chose to build... Rapture."

Flashing green men are the best kind.

How much international intrigue has gone down in the bar of this hotel? I do know this month, they created a pretty damn famous drink.

There's a bit of construction near downtown Singapore. Mostly on reclaimed land it seems.

And there's downtown Singapore, plus the Merlion.

And there's a bedraggled Canadian in an ugly blue shirt.

Allow a photographers conceit for a minute. This photo is frustrating because the plant in the foreground is out of focus. If it had been shot in Landscape or with the building out of focus it would look good. Alas, it was not.

These grow on the street!

Colonial District.

Singapore and The Trip Home

Week 49 and 50

Well, there’s nothing worse than finishing off a trip by waking up ass early to make it to the ferry that will take you back to the boring old mainland, but that was the start of our journey home via Singapore. Early, early god damn wake up, and out on the pier by 5:30 AM. I had a wonderful little time while I waited for Winny and Melissa to finish getting ready. I sat outside on the porch with petting a stray kitten.

The ferry ended up being a half hour late, which really, really pissed me off. That rage was mildly alleviated by watching the squid flit around beneath the pier in the pre-dawn glow.
Finally the ferry arrived and we were Mersing bound. I tried to sleep on the boat, but no dice. I just ended up sleepily watching the Stephen Chow movies they played on the DVD player. It was a bit too early in the day for Kung Fu Hustle.

We pulled into Mersing at 8:30 AM and, after dodging the approaches of a few cabbies, started the short walk out to the bus/taxi terminal deeper within the city. On the way we ran into a woman by the name of Daniella who was going the same direction as we were. She was some kind of business development worker who had recently finished in South America and was now on a tour of South East Asia, doing the solo-backpacker thing. She tagged along with us to the station where we had some roti for breakfast which was excellent. When we found out that the busses were fully booked, we decided to do the natural thing, which to take a cab all the way to Singapore.

I got the front seat, which had both its pros and cons. The pros were that the AC was doing its thing for me…not so much for those in the back seat. Also, I got to see the roads we’d whipped past a couple of nights ago in the dark. The Cons? I got to see the roads we whipped past a couple of nights ago in the day. Oh yeah, and the constant tension caused by the driver continuously trying to edge around massive transport trucks on curvy roads. Malaysian drivers have this wonderful thing they do where, if they’re on the road and it looks like there’s no one coming in the opposite direction, they drift over onto the center line. It was nerve wracking to say the very least. By the end of the trip I was envying the passengers in the back seat who had been lulled partially to sleep by the stifling A/C-less atmosphere.

Arriving at the cab depot we switched over to a different cab, one tasked specifically with making trips across the border to Singapore, or so it seemed. The driver was pretty pro.
Before long, we were in the short queue to enter the city state of Singapore. It was an interesting shift of visuals waiting in line there. As soon as we entered the massive customs complex the quality and price of vehicles around us greatly increased. This spoke to the obvious prosperity that Singapore has enjoyed and the last few decades. We had a slight complication getting through the customs paperwork and had to have our bags examined, but it was ultimately no problem.

Once we were dropped off in downtown Singapore we were on our own. After getting some Singapore dollars and consulting our Lonely Planet book, we were off and searching for a place to stay. A few inquiries and about a half hour of walking later landed us at what could be very, very loosely defined as a hostel. It bore a much closer resemblance to a hotel, especially after the price of our room for 3+ was quoted at 240 Singapore dollars. That’s kind of REALLY expensive for a hostel. This was especially true considering our room did not have a TV and the shower required priming of the water heater before hot water would be available. I know that in a hostel you wouldn’t expect this anyways, but for $240 SD, I’d expect a little something extra. Also, the desk clerk was kind of unfriendly, bordering on downright hostile. I think our showing up without a reservation frustrated her. Again, it’s a FUCKING HOSTEL.

*sigh*

Daniella did not check in with us. After lunch at a local food court she split off and went to meet up with a friend of hers who lives in Singapore. And so, our group was down to three.
What followed was basically just a long walking tour of Singapore. We spent a good while walking through a very large market in the center of the city, perusing T-Shirts and other things. We also visited a few different temples. Singapore, much like Penang, maintains a cornucopia of places of worship in relatively close proximity to each other. Our ultimate goal in these wanderings was to find the Merlion which required at times some fairly unconventional navigation of shopping malls and busy city streets.

Singapore is very beautiful. It is chock full of well manicured gardens and revels in its liberal application of green spaces. It’s also exceptionally clean. This of course all comes at the cost of some of the freedoms normally associated with other cultures. I mean, come on, this is a city where it used to be illegal to chew gum. There’s still a fine for spitting it out on the ground. Clean is clean and Singapore accepts no substitutes.

After a good amount of path finding we finally hit the harbour and, against a backdrop of towering sky scrapers, found the symbol of Singapore itself, the Merlion. We admired it as it contently sprayed water out into the harbour.

From there it was a nice walk back through the colonial and administrative district of the city. Impeccably maintained, it was almost like visiting Britain for a day (or so I imagine). The sun was setting fast though and before long it was back to the hotel room to get refreshed and head out for dinner.

Our last meal overseas was in a beautiful little boutique restaurant. We ate Middle Eastern food, shish kebab and pita. It was delicious. We also shared a Singapore Sling, the birthplace of which we’d wandered past earlier, the Raffles Hotel.

It was a great meal too. The wine was well matched and it gave us a great opportunity to reflect on the trials and tribulations of the last week. It was a great way to finish off our short day in Singapore.

Dinner complete, straight to bed.

Next morning we woke early of course, rolling out of bed at 5:30 AM. After once again having to fight with the hotel desk staff, we had a cab and were off along a beautiful orchid-bedecked highway within minutes. The 8 AM flight soon saw us on the way home to Tokyo. I of course failed to sleep again, but managed to watch Gran Torino, The Road To Perdition and The Bourne Identity on the way back. In flight movies are a terrible thing…

Landing in Narita in the mid afternoon we quickly bid farewell to Winny who was bussing back to Fuji-Yoshida. Then Melissa and I had lunch in an airport restaurant before boarding the Narita Express back to our respective homes.

The next day I still had off so It was merely relaxation. I think in the PM I actually did end up going to Ben’s to partake of a bit of Rock Band, but I’m not entirely sure. I’m writing this about 3 months afterwards, so the events are a bit fuzzy. Ben had just returned from Vietnam where he had been travelling with his girlfriend. He had a pretty wild time it seemed, even having lost his wallet shortly after arriving. Crazy.

Anyways, that was Malaysia and Singapore! Another amazing trip I believe…

Finally finished writing about it…

Ian “Mello Yello” Cantello

Pulau Tioman - Week 49 and 50 (May 2 - May 3)

2009-07-23T08:13:00.000-07:00

One final view of Mersing before we get on the boat to Tioman.

We're on a boat!

Tioman rises out of the clouds.

A view of part of Tioman's shore. The entire island is covered in tropical rain forest.

My friend the Monitor lizard.

Crabs on the beach near our lunch spot.

The fruit bats.

The closest beach to our huts.

That's me out on those rocks.

Our dinner, the two crabs and the fish, being prepared.

A wonderful presentation!

The Hong Kong divers.

Morning day 2. My lens fogged from the temperature difference between my hotel room and outside. The water is at low tide here.

Near the beginning of my hike to Juara.

That's a tiger leach in the middle there. Fortunately I avoided getting any of thse on me.

Big ant, no?

If I wasn't spooking monitor lizards I was spooking these guys.

Huge worm...

Tiny spider.

A tropical squirrel. I saw one of these guys in a zoo a few months back. Felt great to see the real mccoy.

Close to Juara beach now.

Juara beach.

On the way back.
On the road back to Tekek.

The road crew.

Winny at sunset. One of the best shots I took on this vacation.

Best shot I could get of a bat.

We ate here both nights.

Pulau Tioman

Week 49 and 50

An early-ish wake up saw us moving out of the hotel nice and fast to the docks for our 12 PM trip out to Tioman. After a banana-roti breakfast in the waiting area of the ferry dock, we were soon aboard the ship and headed across the deep blue sea. I just have to say that when Simon linked this on Facebook, I feel he accurately captured our emotions at the time.

We sat on top of the ferry, looking out at the grey, cloudy skies and the odd island that slowly drifted past. Some of them looked like they’d be a lot of fun to explore actually. The highlight of the ferry ride was a fish, I think Stephanie said it was a barracuda, that skimmed the water alongside the boat like a flying fish for nearly 20 seconds before diving back in.

It wasn’t long before the island of Tioman reared its mist-bedecked peaks over the horizon. Our beach, Salang, was located at the north end of the island, and was therefore the last stop of the boat. We landed at about 2 PM and quickly wheeled/carried our luggage to the little cottage that would be our home for the few days. It was pretty well appointed too, 2 double beds, an extra mattress on the floor, shower with warm-ish water and that most blessed of contraptions, conditioning of the air.

Nice.

So we went out and explored.

The group had lunch at a small Indian restaurant. I decided to order a couple of the curries that were on offer. This was a major mistake. Those were two of the least, spicy most watered down curries I’ve ever eaten, less spicy in fact than the average curry rice in Japan.

The best part of the lunch was actually looking over the side of the railing and realizing that there were crabs stalking each other through the surf. I am of course a wildlife geek, so the opportunity to poke around with crabs is one I will never pass by. We don't see em' too often back in Ontario. So I hopped down onto the beach and did my best National Geographic photographer’s impersonation trying to get a proper shot of the little guys. It took some stealth to get close enough even with the telephoto. Those are skittish little guys.

After that it was off to see if the various little shops had anything good on offer. The general opinion was no, but we looked anyways. As we wandered by a little lagoon, Winny pointed out our first monitor lizard. Those were incredible to see for the first time in the “wild”. General scared of humans though. Of course, also not in a huge rush to get away when surprised either.

Winny actually did an amazing job of picking out wildlife while we were wandering around. Besides a good sized spider and an emerald-green tree snake, she also spotted the MASSIVE flock of fruit bats living in one of the trees that grew over one of the hotels on the island. It’s actually surprising that it took so long for us to notice them there, what with all the keening, but unless you look closely they just seem like little pieces of fruit hanging from the top of the palms.

After snapping a bunch of pictures it was already starting to get late in the day, so we went back to the hut and got serious about relaxing. Swimwear in hand for Winny, Stephanie and I, we went on down to the beach and rented some snorkeling equipment. The beach wasn’t all that amazing underwater, mostly crushed and dead coral, but it was still a beautiful place to go snorkeling. We did see some very interesting fish though. Colourful parrot fish, that eat dead coral, were all over the place. You could hear the sound of their teeth on the coral underwater. It sounds like someone walking on really crunchy gravel. We also saw these really interesting skinny, long fish that were almost translucent and only swam right at the surface of the water. Stephanie is a certified diver, so she knew quite a bit about the fish we saw and gave us a great running commentary. This was also the first time that Winny had ever used a snorkel, so she was pretty ecstatic. I swam out to some rocks a bit further out in the bay and proceeded to play hide and seek with the residents there…a large number of fish and some more skittish little crabs.

While we were swimming Mel and Seth had made an attempt to make it out to an area called Monkey Beach, but shortly after starting their walk it got too dark to continue. They joined us on the beach and we all sat and watched the sunset.

While the others went off to shower and get ready for dinner, Winny and I stayed on the beach and discussed the trip thus far. We were both just sort of overawed with the amount of effort we’d expended getting to Tioman, but man was it worth it. Strangely enough, while we were sitting there, we both suddenly felt like it was raining, only that wasn't the case. What I think were sand fleas had all woke up at the same time and started jumping around. We couldn't see them, but they were hoping all over the place. It was a weird feeling, almost like the beach came alive.

We ate dinner on the beach, sitting at a little table, watching a thunderstorm race across the horizon. This ranks as probably the best surroundings I’ve ever had for a meal. It was so amazing, eating another steak and watching lightning lance across the Malaysian mainland. We also had a fun time dodging, and in my case playing, with the feral cats that make Tioman their home. We discussed the possibility that countries tend to have either feral cats or feral dogs, but usually not both. In Malaysia’s case, cats won out for some reason. Hence the feral cats. Cute, I say.

Actually, all in all the meals were quite interesting that night. Although my steak was a bit pedestrian by itself, I supplemented it with a crab that I’d picked from a tank that Melissa and I ate together. Winny had also selected a crab and a fish for her dinner. It was really great stuff, although the grab was a bit spikey and we didn't have a cracker.

After dinner we walked home and found a little bar that was kicking pretty solidly and sat down for gin and tonics. We played a few little drinking games and then watched in surprise as a bunch of divers from Hong Kong totally out did us with their drinking game. It involved standing a diver on a chair and stripping off his shirt and pants. He was then forced to don a pair of scuba goggles with cartoon eyes glued over the lenses. La piece du resistance was the beer-bong/snorkel that completed the arrangement. At first they were only drinking beer but it was soon changed to a combination of beer and wine, which certainly sounds foul to me.

We enjoyed the show for about 20 minutes before tiring of the divers antics. I actually left the bar a little bit early and went down to the ocean and lay down in one of the hammocks provided by the hotel. I drifted off for a little bit in the warm tropical night, watching fruit bats flit back and forth through the palms. Soon though I had to leave that peaceful environment and head back to the cottage to sleep properly on my own bed. I also lost a button off my pants when I stood up to get off the hammock. Damn it.

Day two on Tioman started later for me than everyone else. Seth had signed up to become a certified diver so he was out at class nice and early learning the basics. Stephanie, Winny and Melissa had signed up for a tour around the island including some snorkelling, a little tiny walk into the rainforest to check out a rainfall, and a few other things.

Me, well, I struck out on my own and went hiking.

First though I had to do something not so fun. The day before I had climbed those rocks out in the bay in order to get Winny and Melissa to take a picture of me. I cut my hand a little bit on those rocks, a very small cut, nothing serious. However, I noticed the next day that the area on my hand was very red and was swelling slightly. Also looked like it was filled with, well, pus. So I popped open the little first aid kit I’d brought (I knew I was going hiking), lit a match, heated the end of a needle, and lanced the cut. With a little bit of anti-septic on it, it was feeling fine soon enough and I was on the way to Juara beach, halfway down and on the other side of the island.

This involved first chartering a water taxi to take me to the main city on the island, Tekek. I had to buy two tickets in order to leave without waiting for more customers to charter the boat. I guess not that many people go around by themselves. Normally I would have waited, but I didn't want to get stuck in the forest when the sun went down.

Anyways, it was a pretty crazy ride over. The ocean was a bit choppy that day, maybe a 2-3 foot swell and the water taxi was not exactly big. That made for a pretty wildly bumpy ride around the side of the island to tekek. Melissa, Winny and Stephanie had had a similar experience while they were shuttling around to the various activities they partook in that day.

Upon arriving at Tekek I started out on my hike. It was pretty tough going, due to the insane heat and the poorly maintained trail before hitting the rainforest proper. I found out that the path was well developed once under the canopy. It seemed as though the trail had been put in to facilitate the construction of the power lines that ran alongside the path. This actually ended up being a serious problem for me at one point, for my Lonely Planet book failed to mention that at one point the power line actually crosses the path about a foot off the ground. I had to climb a rock and then jump over it. It didn’t make me too happy.

But otherwise it was really cool. I kept on spooking monitor lizards as I went through the underbrush. I saw plenty of birds and even more insects. I even saw a monkey jumping through the trees above me. The path also led me past a couple of waterfalls and a delightful little stream. The path itself was fairly vertical in places but man, was it beautiful to be in there.

Finally after a couple of hours the path crossed over the hump of the ridge in the middle of the island and back down towards Juara beach on the other side. I passed a road crew and waved then continued to wave at the driver of a big four-wheel-drive dump truck that was ferrying gravel up and down the road.

This path provided amazing views over the island, and I had more than one “whoa” moment where it struck me where I was and what I was doing. Hiking in the rain forest on a tropical island? Never thought I’d do that before…

I made it to the beach a little past one, stumbled into a restaurant and sat down for a delicious…piece of buttered toast. The resources on the island were super low due to the large number of vacationers that weekend. But it felt good to get something in my stomach.

After lunch I tried to book a water taxi back to my beach, but the guy was trying to charge me nearly $70 for a 15 minute boat ride. Unacceptable. So I turned around and started walking the other direction, somewhat unenthusiastically. I had bought more water at Juara beach, but on the way there I had run out, and I expected to do so again on the way back. It was just far too hot to hike comfortably.

Fortunately, just as I was about to start the long climb back up, the dump truck driver from earlier came by and offered me a lift up to the building site. I happily accepted and climbed into the cab alongside the him, pushing a big collection of crushed beer cans that littered the passenger seat floor aside.

We had a good conversation on the way up. I joked about how it’s far too hot for Canadians in Malaysia and he thought that was pretty funny. I asked a little bit about his job and what they were doing up on the mountain. His English was alright, but not amazing, so it was a bit difficult to communicate.

He let me off about three quarters of the way up the mountain. I hiked the rest of the way back to Tekek village, avoiding the jungle path I’d gone through earlier because I did not want to risk another hop over a live electrical cable.

About mid-way through the hike I stopped and added some more SPF 50 sun block to my skin which, after having already re-applied twice, turned my skin into a morass of sweat and oily-white sun block. It felt fucking disgusting. So, with my arms held awkwardly out from my sides, I continued on.

I saw what may have been a bird of paradise at one point, it had long tail feathers, trailing about a foot back from the body. I didn’t really get a good look at it though as it was just flying through the trees. I got a quick glimpse, nothing more.

The guys from the construction site passed me twice on my way down, shuttling to and from a lunch break I should guess. I was again offered a ride by the driver, but I passed this time. It would have been interesting riding the back of the dump truck, but on these roads it looked like it might require some extra skill.

By the time I made it back to Tekek I’m pretty sure I was on the verge of sunstroke. I went into the first general store I could find, bought some more water, then continued on to the docks where I bought another 2 tickets to get me back to our home beach. Again, I could have waited, but the huge clouds on the horizon made me hesitant. The water was a lot calmer this time, so it was no concern to me, although I did have to climb across three boats to get back onto land when I arrived at the pier.

I booked it back to the cottage, switched into my swimsuit, had a short conversation with Seth who was on break from diving lessons, and before the sun could go down, I was back in the water. I just floated there, letting my legs and arms recover from the abuse they took all day hiking. A few minutes after I dipped in the sun went behind the clouds and it started to rain.

I've talked about zen moments before in this blog, back when I was out jogging in sakura season in early April. I had another one of those moments that evening, floating on my back feeling the drops of rain fall lightly on my face. I just lay there in the water, not thinking about anything really, just enjoying the moment of tranquility.

After the rain passed and I had tired of swimming, I changed, grabbed my book and kicked back in one of the hammocks to read a bit while I waited for everyone to get home. Before long, Seth showed up, having finished diving lessons for the day. We chatted for a bit before he went back to the hotel to wash up. Not too much longer after that the girls arrived and we all got dressed for dinner again.

We went back to the same restaurant that night, only this time we had reserved 2 chickens for dinner. Apparently the supply of poultry is fairly limited for that restaurant, so if you want any you had to reserve the food long in advance. Turns out it was a great idea because the half chicken was excellent. Much like the steak in Mersing and the past in Penang, I hadn't had anything that good in almost a year, so again it was just culinary bliss. We also drank a bottle of wine with the meal but it wasn’t very good.

Finally, we returned to the bar for another quick round of drinks before Melissa, Winny and I said our farewells to Seth and Stephanie. Seth was staying another couple of days to finish off the diving course while Stephanie would in fact leave Malaysia and Asia all together, returning home to America and ending her year abroad. I was sorry to see her go, even though I didn’t see too much of her while we were in Japan.

So, bags packed up and ready to go, we all went to bed and got ready for the last leg of the journey, Singapore and the journey home.

Heading across the border…

Ian “Mello Yello” Cantello

Penang, The Road to Tioman, Mersing - Week 49 and 50 (April 29 - May 1)

2009-07-22T09:53:00.000-07:00

Exhuasted travellers in the Blue Diamond Hotel.

Soon upgraded to Hotel Malaysia! Shwing!

Out and about exploring. Yes, that is a silhouette walk you're seeing right there.

The 'beach' we found at Mersing.

Yummy food at the fruit cart.

Betel Nuts. The red ones are ripe.

The school group we entertained by acting like goofy foreigners.

I offered incense to the gods at this temple. Was quite the experience!

Mosque and Hindu temple kitty-corner.

Inside a Chinese mansion.

Small Buddhist temple.

Temple at night...

The night market in Penang.

Just outside the blue mansion in Penang. The inside was amazing but unfortunately no photography allowed.

The accommodation of Seth and I in Mersing

Trapped in Mersing...spirits are low.

Mersing beach!

I briefly considered labeling this 'the moon' but then realized that it might come off as condescending.

Penang, The Road to Tioman, Mersing

Week 49 and 50

Well, the next morning saw us all waking up in the sweltering heat of a room equipped with an air conditioner built to shut itself off after a few hours.

Ugh.

Yeah, that morning at the Blue Diamond wasn’t rambunctious. We were all pretty beat from the trip up the night before as well as tired from trying to fall asleep while listening to the third and fourth play through of the Eagles’ Hotel California.

Anyways, after the requisite cold showers and zombie-like half wakeful state, we were out in the courtyard eating breakfast in the company of the hotel’s rooster and chicken. Our waitress, the same one as the night previous, was one of the most burnt out people I’ve ever seen. It seemed almost as though someone had duct taped a nice fat swatch of pink insulation around her head. But that just added to the je ne sais quoi of the place.

Second order of business after breakfast was to get the hell out of the Blue Diamond. We packed our bags and set out looking for a new hotel. The first one we visited looked super nice, but was also super booked. There were no rooms remaining that would accommodate the whole troop, so we had to push on to the next hotel, which ended up being our lodging of choice. It wasn’t much, but when viewed with The Blue Diamond in such recent recollection, it looked downright palatial. After relaxing for a few minutes in the wonderful A/C and appreciating the beautiful view out of our 8th floor room, we ventured back out.

The weather was a bit spotty and we were soon running for cover under some nearby awnings on what later turned out to be a street lined with clubs. We’d return there briefly that night.

We took a long walk around the city, starting a couple of blocks distant from the seashore. It bears mentioning at this juncture that Penang is one of the least friendly cities I’ve ever visited in regards to pedestrian traffic. We spent a lot of time waiting on the sides of roads watching cars and scooters whizzing by while waiting for the opportune moment to step out into the street without suffering a crushed foot or mangled leg.

Our path towards the shore was initially blocked by the Oriental Hotel, a wonderful example of old-style colonial architecture. The hotel also had a wonderful collection of plants out front. Any hotel landscaper would be ecstatic to have the ready access to orchids that blesses the courtyards of almost every major business in Malaysia. Heading east we moved parallel to the seashore looking for a way to get down to the ocean proper. We eventually found a route down a side street that passed a small design college. The ocean itself was quite beautiful, but we were in a rather uninspiring section of beach, namely because there was no beach. We did spend a little bit of time watching a pair of fishermen trying to harvest the sea of its delicious fish.

Heading back the way we came, we were soon walking through the main administrative section of Penang, which is chock full of white-washed British colonial buildings. It was very impressive. Soon though the humidity and sunlight drove us under the shade of a tree where we found a fruit truck. There’s nothing quite like a lunch of mango, watermelon and passion fruit.

A short while later we were off again and soon found a legitimate seaside walkway upon which to continue our promenade. Perhaps unsurprisingly, for those of you who are history students of the age of sail, we soon happened across the first British fort in Malaysia, Fort Cornwallis. I should note before I get too deeply into this that Penang was in fact the first major European settlement in Malaysia. It long preceded Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, although its glory days have long since faded. These days though, the city does appear to be experiencing some resurgence.

Well, Fort Cornwallis was pretty much what you’d expect. We were greeted at the entrance by a guard wearing the traditional lobster-back uniform of a royal marine. Soon afterwards we were meandering through the parade ground whilst looking at displays depicting period life in the heyday of Fort Cornwallis. We took a seat though for a little while and just relaxed. It’s tough moving around so much in weather that hot.

Seth took this opportunity to sample a local treat, the betel nut, which we’d noticed growing on a number of trees around the fort. The verdict? They taste terrible. The guard helped us prepare it and he thought it was quite funny how Seth reacted to it.

From there we walked up on top of the redoubt and got a nice view of the harbour as seen by a gunner in the fort a couple hundred years ago. Our position also afforded us with a good view of the large school group that happened to be walking by at that moment. Surprisingly, they were quite entertained to see the foreigners standing up on the fort. They all waved enthusiastically at us, pointing and laughing. I snapped a few pictures and Seth hopped onto a cannon and rode it Dr. Strangelove style, much to the delight of the kiddies.

Soon thereafter though, those scattered showers kicked back in and saw us running to shelter beneath the awning of the refreshment stand on the parade ground. I’m always amazed by the cacophony of noise that a corrugated sheet metal roof can kick up in a big rain storm.

I had some ice cream while we waited. During a break in the rain, we began to walk out, only to have the rain pick up again and send us all dashing for cover again. Seth and I were getting bored of waiting at this point so we took the initiative and dashed through the rain into a few low bunkers built into the earthworks facing away from the ocean. They contained a large collection of memorabilia and historical facts about the foundation of the colony on Penang and the initial difficulties in living safely in the area. Apparently Malaria was a major concern, surprise, surprise.

Once the rain had calmed down sufficiently, we were back out walking again, passing by a nice old church and the town’s clock tower, which were both, of course, DRIPPING in colonialism.

We then got sort of stuck in the town’s business district. We were trying to find an area that was renowned for its large number of temples, but we were having a lot of difficulty navigating the streets in this area despite the general regularity of their configuration. We got a bit frustrated and were glad when Winny found a place to get a henna tattoo. That gave us a little while to stop and eat at an Indian restaurant. Food wasn't that great though. Winny certainly managed to purchase an interesting dish though after returning from the henna place. She got a rice dish served on a banana leaf. I thought it was one of the more impressive meals I saw while in Malaysia.

After lunch we managed to find the temples we'd been looking for all day. We quickly toured through a number, mostly Chinese. We turned down an invitation from a few Muslim worshippers to accompany them to prayer time, but in retrospect I think we should have gone in. Penang's religious community certainly is complex though. Hindu temples sit across the street from Mosques, and just down the road you’d be likely to find a church and a Buddhist shrine. It's quite obvious how many cultures have mixed together over the last few hundred years to build the country that stands there today.

We returned home to the hotel just before the sun went down and rested a little bit after the long day, watching some TV and relaxing…even jumping on the beds a bit in Winny and Seth`s case. Soon though, we got hungry, so we dressed up again and took off, looking for a restaurant and a place to take care of some other things.

First order of business was returning to the Blue Diamond. Although at this point in the journey, we were only four, we would soon be five. The fifth member of our troupe, Stephanie, was on her way and we’d been trying to keep in contact with her via email. We stopped by the Blue Diamond, discovered that she had in fact checked in a few hours ago, and was now out on the town with a couple other guests staying there. Seth handled this particular errand and he had a great interaction with the owner of the hotel. It went something like this:

Owner: So, what hotel are you staying at now?

Seth: Hotel Malaysia…

Owner: Oh. That’s a lot more expensive. I bet it’s cleaner too.

So it appears as though the owner took it personally that we left his hotel after the first night. Odd. After all, it was only business. After this somewhat unusual interaction Seth met up with Melissa, Winny and I who had commandeered a few computers in an internet café together.

That deserves its own bizarre little description. On the way over we had stopped by another internet café, knocked on the door, and then had a guy open the door and tell us the place was closed, open only to gamblers.

What the hell?

Basically, at this point, we were just trying to find a way out to a beach somewhere. It had been initially suggested that Pulau Langkwai, an island just north of Penang, would be ideal. Upon further research we were dissuaded from this opinion. Turns out the place is supposed to be quite heavily developed, which therefore makes it totally not ideal for our patronage. We wanted somewhere a bit quiet, but not too quiet. We then learned that it was possible to catch a boat from Penang up to Thailand in order to check out Ko Phi Phi, our vacation destination from last September. Tempting, since it was so perfect last time…

Finally the decision was made to essentially go the furthest we possibly could from Penang in order to visit Pulau Tioman on the diagonally opposite end of Malaysia.

What followed was a fairly epic road trip.

But first, dinner!

We ate at Ecco, a restaurant owned by a woman who might have emigrated from the US or Britain. It was traditional North American food night in Malaysia! And man, it was fantastic. By far the best pasta I’ve had in a long time (I’ve still avoided spaghetti since I left Canada of course). We also had some spectacular wine with the meal. I accidentally ordered two dishes, but we were pretty ravenous, so the extra certainly didn’t go to waste.

After finishing dinner and making 100% sure we were on the same page as far as plans go, we walked back to the hotel. On the way we took a detour and found a very prettily lit Chinese temple and took a few shots before wandering through a night market that was absolutely PACKED. We found a seat near a BBQ place and Seth and Winny dug in for an after dinner treat. We also tried something that was touted as being a local delicacy for desert. It was a bunch of fruits covered in this weird sticky molasses-y stuff. The consensus among us travellers was simply that it ruined the taste of the fruit.

Meh.

Then it was back to the hotel. We discovered oddly enough that our hotel was also right next to all the major clubs in Penang (or so it appeared). We decided to see what the scene looked like, most specifically the clubs.

And what did we discover? Nothing good. At least nothing we had any real interest in. Problem is, these little clubs didn’t really look like all that much in comparison to the ones we’d seen in Roppongi and Shibuya. Seth stayed out a bit, but the rest of us called it quits back at the hotel pretty quick.

The next morning saw us up and enjoying the breakfast buffet at a reasonable hour. Soon thereafter we had dropped our bags in the lobby and headed out to a beautiful azure blue traditional Chinese villa that we’d seen from the hotel window the day before. On the way there we got hit with a huge rain squall and had to dash into the archway covering the entrance to the building’s courtyard. We chatted with the guard for a few minutes before he informed us that there was no waiting for the tour. It started sharp at 11 AM. Seth and I led the charge into the building, running through the rain, and we were soon joined by the girls.

We caught up with the tour while the guide was talking about the family history of the previous owners of the villa. It was pretty interesting stuff. She demonstrated how much of the ornamentation on the walls was made using pieces of broken ceramic bowls and cups. To tell the truth though, I was completely distracted. You see, Chinese villas, the way they’re constructed in Malaysia anyways, have these wonderful, open central courtyards that let plenty of nice sunshine in. It was this that was distracting me as I stood beside the central courtyard, watching the water gush down from the eaves and from the open roof, making a small lake in the middle of the house. I found it to be incredibly peaceful.

A short while later we divested ourselves from the tour and headed back to the Blue Diamond one final time to see if Stephanie got our message. We found her and the midst of breakfast and, just like that, we had another member in our group. She had flown up from KL the day before and I felt kind of bad to turn her around and get right back on a flight to the same place.

Next stop: Penang Airport.

“Next flight to Kuala Lumpur.”

I actually got to say that! Badass, right?

The lady at the Air Asia counter helped us out and about 45 minutes, a muffin and coffee later, we were on board a flight for the equivalent of about $50. Nice.

At Kuala Lumpur things got interesting though. We got a taxi into the city, back to Pudaraya Bus Station, where we’d bussed out from a day ago. The scene was a little bit different when we arrived there. Before, it was a bit busy. This time it was absolutely packed. It was difficult even to move through the throngs of people that had appeared at the place. We later discovered that that weekend was Malaysian labour day, hence the insanely busy condition of the station.
This also meant that all the buses to Mersing, our destination city, were booked, or at least filled in such a way that it was impossible to get 5 people on one of them. At this point it didn’t look like it would be possible for us to get out to the island the next day.

Leaving the station defeated and demoralized, sure that we’d made a terrible mistake by coming all the way down to KL again, Seth went into action. He managed to find a taxi coordinator, who then found us a gypsy cab willing to drive us the 6 hours to Mersing.

And so the trip began.

It was fine at first. Oddly enough, the driver had one of the sun visors on his car replaced with a really tiny DVD player. So, we sat back and started watching Kung Fu movies. The roads were crowded like the aisles of a Walmart on Black Friday, but our driver seemed to be doing a fine job of driving.

That was until we almost rear ended a car at about 100 km an hour. Everyone in the car shouted and the driver just barely swerved to avoid it. This set everyone in the car on edge but Winny who, having lived in Taiwan, was intimately familiar with this style of driving.
Well it freaked the rest of us the fuck out and the atmosphere of nervousness created by us made Winny nervous too. Seth and I weren’t even wearing our seatbelts at the time of the near miss, due to their buried position under the seat.

At the first rest stop we took Seth and I dug out our seatbelts. At this point the sun was down and everything was nice and dark, which just made us more nervous in the car. It didn’t help that we soon left the main highway we had been on and started driving through rural roads entirely surrounded by groves and groves of palm trees. We spent the next 3 hours on the edge of our seats, playing games like six degrees of separation trying to keep ourselves and the driver awake. By the time 11 PM rolled around I was almost passing out from exhaustion myself. I’m usually very good at six degrees of separation but Seth was just beating me left and right. It was pretty rough.

I did notice though, while on one of those lonely back roads, that I was finally noticing why on so many middle-eastern flags the moon’s crescent opens directly up. That was the moon that had risen over those quiet palm groves that night. It was a moment of peace in an otherwise remarkably stressful experience.

We finally made it to Mersing shortly before midnight. I’m not gonna sugar coat it, Mersing is well…not shitty, but definitely not amazing. It’s what you’d expect of a rural Malaysian town, although there are a disproportionately large number of hotels there.

Speaking of which, we checked into one of the hotels on offer, really the first one that we could find. As it just so happened they had two rooms available, a fan room and an A/C room. It was clear how this was going to play out. The three girls got the AC room, Seth and I took the fan room.

Now, I got a bone to pick with this particular hotel. If you’re going to have both fan rooms and A/C rooms, for the love of god, don’t put the fan rooms on the top floor and the A/C rooms on the middle floor. That’s just plain stupid. Heat rises, the A/C rooms should be at the top, the fan rooms on the first or second floors. To make matters worse, the bathroom on our floor of the hotel was laughably bad. It was shared between all the rooms on the floor and had no shower, only a squat toilet and a big vat of cold water and a bucket. Not so good.

But whatever.

At this point, I completely dropped out for the night and passed out. I was totally exhausted from the drive over. The bed was wonderful too…only mattresses on the ground again. At least the room was cheap.

Woke up the next morning hot as hell, of course. After blearily clearing the sleep from my eyes, I wandered down and joined Seth in the girl’s room. Winny and I relaxed in the room while the others went out to get the lay of the land and book a boat out to Pulau Tioman. They soon returned, with what seemed at the time to be apocalyptically bad news.

All the ferry tickets for that day to the island were booked.

To make matters worse, Lonely Planet had indicated that there was a large number of companies that ran speed boats out to the island for a higher price. Unfortunately, these had all been put out of business after an accident earlier in the year had claimed the lives of several people.

Which meant we were stuck in Mersing.

All was not lost though as we quickly found out. After hunting around the city for another hotel since our rooms were booked for that night, we bought ferry tickets for the next morning. The hotel we found was also a great improvement over the one from the night before, although interestingly we were in the same configuration as the night before, one fan room, one A/C room. At least this time Seth and I were on the second floor. Spirits were still a little bit low, until upon asking the owner of the hotel if there were any nearby beaches, she informed us that yes, there were.

Bonus!

She even hooked us up with another gypsy cab to drive us up to the beach for a damn good price. The driver, this time, spoke excellent English, and was pretty funny to boot. He had a lot of political opinions, and talked a bit about how he believed that the human capital of China would be enough to rescue the world economy. He also said Stephen Harper was a bad man, which just made me smile like a Cheshire cat.

We made it to the beach with our cargo of beer and quickly claimed a space. Well, not quickly, it took a little while to hunt down an appropriate spot. The beach itself was also somewhat dirty, so we had a bit of a time cleaning it up before we could sit down comfortably. Also, we were soon evicted from the spot we initially chose by some seriously pro fishermen. No one wants a hook in the mouth. No There’s Something About Mary reruns please.

But the day proceeded like you might suspect. We fiddled around in the surf and sunned ourselves. Hilarious enough, Melissa applied sun lotion to my back and did a great job except for my left shoulder which for the next couple months had an imprint of her hand sunburned into it where she’d missed the skin. I had a fun time facing down waves and pushing my way through them, as I always do for some reason. It’s like checking practice in hockey or something. I swear it’s some kind of psychological condition.

We actually had decent sized waves generally, including some pretty spectacular ones. Most especially, we had an unexpectedly large wave, maybe close to two meters, which surprised the hell out of me, Winny and Stephanie. Winny lost her sunglasses when the wave rolled her under water. They were a gift from her Aunt and were legitimate product. Fortunately, Stephanie, in a feat of amazing detection, found them a couple of minutes later. I got rolled just as badly as the other two in that wave, but unfortunately I was a bit closer to the shore. My back ended up with a wonderful network or scratches from sea shells I was dragged over on the sandy bottom of the beach.

We spent a while at the end just relaxing on the beach and reading before heading out to meet our cabbie at 6 PM. This time Seth and I shared the front set together, and the driver seemed a bit less interested than the first time when he had two girls for company in the front.

Having arrived back at the hotel, we showered, changed and walked down to the pier where we had a great but expensive meal involving, for me at least, the first steak I’d had in almost a year.
It was absolutely delicious!

And that was pretty much it for Mersing. We all headed back to the hotel. Seth and Winny went out to wander the place a bit more, I stayed in the room and took a few photos and did some reading. We would leave the next morning.

Island-bound and realizing he put too much detail in this post…

Ian “Mello Yello” Cantello

Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur and area - Week 49 and 50 (April 21 - April 28)

2009-07-08T08:40:00.000-07:00

My compatriots on the flight over.

Chinese medicine set out to be sold at the pharmacy in Chinatown.

Traditional style food market urban style in Chinatown

Juxtaposition!

The Kuala Lumpur mosque.

Kuala Lumpur itself, the meeting of two muddy rivers.

Our tour guide and the national flower of Malaysia, the hibiscus.

Kuala Lumpur Mosque

You can't get away from crows.

The old KL station.

Lunch in the old KL station.

The National Mosque

The inner sanctum of the National Mosque. Mecca is that way.

Petronas Towers

Batu Caves, exterior.

The stairs up to the cave itself

There were plenty of friendly monkeys around

Inside the caves

Looking back towards the entrance

A look at the ceiling of the cave.

Just outside the entrance.

Looking back towards KL

I love these limestone cliffs.

Little India

Note the maple leaf on the can. We export to Malaysia!

The courtyard/patio/thing at The Blue Diamond

Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur and area

Week 49 and 50

Well, the week leading up to Malaysia was nothing spectacular, just a lot of waiting and trepidation. I had enough time during the week to drop out to Kichijoji and do a bit of shopping for things I thought might be helpful while overseas. This included a couple of T-shirts and pairs of boxer shorts (which were both helpful) but was more focused on, of course, photographic equipment. I’d been trying for the last while to really get a proper suite of tools available, so I added a little bit over this week. Got a nice neutral gradient filter and a star-cross filter for the camera (didn’t use the former, did use the latter). I also bought a small, transmit only, GPS unit. It’s a pretty interesting little device though. It’s made to attach the GPS positional data whenever you take a picture to the photo, which is great because it then makes it very easy to figure out where you were when you took it. Super handy for hiking.

And that was pretty much it. The week passed slowly because I was so psyched to head out of town for the trip. But man, when Sunday morning finally rolled around…woooooo.

I was up and on the train relatively early and, for the first time, made it to Narita without watching rain lash against the windows of the Narita express. Fortuitous prediction for the rest of the trip, no? I also spent most of the trip listening to a song by Rise Against on repeat for at least all the time I was on the Chuo line. First time I’d heard it, even though it had been on my iPod for quite some time.

Anyways, I met up with Seth, Melissa and Winny at the airport. After wandering around for a bit to find Seth (he was saying good bye to a lady friend of his) we all hopped on to the train and began the six and a half hour flight down to Singapore.

It was a really long flight, not made any shorter by the baby that cried the entire trip. I felt really sorry for the kid, and his parents even more so because they were obviously embarrassed by the conduct of their child. It was alright though. I spent the whole time watching movies of course. Quantum of Solace and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I do hate watching films on those tiny airplane TVs as they never quite provide the right experience. No matter. Quantum I’d already seen and Benjamin Button was alright, nothing spectacular and a bit too long for the pay off.

So after the long, long flight we ended up in Singapore airport for a two hour layover before our final flight out to Kuala Lumpur. Singapore International Airport is very well appointed. Seth even managed to score some free whisky. Bonus. Speaking of which, the great part about flying ANA (All Nippon Airways) is their all-you-can-drink policy. Never have I had more poor quality red wine.

Long, uninteresting story short, we killed the 2 hours then hopped back on to a different plane with the same crying baby for the final trip to Kuala Lumpur proper.

The airport was a bit less chaotic than the one in Bangkok. We also weren’t harassed by hundreds of gypsy cab drivers, only a half dozen. Instead we simply bought a taxi chit at a kiosk and were soon zooming down one super wide highway towards the center of Kuala Lumpur. As exhausted as we all were it was impossible to contain our excitement. And we weren’t disappointed. Just on the way into the city we were able to see the Petronas towers lit on the horizon, those two pinnacles that are so symbolically linked with Kuala Lumpur. And the film Entrapment.

The cabbie dropped us off in Chinatown after we had a bit of difficulty locating the hostel. Winny managed to pick out a sign and get us to the general area our lodging was in. We were staying at the reggae house, in an annex building which was way off down the street from the bar it’s primarily associated with. This caused us a hell of a lot of confusion but after a bit of searching and direction asking we were successful. The walk to our section of the hostel was also a bit disheartening. It was garbage night, so not only did we have some amazingly terrible smells, but we also saw our fair share of gigantic cockroaches. We even played footsie with them in some cases.

After some difficulty convincing the owners that I was, in fact, Ian Cantello (I left my booking information back in Japan) we had acquired a couple of small rooms and were ready to paint the town red.

Not exactly.

We were kind of exhausted, so we settled for going to the Reggae bar and having a few drinks. Keep in mind of course from this point on that Malaysia is in fact a Muslim country, and although generally well disposed towards foreign cultures, alcohol is still somewhat difficult to find. That’s why staying in Chinatown is a good idea. The Chinese keep a particularly strong allegiance to alcoholic beverages and the right to imbibe them, not merely to have them gather dust on the shelves.

So we sat and chatted. Winny and I observed a wonderful mating dance between a young turk and a pair of girls. It was pretty funny, especially after the girl that the guy was clearly going after took off for an extended period of time leaving him and the other girl sitting in awkward silence for like 20 minutes. Comic gold.

It was sort of an odd atmosphere in the bar though. You got the feeling that they were trying to go with more of a club feeling, but it never really came together. Especially because it’s a frigging reggae bar. Jumping and dancing around is about the exact opposite of most things Reggae related.

At least in my limited experience.

The barmen were also kind of taciturn, which was even more disconcerting. They seemed frustrated every time I went to buy a drink even though the clientele was clearly predominately foreign.

This aura of the bizarre continued at the hostel itself. The desk clerks seemed to be generally overly hostile and suspicious towards us, if not the other guests. The overall atmosphere of the place was just… uncomfortable. The other guests were appeared to be about 3 to 5 years younger than our group, which was also disconcerting. They were also, to a soul, distant. They barely spoke to one another and when they did only in muted tones. Speaking to people they didn’t know was unheard of. I tried to strike up some conversation by asking about the spelling of Kuala Lumpur (hey, I was tired) and all I got was a polite smile. I’m not THAT bad looking, right?

We finally hit the sack a little past two and were soon asleep. I got top bunk too. Bitchin’.

The next day saw a decently early wake up. We were out and about at a decent hour, although hilariously enough I made the mistake of waking everyone up an hour early (I guess? I think Seth and I were still late) because I forgot to change the time on my cell phone. Speaking of which, although my cell worked perfectly in Thailand, that was not the case in Malaysia. None of our cell phones worked at all which, although not being a serious problem, was wickedly inconvenient.

We bought a ticket for a bus tour at our hostel and started out into the blisteringly hot but not too humid Kuala Lumpur day. And what a day it was!

First stop was breakfast at a Swedish inn, which was quite good although we only caught the tail end. We would come here again the second day in KL for breakfast too.

After that, it was time to wander aimlessly. Unlike Bangkok where you have to be a little bit more focused in your wanderings, KL is quite easily navigable without any specific plan while still allowing you to see some great things.

For example, our first stop was for Seth at a drug store. He’d been having some problems with a sore throat, so we tried to find some medicine for him. The store we went to was just really neat mostly because of our timing. They had all of these crazy Chinese traditional medicines lined up and ready to be packaged for sale. Really cool.

After wandering through the street market and not seeing anything particularly great, we switched shopping locales and found the Sentral Market, an indoor area with more traditional handicrafts for sale. It was just nice to get into some A/C!

From there it was closer to a bit of a business sector. You get some great juxtaposition in KL between ultra-modern sky scrapers and very old colonial architecture, which is actually pretty well preserved. It’s a real pleasure just wondering and enjoying the scenery. And speaking of architecture, you can see some stately old mosques, and Arab-inspired architecture all over downtown.

This brings me to the first major stopping point on our trip: the Kuala Lumpur mosque.

So, wandering in with a bit of trepidation, we discovered quickly that it’s totally cool to go in and look around so long as A) You have a guide and B) you wear appropriate clothing. That meant donning the world’s least flattering, most polyester robes. And for the ladies, headscarves.

The tour itself was quite interesting. We noticed a lot of people just sort of hanging out at the mosque. Our guide informed us that homeless people (or I assume people that are just taking a break) are perfectly allowed to wander in and enjoy the use of the premises. Pretty socially responsible policy I think. Our guide also explained to us washing ceremonies before prayer (if you’re in the desert, you use sand instead of water!) and a few other things.

We walked out to the point within the mosque that gave it and Kuala Lumpur their names. The very tip of the mosque’s grounds is located between the junction point of the two rivers that flow through Kuala Lumpur. These two rivers are quite muddy, which therefore gives us the name, Kuala Lumpur, ‘Kuala’ meaning muddy and ‘Lumpur’ meaning river junction. There you go! There were also several fruit trees on this point that our guide informed us were free to be picked by any visitors. She recommended we try this one fruit that tasted a bit bland but was about the juiciest thing I’ve ever eaten.

I was super satisfied by the tour myself, but Melissa and Winny told me that the guide basically ignored them all the way through. I’m not sure why, maybe some sort of cultural thing, but it was too bad. I thought our guide was awesome AND hilarious.

Once we’d left the mosque Winny stopped at the first of many fruit vendors. It’s a great feature of travelling in South East Asia, the ready access to excellent and fresh tropical fruits. Watermelon in hand, we continued on.

At this point we got slightly confused, but eventually found a bus stop for the Hop on Hop off bus tickets we’d bought that morning. Now, these busses were supposed to swing by each bus stop every half hour. We waited for about 40 minutes with no bus in sight. Wilting in the heat and kind of pissed about the situation, we decided it was time to just forge ahead on our own. It didn’t help that Melissa and the rest of us sampled the local Red Bull and found it surprisingly lacking. Seth decided at this juncture to coin the excellent term “hop on? fuck off.” in regards to the quality of the bus service.

No matter.

Wandering on our own we crossed through a rail station before eventually finding something that had been sitting on the horizon since we got up that morning, the National Mosque. When we arrived, it was closed to non-Muslims due to prayer services, but we noticed the posted times for visiting hours for the not-so-aligned-with-the-state-religion types and made our way down to what turned out to be the old central station building for KL.

It has long since been converted into a hotel, and it’s awesome. It feels really colonial, like the kind of place spies might have been meeting while trying to topple a military junta…or in American’s case, put one in place. It even had one of those super archaic elevators that is built up the middle of a staircase and has a wire cage all around. So cool.

With lunch disposed of at the station hotel, we returned to the National Mosque. Once again, it was on with the polyester robes, pink this time.

The National Mosque was also quite inspiring. Huge. In some places it almost felt like something out of Star Wars, maybe a Jedi temple. Spectacularly beautiful. I also managed to pick up some neat pamphlets to educate me about Jihads and whatnot. No tour guide this time out though. The inner sanctum was off limits to non-Muslims unfortunately, but no matter.

Finished with the National mosque, we followed a road up into a heavily forested section of Kuala Lumpur just west of the National Mosque. We saw some great rainforest trees and our first few wild monkeys on the way.

There were a few different attractions here, and we visited an orchid garden (free) and a butterfly farm. The orchid garden was fantastic, and the butterfly farm was okay too, but it wasn’t as…active as the one in Thailand. I’m not sure what the difference was. Maybe I just wasn’t as wowed. The garden in Thailand was the first one I’d seen.

Following that though, we visited what was maybe the winner for best sightseeing location of the day. We took a cab down to those two massive symbols of Kuala Lumpur, the Petronas Towers.

And they were absolutely awe-inspiring.

We didn’t get the opportunity to visit the sky bridge, but it was enough just to see them from the outside. We didn’t spend too long outside though at first as we were all quite hungry. Instead it was a beeline for the food court, where we all got some surprisingly excellent food. We then followed that by dropping by the Kinokuniya (a Japanese book store) that occupied part of the building. I managed to find a copy of Master and Commander, which I figured was pretty appropriate for a journey into a former British colony.

After spending quite a while perusing the books it was back outside to snap a few photos in front of the towers before heading back to our Hostel. We investigated the night markets while we were there before returning to the Reggae Bar. I WAY over paid for a pair of knock off sunglasses, which was stupid because I was in the midst of bargaining fine and then just panicked when everyone told me they were leaving. So instead of paying like $10, I ended up paying $40. It also hurt that I didn’t have the currency exchange straight in my head at the time, and that’s kind of important. It just sort of pissed me off!

Winny was a bit tired and took off early, but the rest of us hung out and enjoyed another hookah, this time with a truly bizarre guy setting the thing up for us. We just couldn’t seem to find a happy medium between normal and bizarre with the help in KL, that elusive balance that qualifies as ‘interesting’.

Exhausted, we returned to the hostel and called it a night. Once again we dealt with the strangely mute guests at our hostel, but no matter. We also spent some time trying to coordinate the next couple of day’s worth of travelling. More difficult than expected, considering we weren’t sure whether we wanted to go North or South. But that pretty much finished off the day.

The second day in KL began much like the first. Same place for breakfast, although Winny split off to have congee in a very authentic Chinese restaurant. I believe her exact quote was “it was just like being back in Richmond. Everyone was speaking Cantonese!”

After that we wandered again trying to find the central bus station, puduraya, which looked more like a parking garage than anything else, but whatever. We filed its location away for future reference.

Still in a post-breakfast haze, we were soon in a cab headed a little bit out of the city to the site of Batu caves, a limestone cave near the city thought to be something in the neighbourhood of 400 million years old.

More recently it was converted into a Hindu temple.

But, religious trappings aside…wow. Words don’t really do it justice, I’ll make a brief stab. It’s pretty amazing first walking up the steps and eyeing the massive limestone stalactites hanging off of the mouth of the cave. Not to mention the hordes of monkeys eyeing you as you wander upwards. The cave itself is absolutely astounding. Fucking gigantic. As if the mountain itself had been hollowed out at the top. I can’t believe how long it would take to for water to slowly chip away enough rock and dirt to build this thing. But I guess 400 million years sounds about right.

That still was a shitty description. Look at the pictures damn it.

After a long time of wandering around and snapping pictures we took off back down and out. On a personal note, I spat out some gum while I was in the temple and missed a garbage can. Even though it was obviously a pretty rough and tumble place what with the wet concrete floor and the rainforest overhead, I felt so guilty I had to go back and pick it up. Ah conscience, so inconvenient at times.

Once we’d finished our slack-jawed gawking, the crew headed back out down the steps, passing more simians before arriving at the parking lot where we investigated a few more of the sights around the caves. There wasn’t too much to see though.

After ordering some nice cold water and sitting in the shade for a few minutes, we were ready to get on the way once again. Hailing a taxi we were informed that it would cost 35 ringgits to drive back into the city, 10 more than the cost to get out there. I quickly replied that’s too expensive. Our cab driver conferred with his mates and lowered it to 30 rm. I was happy to have succeeded a little bit in bargaining after the monumental failure from the night before.

Oh and of course, I should mention at this point that Malaysia’s driving situation is what one might expect in South East Asia. Scooters zipping between transport trucks and cars weaving in and out from lane to lane, general chaos. It’s not exactly relaxing, but as long as your driver seems confident, really no problem.

We had the driver drop us off in Little India, where we were treated to a small open air market where a bunch of workers from the surrounding buildings were enjoying their lunches dressed in the brilliant colours typical of Indian saris.

Again, wandering completely aimlessly, we happened across a bazaar and just sort of soaked in the flavour of the area. It was positively bustling with activity. We were pretty hungry at this point, so the first chance we got we ducked into what turned out to be an incredibly authentic little restaurant. It seemed to cater almost exclusively to the local Indian population, and as such we saw many people eating with only their hands, which is one of the few times I’ve seen that.

Stuffed with a great and spicy meal, we headed on out to hostel to pick up or bags and ventured back to Puduraya station to procure tickets to the extreme North-East coast of Malaysia, where the city of Penang is located. The ride was about 5 hours, not too bad, and quite comfortable.

The long range busses are probably the best way to travel in Malaysia from what I gathered. They’re generally cheap and fast, which is a good combination in some things, like a computer, and not so good in others, like a restaurant.

They’re also comfortable. Badass reclining chairs, basically like loungers, just a lot more worn out. I guess all the wandering around in the heat had really taken it out of me because I totally passed out on the bus for a few hours. The scenery didn’t help. At least initially it was interesting looking out the window and seeing row upon row of palm trees as far as the eye can see. However, that gets a bit repetitive after the first hour. When I woke up though about 2/3 of the way through the trip I was pleased to find that we were travelling through some low limestone mountains. Awesome-desu.

Soon thereafter we arrived in Penang. Actually, kind of far from the area we wanted to be in. Apparently the bus station is located quite far from the downtown area. While we sat in the station, getting our bearings, I wandered off and, amazingly, used a squat toilet for the first time since I’ve been outside of Canada. This is just remarkable because they’re quite prevalent in Japan, so I’m not really sure myself how I managed to avoid them up to that point.

It was also a little weird because I had to A: pay for using the bathroom and B: buy toilet paper, which ended up being just a small package of Kleenex. Yep, not the Ritz-Carlton. But it was fine, if a little rough on the thighs.

Afterwards, we hopped a taxi into central Penang city where we were soon trying to find a hotel. The one that was first recommended in our book turned out to be closed (Lonely Planet should update on a yearly basis I think.) The second hotel we tried was…well…interesting.

The Blue Diamond.

I’ll get the best part out of the way first which was, unfortunately, the courtyard (?) outside the hotel. It was covered in that oh-so-classic corrugated sheet metal that just screams Vietnam. It kind of felt like being on leave in Danang or something. Ben, who was in Vietnam while we were in Malaysia, might have a better impression of that, but I felt it was close enough for us. The courtyard also contained, oddly enough, a pretty decent Mexican restaurant. Finally, it also featured a live band. Which was good in that it was live and a band, but not good in that they only knew about 6 songs. The second time they played Hotel California was the last time we sat through it.

If the hotel was a candy of some kind, I’ve established at this point that it had a wonderful milk-chocolate shell. How about the inside?

Well, when we arrived Seth went off with the manager to get a tour of the place. Melissa and I were left to our own devices trying locate him. For one, the building is pretty classic colonial. It had those huge vaulted ceilings that are so prevalent in…well…colonial buildings. It also meant that it had those badass doors that are like 9 feet tall. Approximately. Just super tall. Extremely retro-colonialist-chic.

Other than that though, bad signs abounded. From the geek’s perspective, it’s never a good sign when a hotel’s internet café (used loosely in this case) consists of computers with the side panels on the cases removed. That means that the proprietor either doesn’t have the knowledge or drive to get the inside of the computers cleaned out periodically. That pretty much carried over to the rest of the hotel. The walls were covered in peeling orange paint painted in a truly bizarre fashion. Our room was great. One queen and one single and a couch, everything well stained. The A/C unit barely worked, the bathroom had a nice big hole in the floor covered with a rock. The tub looked like every time it got dirty enough to clean someone simply splashed some paint on it instead. When Melissa and I were looking around for Seth we stumbled across the dorm portion of the building which was fucking bizarre in that there was NO DOOR. You could just walk in off the street, up the stairs, and be with everyone. It lacked a…what’s it called…oh yeah, sense of security. Right.

I make it sound like I hated the place. I actually thought it was pretty fantastic. It’s not that often you get to stay in a place with that much character. Even if a foot-long-rat runs by your table while you are eating and you have to execute a cockroach before your room is down to the number of occupants that are paying the tab. The owner was actually pretty cool too. He was pretty hyper-active and genki. He let us watch him feed the fish he kept in tanks near the front desk. Both carnivorous of course.

Anyways, we finished off the night relaxing in the room, listening to the weak A/C. I ended up taking the couch to sleep on despite the offers of the others to share either three to the big bed or two on the small bed. I declined, quoting “I’m trying to see how uncomfortable I can make myself while still remaining comfortable.” This is actually a rationale I use to make lot of decisions. Of course, I make an equal number that make me more comfortable. But one might cite my stalwart refusal to buy any kind of padding for my futon. It’s good practice, not being used to too many comforting things. That lets you sleep soundly on a ripped up old couch in a hotel in Malaysia.

And that’s that. Part 1 of 4. Next one, Penang tourism and the trip to Pulau Tioman!

Sleeping soundly…

Ian “Mello Yello” Cantello

Expressly Reptilian - Week 48 (April 14 - April 20)

2009-06-30T09:36:00.000-07:00

Essentially the start of the hike. Most of the ascent looked like this.

The forest is fairly old-growth-ish. Big trees!

This somewhat beat up shack was our welcome mat for the summit of the mountain. Looks nice in B&W

A Japanese Jack-in-the-Pulpit? You be the judge!

This nature trail section was way quieter than the rest of the trip.

Good luck if your stone lodges in the mouth.

Adventurer...am I right?

Beautiful late April weather.

Traffic jam on the way down. Shin's as disappointed as I am

Wandering our way up to the little secluded shrine

When you walk towards this gap it's almost like the big rock is being aimed at your face. Disconcerting!

The mountain itself on the way out marred by the ubiquitous appearance of telephone lines

Expressly Reptilian

Week 48

Preparation.

Two weeks countdown to the big trip and the longest holiday in Japan, Golden Week.

Yep, pretty much spent the whole week talking to friends and making plans for the coming expedition down the coast of Asia to Malaysia

The week was again unremarkable. Made it through no problem to the weekend. I unexpectedly managed to throw together a hiking expedition for that weekend. I was totally down for it, but also just a bit concerned that I wouldn't have enough time to prep myself for the big trip the weekend after.

Sunday saw me waking up nice and early to head out to Tsukuba-san, the hike that I aborted in early march in favour of Takao redux. Early morning wake up and the 9AM train out of Akihabara to Tsukuba station. Waking up early is about the only aspect of hiking that I really despise.

It was actually a lot more difficult than I was expecting getting out there due to a problem with the publication date of my hiking guide. It was written in 2001. Yep. I didn’t think this would be such a huge problem but as it turns it a lot can happen in eight years. The route described in my book involved a trip on a rather obscure line from Ueno out to a rural train station, followed by two bus rides to the base of Tsukuba mountain.

Fortunately, in addition to Shinsuke coming along on this trip so too did an acquaintance of the fall previous. Rowena, who I saw a few times before Zoey left Japan, joined us in this excursion with some interesting information. She had in fact been to Tsukuba on a previous occasion and saw the wisdom in informing me about the Tsukuba express line, a much faster, much more direct route to the mountain in question.

I therefore ended up starting out my ex-Tokyo journey from Akihabara instead, where I met with the two other hikers on the train. A short 40 minute ride later brought us to Tsukuba station and the bus ride out to the mountain. 30 minutes after that we finally stepped out onto the gentle grade at the bottom of the mountain and started our way out.

Tsukuba is an interesting mountain. It’s located in Ibaraki, near Chiba, which is one of the flatter sections of Japan, at least towards the south of the prefecture anyways. Tsukuba-san is therefore rather unsurprising as a popular hiking destination and possessor of the mantle of holiest mountain in the Kanto region, other than Fuji.

The hike began with a short walk through a small temple before starting up the mountain proper. Shortly after beginning of this section we startled a small snake that slithered off through the grass. The weather was amazing and I guess the little reptile had decided to sun itself in a nice bright spot during the early afternoon.

The trail was pleasant on the way up the mountain. It was heavily forested with some fairly old, good sized Japanese cedar. The path itself wasn’t boring either, which was not what I was expecting. The hike was described as being “easy” in my book, but the terrain was a mix of exposed roots and light rock scrambles. Lots of fun to get up, but not too stressful. There was a good amount of stairs too, but nothing too rough. The heat was a little bit annoying, but nothing we couldn’t get past.

We made it to the top just past 12. No problemo.

Tsukuba has a sort of unusual shape, a double peak. The trail we took to the top deposited us on the saddle between these two peaks, where the ropeway terminates. A short stop for lunch later and we were on our way to the taller of the mountain’s two peaks. It was a bit uninspiring though. The temple at the top was kind of small and a little bit overdeveloped, more concrete than I would like. Unfortunately, the weather was also quite humid so we did not exactly get a good view of the surrounding countryside from up there.

After heading down from there we took a stroll around a little nature path that circled the summit maybe fifty meters down off the summit. We had a few nice views from there and was substantially less busy. Many of the Japanese hikers were there to do flower viewing. Or so I gathered considering the number of elderly couples bent double inspecting undergrowth from about 3 cms away...or aiming expensive digital cameras at the same. I saw some rather interesting flowers myself, including something that really closely resembled a Jack-in-the-Pulpit.

After finishing the loop and coming back to the saddle we grabbed some ice cream to cool off before continuing the journey. Mine was sesame flavoured and quite good. The rest of the hike involved, of course, assailing the lower of the two peaks. On the way there we passed by a very distinctive rock that is shaped somewhat like a toad. There’s a local legend that if you manage to throw a pebble into the toads mouth and have it stay there you will receive good luck. We all tried and failed. It’s actually quite difficult, especially if you limit yourself to one throw. After that we headed to the summit of the lower mountain.

This one was a lot nicer than the first. The temple was better developed, but not overdeveloped, and the rocks that capped the top of the mountain were kind of fun to climb around on and relax for a bit. We snapped a few pictures and enjoyed the rather rewarding view before heading down.

After a little bit of confusion we found the trail off the mountain. The trip down wasn’t so bad, just a little bit long, slightly punishing and heavily crowded.

Traffic jam style

So after queuing for a few minutes I got kind of pissed off and started going down the more difficult sections of the path as fast as possible which was way more exciting. Funnily enough, most of the other hikers just seemed to be amused by the three young people jogging down the mountain.

This trail wound through a rock garden on the way down. It was nice, but the names for some of the rocks were a little bit misleading and/or inappropriate.

We also visited a cool little shrine that was only really accessible through a very narrow, long crevice between two massive rocks. Pretty unique. Whenever I see temples on mountains like this I always imagine the monks hundreds of years ago making lonely pilgrimages up barely trafficked slopes to these incredibly infrequently visited little shrines.

That’s not really the feeling anymore, what with the overwhelming number of hiking enthusiasts in Japan.

We wandered on back to the bus stop from at the beginning of the hike and from there caught the bus back to the station. I arrived home a few hours later and relaxed with some movies and games before hitting the sack, tired as I always am after hiking.

Twice in a row at this point for managing to hike with other people. I gotta say, I much prefer it to hiking alone.

Monday was the usual with a twist. I met Melissa in Shinjuku and we went to a Starbucks near the station in order to finalize plans for the Malaysia trip. That night we went to Ben’s again for the final Rock Band night before Golden Week and all of our vacations.

And so that was it. Prepped and ready to go.

Malaysia bound at this point...

Ian "Mello Yello" Cantello

Ambulatory Finale - Week 47 Part 2 (April 7 - April 13)

2009-06-26T08:43:00.000-07:00

This was actually pretty much exactly where we held the GEOS party

They do have tulips in Japan.

Well, I kind of got a shot of cherry petals falling..
.

This is basically where my jog usually starts...

Ambulatory Finale

Week 47 (Part 2)

Well, picking up from my little talk about jogging and the wee hours, the rest of the week was nothing too special. The cherry trees started to lose their leaves, fewer people were in the park every night enjoying hanami parties and, finally, the cherry trees sprouted leaves and finished the business of blooming once again. I was a little worried all weekend because I had informed a student that the trees still had their flowers (mostly) only to discover that there were very few still blooming the next time I was in the park. He told me later on that his party ended up being fine.

As it turned out, this year had been a spectacular year for cherry blossoms. This was due mostly to a cold snap that hit a few days after the trees start blooming. That drew the season out into about two weeks instead of the usual week and a couple days.

Sweet. I wouldn't have known of course, but a student informed me of this fact...

Just to reflect for a moment, let me a share a hard hitting metaphor:

Sakura trees are basically nature's premature ejaculator.

Many other flowers bloom over short periods of time, keeping a rather low profile, especially for plants like the crocus. However, they species or genus usually seems to stagger it's blooming over time, so you may have a few crocusses every few days or so. Sakura trees don't want any of that shit. They just blow their load in one huge display for like a week, if you're lucky. Then that's it. They grow leaves and go about the business of looking like every other tree on the block for the rest of the year.

Hell, I didn't even know which trees in Koganei Park were Sakura trees until they started blooming.

Which is another misnomer actually. We call em' cherry trees in English, but they don't actually produce any fruit. Just like a premature ejaculator. Get it? Huh? Yeah? You know what I'm talking about?

Yeeeeeahhhhhh you do.

Work went fine throughout the week and the weekend involved, of course, Rock Band and Malaysia planning. Other than that though, not too much.

Man, I thought this week was a lot more exciting, hence the two posts. Guess I was wrong. Well, enjoy the end of the Hanami photos! I tried to get the classic Japanese view of cherry petals floating of the trees in a giant cloud, but it just wasn't windy enough. Nuts!

Sad that Hanami is long over when he's writing this...

Ian "Mello Yello" Cantello

Ambulatory Finale - Week 47 Part 1 (April 7 - April 13)

2009-06-19T09:40:00.000-07:00

Ambulatory Finale

Week 47 (Part 1)

Really, nothing to report from this week. I was preparing hastily for the upcoming trip to Malaysia and Singapore. I must, however say, that 3 of the most memorable jogs I will ever take happened this week...and one inopportune one on Sunday that turned out to be a bad idea. The weekend was as per usual, with the exception of the above mentioned jog. Rock Band in Shimo.

I'll reiterate once again that I almost always jog at night to avoid the heat and the crowds. I also always jog while listening to music and I've found that what I listen too can vastly affect my mood while I'm jogging. In some cases it makes it more difficult, in most it makes it easier and others it makes me run balls out fast or super giddy. I really get into my music when out running, to the point that I'll even do stupid things like try to match my footfalls to the beat, or run in a stupid gait to match the music's mood. I sometimes joke that I live my life to a soundtrack. My iPod is actually the one thing I probably couldn't survive without.

Let me paint a picture.

You're running on a slightly cool but not uncomfortable April night. The path is covered by a canopy of pale pink blooming cherry trees. The streetlamps highlight the gently swaying boughs in a spectral yet elegantly beautiful way. And so you run. And as you run, the two songs that you hear are the following:

The Arcade Fire - Wake Up

Interpol - PDA

I know that to someone of differing musical taste these songs are contradictory . For me though, they were absolutely perfect, as if every Hollywood composer had sat down and collaborated to create the perfect music for just one scene. Whenever I hear these songs I always think of those two or three nights in April 2009 when I ran beneath the cherry blossoms and just let the music carry me along.

It was one of the most beautiful, peaceful things I've ever done.

Figuring it must have been some sort of zen state...

Ian "Mello Yello" Cantello

Liquid Shack - Week 46 (March 31 - April 6)

2009-06-18T11:00:00.000-07:00

Koganei park. This is the entrance I take to get in these days.

Mmm...Sunsets through sakura. This photo and the previous one were actually taken during the last blogs time window. I thought it was better to group these a bit together though.

The morning of the school's Hanami party. Just hanging on my tarp, watching the flowers.

It was a bit busy though...

Sean, towards the end of the party helping us get the tarps ready for transport.

Simon's difficult to locate cell phone store, Vertu.

Genki at the Imperial Palace.

A familiar view from an earlier week. Much better camera now though.

On our way to accidentally discovering awesomeness.

The Imperial Palace's moat.

Starting along the path...

See all the suits? This is Tokyo word, Tokyo city, Tokyo prefecture...

"Yeah, I just dig chilling with cheery blossoms."

The torii gate in front of the Yasu-Kuni shrine. This is reportedly the largest in Japan.

Just a nice shot of a crow...

The shrine itself. There's a good chance that some of these visitors are ultra-nationalists.

Old/New, Nature/Technology

The Yattei area that Melissa and I had dinner at.

Liquid Shack

Week 46

And so it begins.

Perhaps the largest yearly festival in Japan.

Hanami.

Cherry Blossom viewing.

The very first indications of the cherry blossoms had begun popping up a few weeks ago. When Melissa's friend Toni was visiting we saw a few in Yoyogi park. But it wasn't until this week that they really came out with a vengeance. And man, was it ever beautiful to see. Kayoko and I spent a good bit of the week preparing for the school’s Hanami party that was to take place on the weekend. Around about this time the manager that had been working with us temporarily finished off her stint at the school. She was pretty cool. We had a final farewell with her in Kokubunji.

Thursday saw me running in the afternoon.

And that’s really unusual.

Some explanation required. I often have a fairly large break on Thursday afternoon, so I took the opportunity to walk back to my apartment, change into my jogging gear and tear it up through Koganei Park on an absolutely beautiful April day. It was really warm and, more than anything SUPER crowded.

The latter part of the previous statement also requiring further explanation.

My city, Koganei, is INCREDIBLY well renowned for its cherry blossoms. So much so that 30 or 40 years ago, the trains on the Chuo line would only stop in Koganei for two weeks out of the year. Those would be the two weeks of Hanami, when the cherry blossoms were blooming. This may not be so surprising when you consider that my house is on a street called Sakuramachi. That literally means Cherry road.

It follows therefore that the yearly Cherry Blossom festival is an absolute mad house. The close proximity to Tokyo and the quality of the sakura presentation creates the perfect typhoon. So Koganei gets a bit flooded, especially the park section of it.

And this all added up to a very interesting jog for me. I’m used to jogging at night with barely anyone else around during the coolest part of the 24 hour cycle. So yeah, it was a novel to be dodging around kids on bikes and huge numbers of people walking dogs. Not to mention the heat. That stuff wasn’t annoying at all.

Hmmm…sarcasm doesn’t really come through in print.

It all added up to a really exhausting jog that was partially fueled through a song recently recommended to me by Melissa, Flo Rida’s Right Round. I can’t really comment on the intelligence of the lyrics, but damn if music like that doesn’t help with running. He certainly throws together a good rhyme.
It was damn appropriate for the hectic surroundings of that particular run.
Other than that though, a fairly typical week. Sunday saw me up nice and early to partake in a wonderful Japanese tradition. Companies in Japan these days often send the newest members in an office to reserve the spot for the office Hanami party. In many cases this even means that they have to go and stay there overnight.

That was me this year. Minus the overnight bit.

Although, honestly, I think it was probably more due to me being the member of school staff that lived closest to the park, not my junior position.

So I was out nice and early sitting on my school’s tarp, snapping away at the cherry blossoms with my camera and awaiting the nice big group of students that was coming to hang out with us. The spot I picked was pretty good, in that it wasn’t too crowded but still had plenty of sakura trees around. The park was ridiculously busy though, so busy that in some places it was actually difficult to see the ground around the tarps placed down by picnicking families.

We had a pretty decent student turnout. About 20 people. Kayoko and I had also taken advantage of the newly opened Ito Yokada across the street from the school to pick up some authentic western food. Ie. Tortilla chips and salsa. Yeah, yeah, not exactly Canadian, but it’s a bit of a rarity in Japan. I don't think it was wildly popular with the students, but it was nice as something new for them to try. The rest of the afternoon was pretty great. Good conversation, seeing Sean again, tons of cherry blossoms. Does it cause some descriptive dissonance to call the afternoon badass? I mean, there weren’t any awesome guitar solos or anything…

But badass ‘twas.

Things broke up in the late afternoon and we all headed back to our respective places of residence.

Monday was pretty spectacular. I met Melissa in Ebisu early on in the day to go and take care of some medical concerns we had about our upcoming trip to Malaysia. Namely, Malaria and Typhoid.

This led us to the Tokyo British Clinic and a nice meeting with a doctor. He informed us that the risk of contracting either disease was quite low. As a precaution though, we both got Malaria shots at an absolutely exorbitant price, something in the area of $350. I’ll unfortunately have to go back and get the Typhoid shot later this summer for a trip that’s coming up in fall. This was actually kind of a surreal experience. I guess I know what Americans without health care feel like now.

“I’ll take the Malaria but hold the Typhoid.”
“If you buy both now you get a 10% discount…”
“Well…I’ll have to put it on layaway, but okay.”

After the Doctor’s, Melissa and I headed to Ginza for a second time. It was a lot cooler this time out, we wandered around and just took in the sights. I was on a mission to get a few pics for my friend Simon back in Canada of the Vertu store in Ginza. We didn’t actually know where the store was, so we had to wander a bit before we found it. I got some shots of the outside. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t let me shoot inside the store. Guess that’s the curse of being an amateur.

Things then got really interesting. We decided to go to the Imperial Palace because Melissa hadn’t been there before and we were within easy walking distance.

The Palace itself was much like I remembered it. However, we stumbled along a path that runs alongside the moat of the Imperial Palace that is famous as one of the best places in Japan to see Cherry Blossoms. This discovery was completely by accident and COMPLETELY awesome. The path is positively enfolded in Cherry trees. This is bolstered by beautiful views across the moat of the palace walls bedecked with more cherry trees.

We followed the path for about 45 minutes, circling about half of the Palace compound before we split off and crossed the street and arrived at our originally intended destination.

The Yasu-Kuni shrine.

This is a really impressive, very beautiful shrine. Unfortunately it’s also quite infamous. The shrine itself is dedicated to the war dead of the Meiji Restoration. This was later expanded to include any soldier that died in service to the emperor in times of war.

So far so good.

Oh wait…except for a little blimp called World War 2. Japan unfortunately did some not so nice things on continental Asia. Since the shrine is dedicated to soldiers sacrificing themselves during war, a great number of combatant names were enshrined there after World War 2.

Which makes the shrine a public relations nightmare.

Every time a Prime Minister visits the temple China and Korea freak out and make claims about Japanese militarism and attempts to revise their history. Arguably, China and Korea aren’t being that alarmist. There are thousands of shrines in Japan. There’s no real reason why you would choose to go to the one shrine that will piss off the international community.
Conversely, should not Japan be allowed to mourn their dead as well?

It’s a sticky situation.

Anyways, political disaster aside, it is a really beautiful shrine, and was quite busy when we were there. We just kind of waltzed in and wandered around while I made cracks about damaging relations between Japan and its neighbours.

We only stayed for a short time before leaving the shrine to grab some festival food. Mmmm Yattei (food shacks at festivals). After that, it was out of Tokyo and off to Shimo-Kita-Zawa for more rock power with Ben and Co. We’ve actually started building a band in the game at this point. The Hair Blair Bunch will rock on forever! Great fun and a great week!

Sakura’d out

Ian “Mello Yello” Cantello

Acoustic Iteration - Week 45 (March 24 - March 30)

2009-06-16T09:40:00.000-07:00

Sean contemplates Fuji

Takao really is blessed with a great view

And that's lunch!

Here we are about 2/3 of the way done. You can see the route we've taken thus far. Takao is the mountain to the left of the photo (it looks more like a ridge). From there we basically just followed the crest of the ridge to this point. You can see part of the trail leading off the hump to the right of the photo.

One more push lads!

For some reason whenever I look at this photo it reminds me of the album art for Abbey Road...

Foreshadowing

I didn't really feel I captured the essence of this "horse" painting the first time. Here I feel like I really got the artist's intended impression of of a horse standing proudly erect.

This picture looks better with (cold) friends

Even a cloudy day can provide some really beautiful views

Japanese landslide armour

Acoustic Iteration

Week 44

Ah the work week. Exciting as always, especially since it was intensive week this week. That’s when students with certain contracts come to class multiple times to make up for absences that they accrued previously in the year. The classes have a little bit more of a relaxed structure in some ways, so I used the opportunity to warm up a couple of classes by playing Jeopardy! The categories weren’t terribly difficult for a native speaker, but there were some good ones…Geography, Big Books, Abbreviations etc.

Anyways, the week passed like any other. Nicely enough though, the weekend ended up being something a bit different. I invited (or managed to convince) three other gentlemen to accompany me on a hike. The original plan had been to go out to a mountain called Tsukuba on the East side of Tokyo but that was cancelled due to potentially poor weather. I ended up hiking that with a different group a few weeks later.

We relocated the hike to Takao for my second trip along the Takao – Jinba traverse. At 16 or 17 km long, it’s a pretty decent hike over a rolling ridgeline.

As it turned out, the weather was quite good, if not all that warm. We changed out of our jackets pretty quickly before later putting them back on. A few of us were even down to our T-Shirts for a little while. Oh yeah…speaking of us, the hikers were of course myself, Sean, Casey and Shin. I actually hadn’t seen Shin in nearly 6 months, the last occasion having been Zoey’s farewell party back in September. Yikes. I was happy to see him, but unhappy to hear that he’s in a tough spot these days looking for a job. Bad economy and all doesn’t help.

So the start of the hike was pretty nice up Takao. The last time I actually hiked the mountain it was in late September also, and I guess we had the Japanese equivalent of an Indian summer last year, so it was balls hot at the time. I appreciated the hike a lot more in Spring. Good crisp air and not too hot. To make things even better, it was still clear enough at the top of the mountain to see Fuji from the top! So we broke for lunch within sight of Japan's most famous icon. I’d packed along a ham and cheese sandwich from a Circle K while Sean and the others visited one of the huts up at the summit for some hot food…I ought to have done that. Especially since my sandwich was squashed flat as hell by the time I got to the top of the mountain. Literally like it had gone through some kind of halfway functional car compactor.

Oh well.

We continued on the hike. It was a bit difficult at times. I hadn’t been out hiking in a long time and my jogging regimen had been spotty around that time. The hike, as I mentioned previously, was along a ridge line, which made for a lot of up and down. That can be kind of crushing to morale. I’m not really sure which is the more difficult kind of hiking, one shot straight up and down a tall mountain or a long rolling series of short ascents and descents along a ridgeline. Both have their definite pros and cons…

Our second rest stop saw Casey, surprisingly enough, pull out a flask of whisky and a cigarillo. Not exactly what I’d call proper hiking form, but that’s just how the Hawaiian rolls. I suppose if you're going to be manly men out in the wilderness you might as well go the whole nine. We got cool as soon as we stopped moving, which is a major drag, but easily remedied. The weather was of course still really cloudy and a bit cool.

The rest of the hike was fairly uneventful. It had been quite a while since I hiked with someone else and I’ve got to say, it pretty much beats hiking solo every time. Having other people along really keeps the morale high.

We finally made it to the top of Jinba at the end of the hike and went about the business of catching our breath before heading down to catch our bus out. I smoked a cigarillo offered to me by Casey, which was quite nice. Cuban no less. I also enjoyed a little episode where Casey hunted around the top of the mountain to find the source of some jazz music he heard playing only to discover that it was his iPod. Oh well.

We finished off the hike and took the bus back to the station and from there, exhausted, returned to our various places of residence. I got some food on the way home and took it very easy for the rest of the day. Well deserved I should think.

The next day was the usual Monday. Rock out in Shimo-Kita-Zawa with the crew. Tons of fun as always, but nothing too amazing or exciting to relate to you, my readers!

Should have lots of time this week to write up a few more weeks worth of posts. Hopefully at least to Malaysia…maybe past it? Or maybe not. I have a bad record of promising lots of delicious content and then delivering a measly wafer. We shall see come Thursday.

Playing catch up as always…

Ian “Mello Yello” Cantello

Vacationer Calm - Week 44 ( March 17 - March 23)

2009-05-29T08:57:00.000-07:00

One of the main intersections in Harajuku. I was trying to get some pictures of unusual Japanese vehicles. Here we have a tiny, tiny truck.

Here we have the very common two person scooter

Eave decoration at Meiji-jingu

Shibuya station in the PM

Seth demonstrating what exactly it is to ROCK OUT!

Vacationer Calm

Week 44

Well, I can't say the next few weeks I'll be writing about were that exciting generally. Unfortunately you were curious enough to navigate to this page, so enjoy the very slow, flat ride!

*maniacal laughter*

Just kidding. March was a bit slow though.

This particular week saw an odd coincidence. One night while I was relaxing at home I got bored and started surfing YouTube watching old cartoons. You know, Tiny Toon Adventures, Looney Toons, Animaniacs, the good stuff. Oddly enough, while I was reliving the TV of my childhood, a woman messaged me on Facebook that I hadn't talked to in nearly 15 years, all the way back in Elementary School, when I was watching the very same shows.

Bizarre, but cool.

The weekend saw me head out to the Irish pub in Tachikawa on Saturday night to spend some time drinking with Sean before heading back to my place. Sunday was nice and lazy, but Monday was set up for some serious work.

Melissa had a friend of hers visiting from Korea. I therefore spent Monday afternoon hanging around with them visiting a few of the major Tokyo sites. Meiji-jingu, Harajuku, Shibuya. It was nice to wander around again, though a bit chilly. We even got to see the very start of the cherry blossom season in Yoyogi park. Sugoi!

Melissa's friend was pretty cool and joined up with us at Ben's place that night for some Rock Band. All and all though, not much to report from this week. Just another awesome 7 days in Japan.

Separating the wheat from the chaff

Ian "Mello Yello" Cantello

Leprechaun Elvis - Week 43 (March 10 - March 16)

2009-05-28T06:40:00.000-07:00

Tokyo Rock-A-Billys

Line Dancers? Yoyogi's got it all

More of em'...

The Elephant room

Leprechaun Elvis

Week 43

Posting again after a long Malaysia related hiatus.

This week started and ended without any serious hitches or problems. It’s the usual work week, powering through lessons and maintaining genki-ness.

But the weekend…

Now, this weekend was, of course, St. Patrick’s day. Fortunately for foreigners living in and around Tokyo, there’s enough foreigners of decidedly beer-oriented disposition to generate legitimate St. Patty’s festivities.

So off we go. Sunday I woke up late of course, it's kind of my M.O. at this point. I was to meet up with three different groups of people in Harajuku in the early afternoon on Sunday. Sean and Kayoko, Melissa and Seth (and others), and Miggy and a group of others down from Fuji-Yoshida to celebrate both the St. Pat’s and a stag party. In the end I failed miserably in spending time with the different groups. Instead, I first met up with Melissa, then crossed the street to deliver Miggy the old tripod I’d brought out for him. He informed me that he and his compatriots were soon to return to the mountainous Yamanashi prefecture from whence they came. I bade them farewell and godspeed. I then proceeded to spend the rest of the day in Mel's company, mostly by accident. I had intended to meet up with Sean but never had a good opportunity to peel off. Ah well.

Due to my late arrival in Harajuku I missed the parade that was held, which was a bit of a shame, but I did later meet the Irishman who actually led the parade. That was cool. Without much else going on it was soon time to leave our perch along the parade route and venture out to Yoyogi park. This was the first time I’d actually been in the park myself. I’d walked along side it before but never gone in. That’s partially because I usually visit the area on Mondays and it’s just not that kicking on weekdays. However, on Sundays (and Saturdays I assume) it’s absolutely kicking. The combination of close proximity to both Harajuku and Shibuya, towns known for their vibrant youth populace, and the lack of large open spaces in Tokyo assures a maelstrom-like confluence of visitors.

Most notably the Rock-A-Billy dancers.

Seriously.

We spent a good long time watching this greasers go through their moves. I was half expecting them to bust out into a rendition of West Side Story, but no dice. There were a few different groups of Rock-A-Billy’s set up as well as some line dancers and others. An interesting cross-section. I ran into Tuan, Alex and Alex’s girlfriend while out walking. It was only a brief conversation though, as I had to get going along with Melissa’s group.

We hunted around for a nice spot to set up and found one close to the fountain in the middle of the park. A few hours of easy conversation and drinking ensued. Melissa’s friends were all really cool and it’s always nice to meet a new group of people.

On a funny note, while walking through the park we stopped for a washroom break. While the girls were waiting in the incredibly long line, a rat the size of small football ran past the lot of em’, eliciting a few screams but, from the three girls in our party, nary a yelp. I was impressed at their hardboiled-ness.

After Seth joined us in the park (he’d been out with others earlier) we walked to Shibuya and found a bar to relax in. We tried an Irish pub first, but it was way too packed. Instead, we ended up back at the Elephant Room, a restaurant I’ve been to a few times before which is always excellent.

Everyone was pretty drunk at this point, and we proceeded to get more so. Ralph, a friend of Mel’s, had joined up to and it was cool to meet him for the first time. The next couple hours are a bit hazy, but it involved plenty of drinking, lots of good food and at the end, a slightly drunken ride home on the Chuo line.

The next morning went slowly, due mostly to hangover issues. Fortunately, I had no agenda, other than going over to Ben’s place for more Rock Band. We had a fifth member there that night, one of Mel’s acquaintances from her part of Japan. The night went well except when our fifth got a bit slovenly and spilled a full drink on Ben’s Tatami. Not good, those rice mats are expensive. That put a bit of a damper on the rest of the night, but it still turned out okay. As always at the end of the night it was back to my place and ready for another week!

Trying desperately to catch up...

Ian "Mello Yello" Cantello

Consumer Wilderness - Week 42 (March 3 - March 9)

2009-04-17T09:01:00.000-07:00

Businesses in Ginza

Ginza shoppers churning about...

Models for UNIQLO (American Apparel crossed with Walmart)

Shibuya scramble crossing

Rock Band, baby.

Consumer Wilderness

Week 42

Another short one here.

After the usual slow recovery on Tuesday due Rock Band Night at Ben's, I was on to another fairly typical week. I started jogging again seriously, which was nice despite a few cold nights out in Koganei park.

It's occurred to me over the past few months while out running that there are a few songs that I'll associate with my time in Japan for the rest of my life. Chief among those I'm sure is The Killers track, 'Spaceman' which I have both sang many, many times and also listened to while running quite frequently. Also, basically any song by Coheed and Cambria. I pretty much live my life to a soundtrack.

Speaking of the Arts and Entertainment, during the week I watched Sean Penn's excellent film, Into The Wild. I'd read the book a few weeks earlier and decided to give the film a shot. I was pleasantly surprised, I thought it was quite good. Obviously not the equal of the book, but still, very sincere. I kind of missed Jon Krakauer's narration though, as I feel it really bolstered the story by giving it a context within the author's own experiences.

Which brings me to my own impression. I wrote something down after I watched the movie to remember what I was feeling right after I finished watching it. Looking at it now, it's a bit incoherent, so I'll try and rephrase as best I can with a month or so of sweet, sweet 20/20 hindsight.

Traveling to Japan is in many ways my own McCandlessian journey, just far less self-destructive. Self-constructive perhaps? Sure, it's not nearly as dramatic and full of adventure, but I undertook it for much the same reasons: being in a situation I wasn't happy about, wanting to know myself better and hell, oddly enough, discovering The Wild.

That last point is wickedly ironic.

Who would be stupid enough to leave one of the world's least populated countries for one of the world's most populated in order to explore the wild?

But that was more unintentional. I had no idea that climbing Fuji last summer would have struck such a resounding blow within me. From time to time I wonder what would have happened had I not made that fateful ascent...But that's another path.

Speaking of another path, my mom must be happy as hell that I didn't follow the path that Krakauer took. The scribe of Into the Wild, also having been stuck in a situation he disliked, decided that the best way to overcome his problems would be to head up to the Stikine ice cap in the Boundary range to climb a mountain called the Devil's Thumb. Almost died doing it too.

I just went to Japan.

But what struck me most about this was that one of the major reasons he cited for his departure was the end of a four year relationship. The relationship was also the only major one he'd head in his life at that point when he was in his early twenties.

Damn if that does not have some parallels with my own experience.

It just sort of hit me that sometimes everyone has to change their situation. For someone that used to get stuck maintaining the status quo easily, it's nice to know that I'm not the only one. But I'll stick to hiking thank you very much. Ice climbing screams "death wish". No offense to any ice climbers out there. And I can unequivocally state the following:

I feel that this time abroad has already been the most rewarding thing I have ever done.

And it's not even over yet, that's the best part!

Deep spiritual reflection and all, I really dug the movie.

Rest of the week was standard fare though. Sunday I relaxed at my place before heading out with Melissa to check out Ginza for the first time on Monday. It's THE upper class shopping area of Japan and, although definitely living up to the name, was somewhat disappointing. Namely due to our lack of millions of dollars. We would end up back here a couple of weeks later (stay tuned).

We also walked from Shibuya to Harajuku, just looking around at a few of the clothing stores. I've walked that street many times. Nice walk, fun to soak up the sights and a few neat stores to check out always.

Monday finished with the standard thrashing of plastic drums and guitars at Ben's place and back to work on Tuesday.

Prepping for Sunday's hike at Tsukuba-san...

Ian "Mello Yello" Cantello

Repetitious Precipitation - Week 41 (February 24 - March 2)

2009-04-14T11:07:00.000-07:00

View off the balcony

I still envy this guy's garden.

Thank you Unibroue for providing my first taste of Canada in a long time

Was last here at New Years with Sophie, Winny, Sean and Kayoko. Ah, memories.

This statute commemorates a famous Japanese No actor

Repetitious Precipitation

Week 41

Ah, I gotta say, the next few posts are going to be, for the most part, short and sweet. Let’s get rolling!

I was quite pleased on the morning of the 27^th when I woke up to see big, fat snowflakes falling outside. Though it snowed briefly earlier in the year in Tokyo, it was really nothing at all to phone home about. This time though, despite the zero accumulation, it felt like a legitimate snowfall just like back home.

The above statement seems to suggest a certain twenty-something general disinterest with geneveral events. I was giddy as hell to tell you the truth.

I grabbed my camera on the way out the door and snapped a few photos on the way to work. It was a nice combination, the white of the snow with the pink of the newly flowering plum trees, very beautiful.

The rest of the week saw nothing amazing though. I ended up the week happy enough and proceeded to sleep through yet another one of Sean’s football match-up. Someday man, especially in the upcoming weeks since my Saturdays have gotten slightly easier.

Monday saw a rendezvous with Melissa at 1 PM before heading off to Asakusa for her first visit. I had already been there twice of course, but it was nice to see it through the eyes of someone seeing it for the first time. Beautiful weather to be walking around in too.

We then proceeded to Akihabara to try and find a replacement battery for her laptop. Unfortunately, despite Akihabara being the supposed Mecca of all things electronic, it was woefully bereft of Dell components. I guess they just don’t have the market penetration here that they have in Canada and the US.

Finally, we finished off the night at Ben’s place in Shimo-Kitazawa, belting out our favourite songs and belting down a variety of spirit-based beverages. Dinner at the Thai restaurant near the station topped off yet another week in Nihon.

Slightly hoarse…

Ian “Mello Yello” Cantello