this is the last of the entries I wrote, or mostly wrote, on the train to Tokyo. It's the most fun of them, though! ^_^ Er. The most fun to read, not to experience.
October 7th, 2011.
It was a three-day-weekend. One should know better.
I began my journey into well-paid-for hedonism by taking off
work early. The situation was nearly perfect: with four morning classes, then
lunch, I should be basically free to go once lunch was finished on Friday
afternoon. I would have been, but for speech contest practice all the damn
time. But, begging out of that, and giving my heartfelt yoroshikus to those in
charge, I slipped off while the third years took their tests in what would have
been, for me, a post-lunch fog of dreadful sleepiness.
Having left work early, I enjoyed enough time to finish
packing and preparing my house for departure, distracted only a bit by the
re-Japanated Miriam.
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| She is only a little distracting. |
On a good day, it takes 45 minutes to get to Himeji, so I
made sure I had at least an hour and 15. I wanted to be on the 4:30 bus to the
airport, although since domestic flying in Japan suggests you check in at least
20 (twenty) minutes before your flight is scheduled to leave, I figured that in a pinch, the
5:30 would get me there at 6:50, which was just enough time for my 7:15 flight
to Kagoshima City.
Oh, naivety.
I made great time
until about halfway up the bypass highway, when I met traffic so hideous, it
drove me to exit and try my hand at the surface roads instead. Riddled with
stoplights, they were not much better. I watched 4:30 arrive but blocks from
the bus station, aware that I still had to park and walk to the gate anyway.
Shit. Oh well, there was still the 5:30.
I parked in the cheap section and dragged myself and my bag
to the bus terminal. 4:48. Fuck it, I thought, I’ll go have a donut and eat
this banana I carried along with me for some reason. The donut was subpar. I
sat around for a bit, took a call about speech contest skit preparation from my
former vice principal, and sat around a bit more before I heard some kind of
announcement regarding airport buses. I couldn’t understand enough of it to
know what was going on, but I did see that my bag was the only one in the
airport bus line. It was 5:15 I poked my head out the door to see if I could
see the airport bus, worried that the announcement had said “Well if there
isn’t anyone who wants to take the airport bus, we ain’t sendin it!” No, it was
far worse than that.
An oldish bald dude appeared as if from nowhere, and asked
me where I was going. When I said Itami, he asked me what time my flight would
be. He did all this in more than passably good English. I told him 7:15 and he
said regretfully, “I don’t think you can take your flight. The highways are
very crowded.” Well no shit, I had seen that myself in attempting to make it to
Himeji on time. Of course. “You should take the shinkansen,” he said, “that is
the best way. Only take shinkansen.” I thanked him and went outside to try to
call my Wervs, in distress over the idea of spending 200 bucks on a shink
ticket to Kagoshima when I’d already thrown 110 on a flight thinking I was saving money by doing so.
At this point I was wondering, should I even go? Was it worth it, after a week
like the one I’d had, and before the week I knew was to come? Was this a sign
that I should just give in and take a damn rest for goodness sake?
I didn’t have her number in my phone, so I texted her
instead with a plea that she give me a call.
But then it dawned on me that the little old man might have
been talking not about taking a shink to Kagoshima, but rather to Osaka, and
from there getting myself to the airport via train. Trains run at the same
speed no matter how road traffic is going. With this revelation, I looked
around to ask him, but he had vanished as mysteriously as he had appeared.
I power-walked to the train gate at Himeji station and asked
a train guy what the fastest way to Itami was, and how long it might take. He
gave me a wishy-washy answer that amounted to, I’m not sure you’ll get there as
soon as you want to.
I dithered for exactly one minute more, then thought, fuck
it, I will be way more upset if I don’t at least try my best to get my ass on
that plane. I can deal with whether or not to take a shink to Kagoshima and
spend a ton of extra money once I have really missed my flight, because I
haven’t really missed it yet.
I bought a nonreserved ticket from a machine and hotfooted
it to the platform, taking the first Nozomi to come down the track. I was on my
phone’s browser for the entire duration of the half-hour ride, figuring out
exactly how to get from Shin-Osaka to the airport. Turns out, you have to take
the subway from Shin-O, then connect to the monorail from the subway.
Thing is, connections never mean you hop off one train and
onto the other. Usually they involve walking through a station, then through a
tunnel or walkway of indeterminate length, then into a new station, where you
wait on a platform for the next train to come. It takes way longer than anyone
(I) ever reckons because all that time, one is in motion; so while time spent
on a train is felt as time passing, time spent moving to a train is less easily
felt.
But I knew, this time, that it would be there, and would make all the
difference. So I jogged from the shink/JR area all the way across Shin-O (which
I quite thankfully know rather well by now) station and to the red subway line,
bound for the outskirts of the city. I never got a seat on any of the trains
that came after, but that’s how weekend (especially long weekend) travel is. I
texted Wervs to tell her it was giri-giri (going to be close!).. Then I jogged (with all
my shit on my shoulders, mind you) from subway station to monorail station, a
farther jaunt than I liked. Then I basically bolted down the walkway from the
monorail to the airport doors, aware that by then it was 7:00 and my flight was leaving
in fifteen minutes, and holy shit.
I ran haplessly past a lit sign that proclaimed the check-in
for my flight was officially closed and called out to a woman who looked like
she was on her way somewhere. “To Kagoshima!” I whimpered, helpless against the
motion of time.
“Do you have a reservation?” she asked, moving toward a
check in counter, “Do you have ID?” I basically threw my driver’s license at
her as I shifted my bags. “Is this okay for carry-on luggage?” I asked, still
panting, still sweating.
“It’s fine,” she confirmed, “gate 23, go!”
The line at security was too long for me to wait in. I
showed my “hi, my plane leaves in ten minutes” boarding pass to someone near
the line and she pushed me to the front, asking the pardon of people behind me,
who nodded sagely, perhaps pitying, perhaps silently tsk-tsking this panting,
sweaty foreign girl-child.
Once through security, I jogged the remaining length of the
airport (because gate 23 was, for some reason, at the end of the entire thing)
to find the tail end of the plane’s boarding line still being processed. I
dropped into my airplane seat, wishing I could take off my shirt. Since
domestic flying allows you to take along a water bottle (provided they take a
smell of it, and why shouldn’t they, when you can take all those things on a
train and go to the same place?), I chugged some water and sent a quick text to
Wervs to tell her I had made it.
Having no checked baggage let me waltz out of the airport as
soon as we landed, and I was one of the first in line awaiting the bus back
toward the city center. I stuffed a combini egg-salad-and-ham (yeah, I dunno
either, Japan) sandwich into my face because in the mad dash I had had no time
for such trivial things as dinner. From there, Wervs met me and we took the bus
back to her apartment, where I plopped down onto her couch and passed out into
oblivion.
So you would think that at this point, we were done. Wervs
had it under control from here. Yeah, we thought that too.
We had reserved tickets on the 10am Toppy speed boat to
Yakushima. We figured if we left around 9, that should give us plenty of time
to get to the port and sort it all out and settle into our seats before the
boat sailed. It was all going to be perfect: our hostel was right next to the
port on the island, and we could rent a car just meters from the dock. It was
all going to be just. perfect.
So we got out of the house at 9, and we got the 9:10 bus
toward the city and the port, and by 9:45 Wervs was getting antsy, but I was
old hat at this game by now, and I, without knowing exactly what bus stop we
wanted, or exactly how far that bus
stop was from our current location, or thereafter exactly how far it was from
bus stop to port, was convinced that we would make it. We would make it or…
well, we would make it. The bus stop appeared. 9:50. Time to start jogging
again.
Wervs said, “there’s always one in a few hours.. and it only
takes an hour longer on the water..” I began to jog. “I can’t run!” she
insisted, her hiking boots hindering her. I didn’t know what to say to that. I
might have said “I’m sorry,” I might have said “I know,” but whatever I said, I
kept running, sure that if even just one of us made it to the counter by the
water, they would hold the boat long enough for both of us to climb aboard.
I kept glancing at my watch and what I saw there was
encouraging. It was only 9:55 and the port was in sight. We would make it to
the island in time to spend more than just the night there, today.
At the counter, Wervs presented the paper she’d printed out
regarding our reservation. The woman began asking if we’d already paid for the
tickets, and we explained we hadn’t, and wanted to pay her now.
If you didn’t pay for
them, she explained, they don’t
exist. She pointed to a line of kanji-ridden Japanese that must have
spelled out what she said next. You have
to pay within 4 days of making the reservation, or it gets canceled
automatically.
We glanced at each other, then turned back to her. “Okay,
that’s fine. Let’s buy new tickets.”
I’m afraid the 10am
boat is sold out.
Naturally. Another exchanged glance. “So we’ll be on the 1pm?”
That one is also sold
out.
A breath. The 3:15 would get us to the island around
sundown, just in time to not do anything outside or see anything interesting.
But what else could we do?
The next available
opening is the 3:15, she pointed out on the schedule, would you like a reservation there?
We readied our cash. Since we’d been getting round-trip
tickets, and our returning boat reservation had also been canceled, we had to
settle for the only open boat coming back on Monday, the 7am. If anyone cancels for the 1pm, we will
notify you and you can take those seats, she offered helpfully.
“That would be so great!” I enthused, shrugging some of the
run-to-the-port sweat off my brow.
We shouldered our shit and began to back away from the
counter, but just then she called out to us again. Apparently, something was
changing.
There is another
possibility, it seemed like breaking news, there are two spots.. they are very narrow and uncomfortable. But
these were the faces of two young women who did not give a crap about that, at
this point. All we wanted was to be on that boat. Let me perch atop my baggage
in the aisle for all I care.
In the spot where they write the seat number on the ticket,
she wrote something like “ho 2” and “ho 1” on ours, and an attendant jogged
(yes jogged) us out to the dock to catch the boat as it was just about to
leave.
The cabin attendant led us to our seats. One was the jumpseat in front
of the back door on the first floor; the other was the jumpseat in the back of
the second floor. They were pretty
uncomfortable, but I just couldn’t believe our good luck that there were
exactly two such fold-out fake chairs on the boat, and someone thought to let
us use them. I wondered again if this was what it felt like to be on The
Amazing Race.
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| Add Wervs has a brighter, more open jumpseat; mine was wedged behind the last row of chairs on the first level. |
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| From Kagoshima by the Skin |
By 12:45 we were on the island. But… Yakushima has two major
port cities (I say that like they are major port cities.. they are the two
ports on the island, and perhaps the two largest cities there). One is
Miyanoura, location of our hostel and biggest little city on the place. The
other is Anbo.
There was, however, an Orix up the road from the port, so we
began to walk. We passed a small rent-a-car company and paused, considering it,
watching the old dude in charge set groups up with little k-cars. We thought
maybe the other place might be cheaper, so we began to haul our stuff in that
direction. As soon as we came to anything even remotely like a hill, and my
phone told us we still had a five minute walk ahead of us, I stopped to
question the wisdom of this venture.
“If we rent from here, we can return it right here, next to
the port we’re leaving from Monday morning,” I reasoned, “so even if it’s a few
bucks more, I don’t mind paying for that kind of convenience.” Not after all
we’d been through.
So we went back. But now, most of the cars were gone from
the lot. We watched as a group of five dudes too the last white-plate in
visible range. The old guy looked us over, a bit wary. “So you got a Japanese
license?” he asked. I proudly threw it on the counter, and was rewarded with a
“subarashii!”
I pointed out the 48-hour rental rate and asked if that was
what we’d get for a k-car. He said, we
have no cars left. This was no problem.. we could just go to Orix, although
I was a little pissed that by wasting time, we’d let the nearest-to-Anbo-port
car rental get away. But before I could regroup, he went on, so we’ll give you a discount! He then
yelled to a younger guy walking around the tiny car lot, hey, clean up that car, would you? And thus we were given the
company crap car, and at a discounted rate.
At this point, we were so happy to be in the island, and
free. We drove to Miyanoura and checked in, then spent the rest of the daylight
hours exploring via the one main road that rings the island, about a three-hour
drive around, although we also made some stops. We stopped at a few overlooks,
a couple beaches, and some waterfalls, and enjoyed the winding forest path
portion of this “main” road.
When we got back to the hostel, the dude there assured us
that the hike to Jomon-Sugi (the like 7000 year old tree) was indeed possible,
if we woke up at about 5 and got our early. We didn’t even have to discuss
that: not bloodly likely; we were going to take it easy (at this point that meant sleeping the hell in), because we were on
vacation, dammit.
Sunday, we rolled out at our leisure to explore the hiking
trails of Shiratani, famed for being an inspiration to Miyazaki’s work
Princess Mononoke.
Overall, I’m going to let the photos do most of the talking
for me after this point. The island is pretty much amazing, and my only irritations
were that, because of that, it’s pretty popular, so the trails were kind of
crowded (of course our timing has something to do with this as well). They do
take pretty good care of conservation up in there, though, and the sights were
totally breathtaking. Everything in that forest was alive. The trees were alive (even the dead ones), the rocks were alive, the moss and river and mud were all alive. I can see why the used to think of it as a forest full of gods.
At some point a guide-type guy told us that in the old days, when the rulers of Kagoshima used to get their cedar planking from Yakushima's forests, the island's forests were barred to women: only men, and I believe he said important men, were allowed in to work in the sacred space.
There are no photos of the onsen adventure on principal; I
feel bad because it was wervs’ first onsen experience, and it was the most
crowded naked space I have ever been in. I’m pretty comfy with onsen etiquette
by now, but it’s not the kind of place I would have wanted to be a first-timer.
And that's how I did Yakushima!
