May 04, 2004
Kyushu Hitching Pics
Hitching at night time was difficult. I would not want to pick up someone who looked like this, but surprisingly people almost always stopped for us regardless of the time or the place. If you get stuck out in the country at night, though, you may have to set up camp.
This is my hitching partner, Mr. Jamie Mackay of Georgia. For some unknown reason, I prefer to introduce him as "James" (no one ever calls him that) to Japanese people.
When we saw that the sun was going down in Fukuoka, we knew that it was time to hit the road. Hitching out of big cities isn't easy, but we did it.
This guy picked us up around Hakata, and drove us to Karatsu. Whenever we would bring up a city in Kyushu or southern Honshu that we had visited, he would always say "Oooh, the girls in (name of city) are beautiful." and then name off the price of how much an "oral massage" costs there. He was a nice guy, but he complained of being hard on cash. Of course you're gonna be low on funds if you skip work to play pachinko and go to Soapland every weekend!
This is Mr. Tanaka of Karatsu. He picked us up as we were walking down a road in Saga toward Nagasaki. I was able to have a really deep conversation with him, and he told me to consider him my Japanese father and then told me to tell my real father hello.
On the ferry from Taira-machi (on the southern peninsula of Nagasaki) to Nagasu (about an hour North of Kumamoto City), this girl and her mother started asking if I had a sister at Daiichi High School. I was confused because I thought they were talking about Merin at first, but it turns out that I look like her good friend's brother. It's funny because I teach her classmates through the Virtual High School program (and another one of the students was convinced that I was a member of her favorite Japanese R and B/Hip hop group "Da Pump" until I spoke in English to her).
We got stuck in a random town in Southern Saga late at night on a road with no traffic and so we had to find a low key place to camp. We settled on a small cluster of trees next to some tea fields, and started getting paranoid that we had been spotted when some cars seemed to stop right next to our tent and idle for a length of time.
There And Back
These past 5 days are stretched across my mind like a speedo straining to cover a bulging German tourist. Yes, I'm back safe from hitchhiking, and it was a great experience. However, three full days of rushing around getting picked up by kind strangers were enough for us. I will write more on this later.
Two days ago, we got back to Kumamoto, partied in the city (it was kind of cool because all of the gaijin that we saw were not our familiar locals. being incognito at home is interesting). The next day, we got back late to Aso and headed out to a music festival on the mountain. It was held at a huge clearing in the forest, and it was raining off and on. People had come from all over Japan and had set up a commune of tents, yurts, tee-pees, and other forms of mobile habitation. It was amazing seeing so many gaijin in Aso, along with Japanese hippies and little kids running around amid this strange environment full of the sounds of djembes, dijaradoos, jews harps, reggae music, and a shakuhachi (I only knew what it was thanks to Zachary Braverman's posts on the subject, and I had a feeling the old dude was good because his beautiful songs sounded like a floating/effortless/improvisational jam session).
I had a great time talking with the people at this festival. Everyone was friendly and it was easy to communicate with them in Japanese or English. The bands were pretty good too, and most of the people at the concert played at least one instrument well. This is the group of people that Taro would be partying with, if he were not married right now.
Last night was the second night that we camped over on the mountain. It had been raining the past couple of days (one of the reasons for truncating the hitchhiking trip), but last night a typhoon rolled over us. I was in my tent thinking about how great my tent was, how it had always been an extremely reliable piece of equipment, and that it only cost 2000 yen. Until last night, it performed flawlessly. However, the winds picked up, gusting across the camp ground, laying waste to our shanty town. The hippies got excited and started to pound on their drums, climaxing when the torrents poured down at their most furious. It blew my tent so hard that the support rods were slapping me in the face and feet. At times, the tent wrapped around me and I felt like I was returning to the womb. I compensated by placing my bag next to the rod that was punching me, and was able to fall asleep in the middle of a raging storm. I remember thinking that the sheets of rain that the wind was driving against my tent's rain cover was eerily similar to the turbulance portrayed in the Twilight Zone episode "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet"- you know- the one with the gremlin tearing apart the airplane wing and William Shatner! I sure do miss the old school episodes of The Twilight Zone). And then I woke up abruptly when the wind finally tore the cover off of my tent, exposing the windscreen (remember, water and wind can pass through a windscreen, but not a windshield) to the blowing downpour. The experience was similar to gunning through the hypothermic chop in a whaler when the hull smashes into a huge wave which is then blown directly into your face. SMACK! "Fuck this! I live close to here, and I want to sleep in a warm futon tonight!" was my immediate resolve. I woke up Jamie (who was still sleeping somehow), and we made a hasty retreat with some other friends back to his place, coming in from the cold. Many others decided to leave the grounds as well, and it was crazy witnessing the devistation amid the campsite. It seemed as if the fog of war had descended upon our hippie commune, and God was punishing the wicked hippies and gaijin. Most tents were clearly not made to cope with such adverse conditions and had collapsed. Only the yurt and teepees stood proudly, taking everything that the storm was throwing at them.
When we were driving back, I could not help but wonder how the other hitchhikers were faring. We were close to home, and so we just headed back to shelter when conditions got insane. Any hitchhikers caught in the middle of nowhere that might have been forced to camp will no doubt be feeling pretty wiped and soaked right about now. Traveling funk is inevitable, tolerable, and not necessarily a bad feeling, but soaked traveling funk does not sound like fun. Anyone picking up a soaked hitchhiker is indeed a kind soul, because that car packed with soggy gear and soggy gaijin is bound to smell like a wet sheep dog.