‘Any idea how hitchhiking works here?’ I asked Ben.
‘Relax. You know that Japanese hippie guy who’s always playing guitar outside the library? I asked him about hitching, and he made us a sign.’ Ben pulled out a piece of cardboard covered in Japanese writing.
‘What does it say, “Fuji or bust”?’
‘No, actually he wrote out some folk music lyrics for us:
“Wherever the wind blows, so too will my feelings take me.” ‘
‘That’s touching’, I said. ‘Is it going to get us to Fuji?’
‘Sure. I think it’s some kind of subliminal Japanese message.’
‘You must be kidding.’
‘I am. Here’s the real Fuji sign. But we should still wave this one as a back-up, to show the people our spirit is in the right place. We’ll get a ride in no time.’
Only minutes later a car passed us, then reversed to stop in front of us. We grabbed our packs, happy at getting such a quick ride. Instead, the passenger window rolled down, a camera flashed at us, and the car drove away. We decided to ditch the folk lyrics.
A sequence of truck rides eventually took us to Gotemba, the town nearest to Mt Fuji. It was about 10pm, so we were still on schedule for our sunrise hike. We looked for the famous mountain silhouette and saw – nothing.
‘Hey, Bill, we’re supposed to be eight kilometres away from the biggest mountain in Japan. Shouldn’t we be able to see it from here?’
‘I’m sure it’s just blending into the clouds or something. Maybe we’ll see it once we walk past the foothills.’
We put on our jackets for the walk to town, where we stopped in a noodle shop for a late-night meal and a warm-up. We were the only patrons. Once we finished our steaming-hot bowls of thick udon noodles, the manager approached us.
‘Hello. Where you come from?’
‘America.’
‘Thank you for come to visit Gotemba. You make camping?’ He motioned at the sleeping bags hanging off our small day-packs.
‘We have come to climb Fuji-san!’ I announced. (The Japanese respectfully refer to Mt Fuji as ‘Mr Fuji’.)
‘Fssssssss…’ The manager made a special Japanese noise that is done by sucking air through clenched teeth. This usually means the speaker has some worrying news for you, but is too polite to tell you directly.
‘Fuji-san a little cold, these days.’
‘Oh, not so cold’, Ben replied. ‘I come from Colorado, in America. Many mountains there taller than Fuji-san, and colder. Cold is no problem; we are tsuyoi, tough!’ Ben pounded his chest, Tarzan-style.
‘Ahhh so, so…’ The manager didn’t look convinced. ‘When you climb Fuji-san?’
‘Ima, right now, tonight’, I said. ‘We’re doing the midnight climb, you know, sunrise at the summit? Sunrise: asa-no-hi’, I added, checking my phrasebook.
He squinted his eyes and turned his head to the side, like a dog that had heard a strange noise. Then he asked, ‘How you go Fuji-san?’
Ben pointed to his sneakers, ‘Arukimasu yo! We’re walking, man.’
‘Haaaaaaa…’ he said. This is another untranslatable Japanese worry-sound. If you hear both ‘Haaaaaaa’ and ‘Fssssssss’ in the same conversation, it pretty much means you’re screwed.
‘Fuji-san… a little far…’
We waved away the manager’s worries. We figured he was just a small-town yokel who’d spent his life in a noodle shop, the kind of fool who never once made it up the mountain. We wouldn’t be so meek.
Ben and I marched out of the shop in fine spirits. Thirty minutes later, we wandered alone past empty rice fields.
‘You’re sure this is the right direction?’ Ben scanned the gloom for some sign of Mr Fuji.
I squinted at a map in the weak glow of my torch. ‘I think I see the dot of Gotemba, and Fuji is this “X” here…’
‘Hey, here comes a car. Maybe we can flag it down for directions.’ Ben waved at an oncoming sedan.
Surprisingly, given the time and our appearance, the car rolled to a halt. The passenger window lowered to reveal a familiar face.
‘Please. Come. I give ride. Okay?’ The noodle shop manager, still with a pained expression, beckoned us to hop inside.
The car turned around. At first we thought he was returning us to town. Instead, after twenty minutes of driving, we saw a dark shape looming up ahead. It was easy to tell the mountain from the clouds, because the clouds were the things dumping snow everywhere. The manager remained silent, perhaps torn between his duty to help visitors and his guilt that he was leading them to almost certain doom.
‘Yeah, that does look… a little cold.’ Ben reached for his safari hat.
After our posturing in the restaurant, we couldn’t back down from the challenge. We must be turning a bit Japanese, as we didn’t want to lose face with the manager. So once the car stopped at a Fuji trailhead, we gamely hopped out and sank into ankle-deep fresh powder. We grabbed our woefully empty packs and thanked the manager.
‘Yes, yes…’ He almost bowed his head in apology, and handed us a small paper bag. ‘Please…’ and then, with a fatalistic nod, ‘ganbatte.’ (‘Fight to the finish.’) The car turned to leave, and its headlights gradually disappeared behind a curtain of falling snow.
It was past midnight. We were thirty-five kilometres from the nearest town. We were wearing jeans and sneakers in a mountain blizzard. But we had…
‘Rice balls!’ Ben shouted with excitement, as he looked into the paper bag. ‘That manager is great. Not only did he find the mountain for us, but he gave us breakfast!’ He tossed the gift into his pack. ‘Okay, now it’s time to put those bin liners to good use.’
Balancing precariously in the snow we double-bagged our feet and scanned for the trail ahead with our weak torches, but saw only untracked snowfields leading into darkness.
‘I guess it shouldn’t be too hard’, I said. ‘We just go uphill.’
We headed off, walking between rows of pine trees on what we guessed was a path. The snow deepened. So did our worry.
‘Did you hear something, Bill?’
‘Sounded like a tree branch snapping.’
‘Do they have bears here? They should be hibernating anyway, right?’
‘No worries, I read up on this.’ My studies were finally coming in handy. I quoted from memory: ‘The last bears around Mt Fuji were captured in the Edo period of the early 1800s. They were used in bear-baiting entertainment in Tokyo courts.’
‘Thanks. Any chance you read something about hiking paths?’
A few minutes later I sank waist-deep into a snow-covered ditch. I signalled defeat. ‘There’s no way we’re going to get to the top. We can’t see three metres in front of us. We could walk right off a cliff.’
Ben agreed, and we staggered towards the trees to find shelter from the wind. There we spotted a dark shape. It was the size of, oh, two bears, side by side. A shot of adrenaline warmed my body.
‘You see that? What the hell?’ I shouted.
‘Awesome!’
‘Huh?’
‘We have shelter!’ Ben led our charge towards a small storage cabin made of plywood and anchored by ropes against the high winds. A broken window revealed its empty interior.
The cabin had no floor, so we set our sleeping bags directly onto the volcanic flank of Fuji. Snow blew steadily through the window to cover us as we shivered through the night. My teeth chattered in time with the wind-blown rope banging against the cabin, while sharp rocks jabbed me in the back.
At daybreak, we stood up, still inside our sleeping bags, and looked out the door. The sun reflected off a bright white snow-field, a plateau of drifts separating us from the steep upper slopes of Mt Fuji. We were maybe one quarter of the way to the top.
We munched on our rice balls and watched the wind whip snow across the peak far above. We looked at our bag-covered shoes, our sleeping bags torn by the volcanic rocks, and our frozen jeans.
Then we looked at each other
and came to a decision. Any fool can climb Mt Fuji, and any fool can ignore it. But it takes a special kind of fool to climb a quarter of the way up, sit in the snow for the night, and then turn around. So that’s exactly what we did.
IGNORING THE ADMIRAL
JAN MORRIS
Jan Morris, who is Anglo-Welsh and lives in Wales, wrote some forty books before declaring that Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (2001) would be her last. Since then The World (2003), a retrospective collection of her work, has been published and she is now working on a long addendum to her allegorical novel Last Letters from Hav (1985), provisionally entitled Hav of the Myrmidons.
Devoted as I am to the ethos of Lonely Planet, I was never a backpacker. ‘The British Navy always travels first class’, Admiral of the Fleet Lord ‘Jacky’ Fisher used to say as he checked into yet another fashionable spa, and I was similarly conditioned during my adolescent years as an officer with the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers of the British Army. At the end of World War II, when we were not getting messy in our dirty old tanks, we were making sure that we ate at the best restaurants and stayed at the poshest hotels.
Nowhere did we honour Lord Fisher’s axiom more loyally than in Venice, where we happily made the most of our status as members of a victorious occupying army. Many of the best hotels became our officers’ clubs, while the most expensive restaurants were pleased to accept our vastly inflated currency (which we had very likely acquired by selling cigarettes on the black market). And in particular, since all the city’s motorboats had been requisitioned by the military, we rode up and down the Grand Canal, under the Rialto Bridge, over to the Lido, like so many lucky young princes.
That was half a century ago, and I have been back to Venice at least a hundred times since. I have never forgotten Fisher’s dictum (although he died, I must tell you, five years before I was born), and until last year I had never once in my life so far neglected it as to take a vaporetto, a public water-bus, from the railway station into the centre of the city. There no longer being commandeered motorboats available, I had invariably summoned one of the comfortably insulated and impeccably varnished water-taxis which, for a notoriously extravagant fee, would whisk me without hassle to the quayside of my hotel.
My partner, Elizabeth, had not been subjected to the same influences of adolescence. She spent her wartime years as a rating in the women’s naval service, decoding signals in an underground war room, subsisting on baked beans and vile sweet tea from the canteen. But she had been to Venice with me dozens of times, and I thought that by now I had initiated her into my own Fisherian style of travel. However, last time we were there she proved unexpectedly recidivist. ‘Oh, Jan’, she said as I hastened her towards the line of waiting taxis, ignoring the throbbing vaporetto at its pier. ‘Why must you always be so extravagant? What’s wrong with the vaporetto? Everyone else goes on it. It’s a fraction of the price. What’s the hurry anyway? What are you proving? We’re not made of money, you know. What’s the point?’
‘The British Navy always –’ I began, but she interrupted me with an aphorism of her own. ‘Waste not, want not’, she primly retorted. Ah well, said I to myself, and to Lord Fisher too, anything for a quiet life. Humping our bags in the gathering dusk, tripping over ourselves, fumbling for the right change, dropping things all over the place, with our tickets between our teeth, we stumbled up the gangplank onto the already jam-packed deck.
There we stood for what felt like three or four days, edging into eternity, while the vessel pounded its way through the darkness up the Grand Canal, stopping at every available jetty with deafening engine-reversals, throwing us about with judderings, clangings and bumps, while we stood cheek-by-jowl with ten thousand others on the cold and windy poop. When at last we debouched on the quayside below San Marco, looking as though we were stepping onto Omaha Beach, Elizabeth turned to me with an air of satisfaction. ‘There you are, you see. That wasn’t so bad, was it? Think of the money we saved! After all these years, I bet you’ll never take one of those exorbitant taxis again. A penny saved is a penny gained.’
But she spoke this meaningless maxim too late. Pride, I nearly told her, comes before a fall. Standing there upon the quayside slung about with bags and surrounded by suitcases, I had already discovered that during our ride on the vaporetto somebody had stolen the wallet that contained all our worldly wealth, not to mention all our credit cards. Off we trudged to the police station to report the loss, and as we sat in the dim light among a melancholy little assembly of unfortunates and ne’er-do-wells, how I regretted ignoring the Admiral! I bet Elizabeth did too, although she was too proud to admit it.
I didn’t actually say ‘Penny wise, pound foolish’. I didn’t even murmur under my breath the bit about travelling first class. Never hit a woman when she’s down, I told myself. Virtue is its own reward – and as it happened, it was rewarded. We never got that wallet back, but the carabinieri were terribly solicitous, and said how sorry they were, and assured us that no Venetian could have done such a thing – it must have been one of those Albanians – and sent us off feeling perfectly comforted and a little bit sorry for them, actually, so palpable was their sense of civic shame.
Half an hour later, feeling emotionally and physically drained, we turned up on the doorstep of Harry’s Bar, a hostelry I have frequented ever since those glory days of victory, when I was young and easy, as the poet said, and Time let me hail and climb. With Jack Fisher beside us – he would have loved Harry’s Bar – we pushed our way through the revolving door and told our sad story to the people inside.
And lo! They gave us a free dinner (scampi and white wine, with a zabaglione afterwards) just to cheer us up. For once our truisms did not conflict. Every cloud, we agreed, as the three of us sat there in the warmth of our first-class corner, really does have a silver lining.
DUTCH TOILET
DOUG LANSKY
Doug Lansky has spent ten years travelling in over one hundred countries. He is the author of Last Trout in Venice and Up the Amazon Without a Paddle, and penned a nationally syndicated travel-humour column in North America for five years. He currently contributes to National Geographic Adventure and Esquire, and makes his home in Stockholm, Sweden, where he has not been trapped in any toilet stalls.
The most reliable, though least utilised, traveller’s oasis in any city is the library. In a foreign land, you may not be able to read the books or even get a library card, but it usually has three crucial ingredients: free high-speed Internet access, free international newspapers and free toilets. On an April morning in the town of Maastricht, Holland, I went in search of this traveller’s trinity.
There was nothing remarkable about the public library I found; no soul-moving architecture or rare-archive collection that would attract the attention of guidebook writers. It was on the small side, with a low ceiling, and like any sanctuary of literature it was warmed with those hallowed hushed whispers that you could easily mistake for prayers.
When you’ve used up several passports travelling through more than a hundred countries, had a half-naked native in the Colombian rainforest draw blood from your head with a machete in the middle of the night and been chased by an angry mob with rocks and torches after you’ve run a roadblock in the back of a pick-up truck in Ecuador, there’s a tendency to let your guard down in safe environments such as this. It’s a common problem: Robert Young Pelton, who has been called ‘the world’s most dangerous traveller’, told me he has been robbed only once – while his rental car was parked in the Vatican.
There was no armed robber in this library, no scam artist – not even a gastro-questionable morsel of street food. No, I was foiled by a toilet stall. Three stalls, actually.
The doors were locked. I waited patiently for the occupants to leave, then knocked when the situation started to become dire. All were empty. I tried the doors more forcefully, then looked for alternative entries. There was nothing to crawl under or climb over. Each stall was its own tiny room.
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br /> I kicked myself when I finally noticed the small slots in the doors where the handles should have been. Europe is the continent of the toll toilet, after all. I measured up the hole with the coins in my pocket and started inserting them. When they got jammed, I simply tried the next door. I even tried a few German coins. Nothing.
Reluctantly, I waddled out to ask the security guard on duty.
There was a simple answer. ‘There’s no handle’, the guard bellowed, as no fewer than fifty heads turned towards me. I wanted to yell out and assure them, ‘I’m not just a dopey foreigner who couldn’t find his way into the toilet’ – but of course that’s exactly what I was.
Where does one get a toilet handle in a public library? The guard pointed me towards the circulation desk. I slapped my forehead. ‘The circulation desk. Of course!’
I walked over and noticed six or so handles lying on the counter. I reached over to grab one. ‘Not so fast’, the librarian seemed to be saying in Dutch. She spun her swivel chair in my direction and levelled me with steely pupils the size of sharpened No. 2 pencil points. I stopped cold. Now what? Would I need a library card to check one out?
There was a lecture, first in Dutch, then in English. Urgent or not, permission is required before obtaining a handle and under no circumstances should one ever reach over the circulation desk. In lieu of a card, I gave my word that the handle would be returned.
I headed back to the bathroom with renewed confidence, inserted the handle into one of the doors (one that wasn’t jammed with German coins), opened it, and stepped inside. The door swung shut behind me.
The little room was pitch black. And it had just become my jail cell.
I reached over to open the door but it was locked. After feeling with my hands, I realised I needed the handle to open it. And I had left the handle in the door – on the outside.
I located something that felt like a light switch but it didn’t do anything except make a clicking sound. I groped around a little more, but I didn’t want to get too enthusiastic for fear of bumping into Palaeolithic wads of chewing gum and fossilised boogers.
By the Seat of My Pants Page 7