Dreaming of 'the big one'

I knew I wouldn't be the first foreigner to walk the length of Japan (Tyler MacNiven and Alan Booth being perhaps the most notable members of this club), but it seems I won't even be the first New Zealander to achieve this feat. Craig Stanton walked from Cape Sata to Cape Soya in 2008. Along the way he blogged and took some very nice photos. You can see the results here.

Speaking of nice photos, Swede Joseph Nilsen is part way through his own solo walk from Cape Sata to Cape Soya. His blog is here.

Booth was under forty when he completed his walk, and both Stanton and Nilsen are in their twenties by the look of them, so perhaps I'm in with a chance of being the oldest foreigner to walk the length of Japan.

But enough of this dreaming about "the big one"; what about my Koshu Kaido plans? Well, I've booked my accommodation for nine of the ten nights I'll be on the road between Shimo-Suwa and Tokyo. The missing link in the chain is Otsuki. I was originally thinking of taking a train to Fujiyoshida and spending the night there, but I may wing it and bed down in a ryokan or minshuku in Otsuki itself.

Distance walked since last post: 6km
Total distance walked since Koshu Kaido training began: 80.9km
Days left until departure: 78

On quitting

Larry King: Did you ever think of quitting?

George Meegan: No, because I never had the courage. To give up requires great courage. To turn back requires great courage. I think any fool could go on. Provided you have the legs to move. And I think to surrender one's dream, half finished, is a terribly difficult thing and I never quite had the authority within myself to do that.

Quoted on the back cover of The Longest Walk by George Meegan

Distance walked since last post: 21.2km
Total distance walked since Koshu Kaido training began: 74.9km
Days left until departure: 82

George Meegan

While surfing the net the other day I came across this list of people who have walked, or are in the process of walking, around the world. Coming in at number five is George Meegan.

Strictly speaking, Meegan didn't walk around the world. He does, however, hold the record for the longest unbroken walk, established when he journeyed on foot some 30,600km from Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of South America to the northern tip of Alaska. The walk took him six years and eight months, during which time he married his Japanese fiancee, Yoshiko Matsumoto, and fathered two children.

Some two decades after Meegan completed his epic walk, the elder of these two children, Ayumi Meegan, traveled to San Fransisco where she met Tyler MacNiven (who later gained fame - and half of the one-million-dollar prize money - as co-winner of season nine of The Amazing Race). MacNiven fell in love with Ayumi, and in an effort to impress her (and no doubt her father), he hatched a plan to walk the length of Japan. He completed his walk in 2004 and later made an hour-long documentary about his exploits, Kintaro Walks Japan, which can be viewed at Google Video.

Today, George Meegan shares his time between England and Japan, where he holds a position as associate professor at the Graduate School of Maritime Sciences at Kobe University. He stood as an independent candidate in the recent UK General Election, campaigning on a platform of reforming the education system, which he regards as ignoring the needs of children who don't fit into the school system.

George Meegan makes a brief appearance part way through Kintaro Walks Japan. His intensity and his enthusiasm for walking are plain to see, but he doesn't seem entirely comfortable. In an earlier interview on Larry King Live, an excerpt of which is included in Kintaro Walks Japan, he comes across as confident and media savvy, yet an article in Backpacker magazine from the late-1980s describes him as having a distaste for publicity. He appears to be something of an enigma. Perhaps not "out of his mind" (as suggested in the same Backpacker article), but definitely an eccentric.

Distance walked since last post: 6km
Total distance walked since Koshu Kaido training began: 53.7km
Days left until departure: 89

Spartan

Excerpts from one-star customer reviews of David Mamet's Spartan on Amazon:

The clever dialog turns to just plain non-sense. The plot is just jumbled weirdness. The wonderful actors talents are wasted.

The entire film was utterly painful to watch, and the dialogue seemed like it was written by a retarded monkey.

Despite the confusion and frightful lines, devoid of any humor or humanity whatever, the plot is so flimsy that the general idea emerges quite easily.

The dialogue gets so fast and furious at points that, if it weren't for the all the frequent repetitions, you'd have to be rewinding all the time to hear what was said.

Mamets lauded dialoge makes Judge Dredd look like Alexander Hamilton.

The acting is stilted and disjointed to start. The diaglog is as banal as it gets, and most of the time it doesn't even make any sense. The scenes jump from one to another with no intelligible transitions.

This is the worst movie I have ever seen. The writing was ridiculous. It gave me creepy chills it was so bad.

Single-threaded storyline (...), characters and dialog that manage to be both cliche and unrealistic, lack of development makes many of the characters interchangable.

Preposterous plotting aside, this movie was a waste in pretty much every other regard -- the acting is uniformly mannered and dull, the dialog is a hackneyed, unnecessary rehash of Mamet's trademark circular/repetitive verbiage, and the tough-guy posturing is just plain lame

To say that David Mamet is an utter thumping no-talent is to gravely insult no-talents. This movie is so bad it would be inappropriate for me to explain what is bad about it.

This has to be one of the worst movies I've ever seen in my life. The story is interesting but the dialog and acting is absolutely dreadful.

I could only handle watching about half this movie before i ejected it. Just the wooden way the dialogue was delivered by Kilmer and the unbelievability of the film was enough to drive me crazy.

The characters funtions were hard to follow, the scenario was completely unbelievable, the acting was stilted, and the writing was very poor.

I just don't understand all of the positive reviews of this movie. Val Kilmer's performance is so over-exagerrated, and so is the rest of the cast, especially the young lady who is begging to be put on the mission.

Distance walked since last post: 3km
Total distance walked since Koshu Kaido training began: 47.7km
Days left until departure: 93

The (very) short march

American dude sets off to walk across China and gives up after one day or, why I put so much effort into planning and training.

Distance walked since last post: 15.7km
Total distance walked since Koshu Kaido training began: 44.7km
Days left until departure: 96

100 days to go

I've long been of the belief that traffic cones can fly. Now I have the evidence!

Distance walked since last post: 10.3km
Total distance walked since Koshu Kaido training began: 29km
Days left until departure: 100

Walk to Waltham

The start of a new month seemed like a good time to officially start training for my Koshu Kaido walk. I had a bill to pay over in Riccarton and someone to see in Phillipstown/Waltham, so on Wednesday I decided to give my new shoes and jacket a good workout in the drizzle. Everything went well, although the body was a bit sore yesterday, probably to be expected after such a long walk with so little preparation.

Distance walked on Wednesday: 15.7km
Distance walked on Thursday: 3km
Total distance walked since Koshu Kaido training began: 18.7km
Days left until departure: 104

Post-Koshu Kaido

At just over 210km, the Koshu Kaido will be a walk in the park compared to my next big adventure.

3300km. 128 days.

I think my fate was sealed back in December 2009 when I rounded off a post about Alan Booth's The Roads to Sata with the following comment: "Writing this has made me think how interesting it would be to walk the length of Japan following the same route Booth took as a kind of experiment to see how much things have changed in the nearly 25 years since Roads to Sata was first published."

Jacket shopping

Although not on the scale of that caused by my ingrown toenail and the lingering effects of my old groin strain, the discomfort caused by my Gore-Tex rain jacket during last year's Tokaido walk was of some concern. The jacket, which I bought at Kathmandu, performed well during 2007's Nakasendo walk when we encountered a couple of day's of heavy rain caused by a passing typhoon, but that was in late-October, when temperatures were relatively cool and humidity low. In contrast, it was warm and humid when I walked the Tokaido, and although I encountered very little heavy rain (it did pour for a whole day once but luckily it was one of two scheduled rest days), I did get sick of the drizzle, mainly because my jacket didn't seem to breathe as well as it usually did and I ended up feeling quite sweaty while wearing it. I've since learnt that this is a common complaint about Gore-Tex. Apparently the humidity outside needs to be considerably less than that on the inside in order for the fabric to breathe properly, as a result of which it performs poorly in warm, humid conditions.

The thought of experiencing the same discomfort when I walk the Koshu Kaido in September (the end of summer in Japan, and also the typhoon season) prompted me to start looking for a new rain jacket a couple of weeks ago. But there was another reason. I want to save weight, and my Gore-Tex jacket is probably the heaviest item of clothing I had with me on the Nakasendo and Tokaido walks. I remember leaving to walk the Nakasendo and being quite proud of the fact that I'd kept the weight of my pack down to below 10kg (8.5kg to be precise). I probably carried about the same weight when I walked the Tokaido, but my groin problem as well as a couple of encounters with other walkers along the way, most notably Aki, got me thinking about how I could cut down on weight.

I started doing some online research. I came across a fabric called eVent, which supposedly transports moisture away from the body up to 250% faster than Gore-Tex. Unfortunately it's also hellishly expensive. Eventually I decided to go for a Marmot PreCip jacket. The fabric may not be as breathable as eVent or even Gore-Tex, but it's super light and the jacket has a couple of huge "PitZips" under the armpits which you can unzip to cool yourself down. But the best thing is I found one on special for about $100 less than the normal price. Unfortunately, it being the start of winter here, I have no way of testing it in warm, humid conditions before the Koshu Kaido walk. I have worn it a couple of times in the rain, though, and it definitely kept me dry.