The walking fool

Summer holiday reading

2012-01-06T15:00:00.000+13:00

One evening in early March, when she went to the Rockefeller Library to pick up the reserve reading for Semiotics 211, she found Leonard there as well. He was leaning against the counter, speaking animatedly to the girl on duty, who was unfortunately rather cute in a busty Bettie Page way.
"Think about it, though," Leonard was saying to the girl, "Think about it from the point of view of the fly."
"O.K., I'm a fly," the girl said with a throaty laugh.
"We move in slow motion to them. They can see the swatter coming from a million miles away. The flies are like, 'Wake me when the swatter gets close.'"
Noticing Madeleine, the girl told Leonard, "Just a sec."
Madeleine held out her call order slip, and the girl took it and went off into the stacks.
"Picking up the Balzac?" Leonard said.
"Yes."
"Balzac to the rescue."
Normally, Madeleine would have had many things to say to this, many comments about Balzac to make. But her mind was a blank. She didn't even remember to smile until he'd looked away.
Bettie Page came back with Madeleine's order, sliding it toward her and immediately turning back to Leonard. He seemed different than he did in class, more exuberant, supercharged. He raised his eyebrows in a crazed, Jack Nicholson way and said, "My housefly theory is related to my theory about why time seems to go faster as you get older."
"Why's that?" the girl asked.
"It's proportional," Leonard explained. "When you're five, you've only been alive a couple thousand days. But by the time you're fifty, you've lived around twenty thousand days. So a day when you're five seems longer because it's a greater percentage of the whole."
"Yeah, sure," the girl teased, "that follows."
But Madeleine had understood. "That makes sense," she said. "I always wondered why that was."
"It's just a theory," Leonard said.
Bettie Page tapped Leonard's hand to get his attention. "Flies aren't always so fast," she said. "I've caught flies in my bare hands before."
"Especially in winter," Leonard said. "That's probably the kind of fly I'd be. One of those knucklehead winter flies."
There was no good excuse for Madeleine to hang around the reserve reading room, and so she put the Balzac into her bag and headed out.

From The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

New Year's quiz

2012-01-02T08:15:00.000+13:00

Which famous singer, who was once a maths teacher, walked across Japan in the early 1980s?

Living in the material world

2011-12-28T14:35:00.002+13:00

From the Wikipedia article on George Harrison:

In a complaint later brought on behalf of Harrison's estate, it was alleged that while under the care of Staten Island University Hospital [where he was undergoing radiotherapy for lung cancer], Dr Gilbert Lederman, a radiation oncologist, repeatedly revealed Harrison's confidential medical information during television interviews and forced him to autograph a guitar. The complaint alleged that Lederman and his family came to visit Harrison and began singing, and that, in laboured breaths, Harrison said, "Please stop talking." Later, Lederman allegedly had his son play the guitar for Harrison. The complaint alleged that after the performance, Lederman asked Harrison for an autograph on the guitar, and that Harrison responded, "I do not even know if I know how to sign my name any more." Lederman then allegedly took Harrison's hand and guided his hand along to spell his name while encouraging him by saying, "Come on, George. You can do this. G-E-O...". The suit was ultimately settled out of court under the condition that the guitar be "disposed of".

Te Araroa revisited

2011-12-03T13:58:00.001+13:00

Back in August 2007 (yes, this blog really has been going that long) I wrote about Te Araroa, the proposed walking track running the length of New Zealand. I mentioned that it was due to open in 2008.

Well, today, some three years behind schedule, it was officially opened. In this story on the Radio New Zealand website, the chief executive of Te Araroa Trust, Geoff Chapple, who conceived the idea of the track, is quoted as saying he'd like to see all New Zealanders make it their goal to walk it.

"I remember Mao Zedong saying every Chinese has to see the Great Wall at some time," he says. "Cultural goals are fun...so we'll put it up as a goal: walk New Zealand in your lifetime."

The official Te Araroa website is here.

Road Cone Exhibition

2011-11-26T14:49:00.001+13:00

The other day I took my camera into central Christchurch for the first time since the earthquake in February. My main aim was to take some photos of the Road Cone Exhibition for Erik, but I also took a couple of photos of buildings inside the "red zone".

This is Clarendon Tower, which is awaiting demolition.

And this is Rydges Hotel, which is currently inaccessible but due to reopen in 2012. In the foreground is the plinth that once supported the Scott Statue, which toppled and was damaged in the earthquake. There's a picture of what's left of the statue here.

So, on to the exhibition, which featured over 40 cone sculptures by Certificate in Design students at the Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology (CPIT). The venue was under a large tree in the Botanic Gardens.

Below are just a few of the many fine pieces on display.

Jazz musician plays burning piano

2011-08-27T13:42:00.005+12:00

#1

2011-08-02T13:32:00.004+12:00

All my life I've dreamed of being the best in the world at something. Now I've done it! I have just been informed that this page on my blog ranks #1 on Google for searches for the phrase "Amtrak bagel" (without the quotation marks). This is proof that you can achieve anything if you really put your mind to it. I would like to thank my parents, without whom this would not have been possible. And god.

Order tracking

2011-07-28T11:11:00.003+12:00

Order No. XXX-831-4257162061 placed 23 Jul 2011 (02:48:31) on BookDepository.com
Order status: Processing

"1q84"
by (author) Haruki Murakami
Qty: 1
$22.88
(Save $7.62)

Item status: Awaiting publication

1Q84

2011-07-22T13:37:00.003+12:00

The opening paragraph of the long-awaited English translation of Murakami Haruki's latest novel, 1Q84 (due out on 25 October 2011):

The taxi’s radio was tuned to a classical FM broadcast. Janáček’s Sinfonietta—probably not the ideal music to hear in a taxi caught in traffic. The middle-aged driver didn’t seem to be listening very closely, either. With his mouth clamped shut, he stared straight ahead at the endless line of cars stretching out on the elevated expressway, like a veteran fisherman standing in the bow of his boat, reading the ominous confluence of two currents. Aomame settled into the broad back seat, closed her eyes, and listened to the music.

Patong Beach

2011-06-27T16:22:00.002+12:00

Patong Beach on the Thai resort island of Phuket certainly has its fair share of sleazy bars. If I had a hundred baht for every fat foreign bloke in a wife-beater I saw sitting on a bar stool with one hand glued to a bottle of Singha beer, the other hand glued to the thigh of the young Thai lass on the stool next to him, and his eyes glued to the footie playing on the bar's flat screen TV, well, I'd be several hundred baht richer. And this is in the middle of the day. Heaven knows what it's like at night.

Actually, I probably would have spent the money shopping. Or on a tuk-tuk back to the hotel. That's another thing Patong Beach is famous for. The shopping. They sell everything from T-shirts and hats to DVDs and sunglasses. At first I didn't realise you had to barter. So I probably spent way too much on stuff to begin with. But I soon got the hang of it, and ended up getting a real good deal on some of those Bay-Ran sunglasses. Just like the ones Michael J. Fox wore in that movie Big Lights Bright City.

That was a great movie, by the way, except I didn't really understand the bit at the end where the Michael J. Fox character swaps his Bay-Rans for a loaf of bread. I mean Bay-Rans are worth a lot more than a loaf of bread. Even second hand ones. Maybe it was just to emphasise how much of a loser he was. He sure couldn't barter.

Kunzru on Herzog and Haneke

2011-05-26T15:48:00.004+12:00

In two separate pieces for the Guardian (one a couple of years old), one of my favourite novelists, Hari Kunzru, assesses the films of two of my favourite directors: Werner Herzog and Michael Haneke. Enjoy!

Apropos of nothing

2011-05-19T16:29:00.002+12:00

The other day I was hurtling down Curletts Road at close to the speed limit of 100km/h on my way back from the airport, near the Canterbury A&P showgrounds where the 350 campervans hired by the government as emergency accommodation after the February earthquake at a cost of $1.5 million sit empty, when a man, barefoot and naked apart from a flimsy pair of blue shorts, darted out onto the road a few hundred metres in front of me like some startled wild animal. At first I thought he must have been fleeing something, but as he crossed the road and turned and ran past me on the grass verge between the road and a row of tall trees I realized he was simply going for a run.

My mind went back to the incredibly warm Northern Hemisphere spring day in June 2001 (hard to believe it's nearly ten years ago) when Erik and his then partner drove Mrs Fool and me from Erik's apartment in Jersey City where we were staying to West Point, where I ate catfish for the first time in my life and marvelled at the might and sheer beauty of the Hudson River, and then on to Woodbury Common, where I bought a Brooks Brothers shirt. Anyway, along the way - I believe we were on the New Jersey Turnpike - we saw a deer wandering along the strip of grass separating the lanes of traffic going one way from the lanes going the other. I forget his exact words, but Erik said something including the expression "roadkill" that left me in no doubt as to the animal's probable fate.

The night after seeing the near-naked runner on Curletts Road I dreamed I was running effortlessly over rolling fields of grass, and I was barefoot.

By any other name

2011-04-19T09:43:00.007+12:00

Excerpt from a letter to the editor published in this morning's edition of The Press complaining about student behaviour in the wake of the Christchurch earthquake (emphasis added).

Not only were the students running down the middle of Ilam Rd against traffic, some decided to pick up and throw the orange road safety witches' hats down the road, while many strolled over the road, en masse, through traffic, making drivers stop.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

2011-04-03T15:29:00.001+12:00

Among my latest trove of purchases from the Book Depository (free shipping to most of the civilised world) is The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell. Mitchell, who featured in Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2007 (see here), lived in Japan for many years, and skimming through the synopses of his earlier novels, it's clear that his time there has had no small influence on his writing, with at least two boasting Japanese settings and/or Japanese characters. Mitchell also has a Japanese partner, whose first name just happens to be the same as Mrs Fool's.

Anyway, I'm nearly half way through The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. It's set during the Edo period on the island of Dejima (which I'm sure you all remember from this post about the Nagasaki Kaido). The eponymous hero is a clerk with the Dutch East India Company. This morning I came across the following passage. Jacob is riding out a typhoon in the company of the intriguing Dr Lucas Marinus, physician and botanist.

Each time Jacob is certain the wind cannot rampage more maniacally without the roof tearing free; the wind does, but the roof doesn't, not yet. Joists and beams strain and clunk and shudder like a windmill rattling at full kilter. A terrifying night, Jacob thinks, yet even terror can pale into monotony. Eelattu darns a sock whilst the doctor reminisces about his journey to Edo with the late Chief Hemmij and Head Clerk van Cleef. 'They bemoaned the lack of buildings to compare to St Peter's or Notre Dame; but the genius of the Japanese race is manifest in its roads. The Tokaido Highway runs from Osaka to Edo - from the Empire's belly to the head, if you will - and knows of no equal, I assert, anywhere on Earth, in either modernity or antiquity. The road is a city, fifteen feet in width, but three hundred well-drained, well-maintained and well-ordered German miles in length, served by fifty-three way stations where travellers can hire porters, change horses and rest or carouse for the night. And the simplest, most commonsensical joy of all? All traffic proceeds on the left-hand side, so the numerous collisions, seizures and stand-offs that so clog Europe's arteries are here unknown. On less populated stretches of the road, I unnerved our inspectors by slipping out of my palanquin and botanising along the verges. I found more than thirty new species for my Flora Japonica, missed by Thurnberg and Kaempfer. And then, at the end, is Edo.'

Sad toys

2011-03-29T20:58:00.003+13:00

The final straw?

2011-03-16T13:35:00.003+13:00

Just as Mrs Fool and I were starting to come to terms with the natural disasters here and in Mrs Fool's homeland of Japan, another shock. Last night I went down to buy some fish and chips, only to discover that our local shop had put up its prices! No warning at all. Where is "moon man" Ken Ring when you need him?

The novel

2011-03-11T14:14:00.003+13:00

As those of you who frequent my brother's blog may have read, I'm writing my first novel. When I mention this to people, they're usually very interested at first and ask what it's about, but when I tell them their eyes glaze over and the conversation quickly moves on to other topics. So instead of giving you a synopsis I've decided to take a leaf out of Hari Kunzru's book and post a few photos.

Earthquake!

2011-02-24T14:20:00.004+13:00

This morning someone from the council came along and placed these shiny new cones around a pile of silt in the middle of the road by our house. The silt is the result of soil liquefaction from Tuesday's earthquake.

Welcome to Australia

2011-01-30T16:37:00.000+13:00

The Tomasz Stanko concert was on the Friday night, so I'd originally planned to stay in Sydney on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, but Mrs Fool, ever sentient of the opportunity to save a few dollars, found that the hotel tariffs were cheaper on weekdays than Saturdays, so we decided to fly into Sydney on the Wednesday. This was Australia Day, but we saw no reason why this should affect us, especially as we wouldn't be arriving till the evening.

In fact there were advantages to arriving on a public holiday. For a start, the streets were relatively free of traffic, making the taxi journey from the airport to our hotel a swift one. We checked in and went out for a walk, intending to buy some food at a supermarket or convenience store on the way back to eat in our room. It had been a scorcher of a day (the hottest Australia Day in decades, apparently), and the temperature was till in the 30s. Along the way we passed a cheap pasta and pizza place with outside seating facing the street and decided to try it out. The pizza and Greek salad were surprisingly good.

The restaurant was near Darling Harbour, and as we were eating we watched people walking by on their way to view the fireworks display later that evening. A surprising number had Australian flags draped over their shoulders, wore Australian flag T-shirts, or had Australian flags painted on their faces or bodies. I said to Mrs Fool I thought there was something childish about such displays of nationalism. In truth, I find them rather disquieting. Mrs Fool agreed with me, mainly because Haruki Murakami had expressed similar sentiments in a book she had just read (written after Murakami visited Australia during the Sydney Olympics). Mrs Fool then ventured an opinion of her own, expressing surprise at the number of Asian people with Australian flags painted on the faces. I countered by saying that nationalism was about nationality, not about ethnicity, but deep down I knew she had a point. One only needs to think back to the ugly scenes in Manly on Australia Day in 2009, when a mob of up to 100 drunken youths verbally and physically attacked non-white Australians, to realize how easily the celebration of national identity can become a celebration of racial or ethnic pride, something exclusionary as opposed to something inclusionary. On the television news that night, much was made of the fact that arrests in 2011 were down 20% on the previous Australia Day, with only 180 boozy revellers nabbed by police in the entire state of New South Wales.

The following day we shopped (can you call it that even if you don't buy anything?) and in the evening caught the bus to Leichhardt, where we'd booked a table at Elio's, an Italian restaurant we went to several years ago and liked. The meal was OK (and I learnt what a spatchcock is), but negotiating Sydney's bus system during the evening rush hour to get there took some of the gloss off the evening. On the way back, the bus driver (a Sikh) had to swerve and brake to avoid ploughing into a car door, whose owner had chosen the moment the bus driver was pulling out from a bus stop to open it. This was dramatic enough, but the interaction that followed was even more startling. The bus driver, who had brought his vehicle to a stop, opened his door and shouted something at the female driver of the car. (She was plainly at fault; not only was she parked in a bus lane, but she hadn't looked behind her before opening her car door.) She responded by striding over and yelling at the top of her voice, "Don't drive so bloody fast. This is Australia." The subtext was obvious.

The next day we spent the morning looking around the Museum of Contemporary Art and the early afternoon exploring The Rocks. For dinner we went to Medusa, a lovely Greek restaurant not far from Darling Harbour. We had the most delicious entrée of grilled octopus. As we tucked into the tentacled treats, we mused on how the Japanese and the Greeks both share a passion for munching on these multi-limbed molluscs. For a main I had the vegetarian Moussaka, which was so satisfying I had no room for any baklava, a pity seeing as it's possibly my favourite sweet thing on the face of the earth.

And then it was off to see the Tomaz Stanko Quintet at the City Recital Hall. Once again, Stanko delivered. Mrs Fool said it was the best jazz concert she had ever been to. For me the concert didn't quite live up to the experience of seeing Stanko's quartet in 2009, but I put that down to the fact that this time my expectations were so high. It was interesting to see him playing with a completely different line-up. I tend to prefer purely acoustic jazz over anything with amplified instruments, but I found it difficult not to appreciate the skill and sensitivity of the young (compared to the 68-year-old Stanko) electric guitarist and electric bassist. Occasionally the quintet produced a Bitches Brew-like barrage of noise, but for the most part the music was restrained and melodic with just a touch of melancholy. Just the way I like it.

Buzzing

2011-01-25T08:48:00.005+13:00

The blogosphere is abuzz with talk of Sacha Baron Cohen playing Saddam Hussein in a movie adaptation of a novel penned by the late Iraqi dictator, but I'm still reeling from the news, first revealed to me in this article on the Guardian website about the current obsession with fact-based movies and novels (Is the concentration on reality stopping writers using the imagination for storytelling?), that Baron Cohen is playing Freddie Mercury in a biopic of the Queen front man. Due out in 2012 apparently.

Speaking of buzzing, I'm off to Sydney tomorrow to see the Tomasz Stanko Quintet. Hoping the concert's as good as the one put on by Stanko's quartet in Wellington a couple of years ago. Back on Saturday.

Fossil

2011-01-22T12:57:00.000+13:00

I spotted this can carcass by the side of the road as I was leaving Chino on day 3 of my Koshu Kaido walk. Who knows how long it had been lying there? If I'd been travelling by car or cycling I would have passed it by.

An embarassing admission

2011-01-14T15:20:00.004+13:00

Until yesterday I thought the word "teetotaller" was spelt "teatotaller", its derivation having something to do with drinking lots of tea instead of alcohol. Its exact etymology is unclear, but one possible explanation, which traces the word's origins to a meeting of the Preston Temperance Society in 1832 or 1833, is quite intriguing. To quote from Wikipedia:

The story attributes the word to Dicky Turner, a member of the society, who had a stammer, and in a speech said that nothing would do but "tee-tee-total abstinence".

Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo

2011-01-03T13:14:00.000+13:00

As I've alluded to previously, it was as a result of seeing a documentary about him (Burden of Dreams) and learning of his passion for walking that I first became interested in the German filmmaker Werner Herzog. Only later, after seeing Encounters at the End of the World at a film festival, did I become a fan of his documentaries. Since then I've watched Grizzly Man, Wheel of Time, The White Diamond, and most recently, Little Dieter Needs to Fly. Until a few weeks ago, however, I'd only seen two of his features (Rescue Dawn and The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans), neither of which I really enjoyed. So it was with some trepidation that I sat down the other day to watch one of Herzog's first features, Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), a DVD of which I borrowed from a friend.

The opening sequence alone, shot near Machu Picchu on the side of a mountain with a sheer vertical drop of 600 metres, is, as they say, well worth the price of admission. And Klaus Kinski is anything but dull. Some of the other cast members, however, are not so convincing, perhaps understandably so given they're not professional actors. This amateurishness extends to other aspects of the production. But then Aguirre, the Wrath of God was shot on a budget of just US$370,000, a third of which went to Kinski (apparently he demanded another US$1 million to come into the studio to dub his own dialogue, forcing Herzog to hire another actor to do his dialogue instead). Amazingly, it was all shot on a single 35-mm camera, which, according to Herzog, he stole from what is now the Munich Film School.

A decade after the release of Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Herzog returned to the jungles of Peru to make another feature, Fitzcarraldo, this time with a budget of US$6 million and a number of famous actors. But to say things didn't quite go to plan would be a gross understatement. Both Jason Robards, who was cast in the title role of an obsessed opera fan who dreams of building an opera house in the Amazonian jungle, and Mick Jagger, who was cast as Fitzcarraldo's "retarded actor sidekick", had to pull out midway through filming, Robards due to illness (his doctor in the United States forbade him to return) and Jagger due to Rolling Stones touring commitments. Herzog himself briefly considered playing the part of Fitzcarraldo, but in the end he called on his old "friend", Klaus Kinski.

Central to the story of Fitzcarraldo is the transportation of a 340-ton ship over a mountain between two rivers. Herzog insisted on shooting this part of the film on location using a real ship and old-fashioned technology (pulleys and cables), and the problems this created helped establish his reputation as a megalomaniacal film director with little regard for the safety of his cast and crew. Herzog emphatically denies that anyone was ever at risk while the ship was being pulled over the mountain. And contrary to popular belief, no one was killed on the film set, although one extra drowned after stealing a boat and capsizing it on a river.

In Herzog on Herzog, Herzog explains the decision to use a real boat as follows:

I want to take cinema audiences back to the earliest days, like when the Lumiere brothers screened their film of a train pulling into a station. Reports say that the audience fled in panic because they believed the train would run them over. I cannot confirm this, maybe it is a legend, but I do very much like this story...

...Nowadays even six-year-olds know when something is a special effect and even how the shot is done. I remember when the film was shown in Germany there was shouting from the audiences at the moment when the boat was hoisted up on to the mountain. Little by little they realized that this was no trick.

Cones of the Koshu Kaido

2010-12-20T12:45:00.008+13:00

I originally put together this little collection of traffic cone photos from my Koshu Kaido walk for my erstwhile walking partner and traffic cone artist extraordinaire Erik. But I may as well share them with you all. Enjoy!

The all time best running coach

2010-12-13T16:32:00.001+13:00

"Give me a hundred kids and I can give you an Olympic champion."

So said New Zealander Arthur Lydiard, once hailed by Runner's World as the "all time best running coach". At the 1960 Olympics in Rome, three Lydiard-coached runners (all of them "ordinary runners", according to Lydiard) won medals. One of these runners, Murray Halberg, hadn't been able to use his left arm since suffering a serious rugby injury as a youth. Halberg won gold in the 5000m. Peter Snell won gold in the 800m at Rome (and golds in the 800m and 1500m at the Tokyo Olympics in 1964). Barry Magee won bronze in the Marathon at Rome.

Lydiard's training philosophy, radical at the time but later emulated by coaches around the world, involved building stamina and endurance in his athletes by having them run 160km a week regardless of their specialist distance. On top of this base training he added phases of specialized training to ensure his athletes were at the peak of readiness for major events like the Olympics.

In the late-1960s Lydiard moved to Finland where he sparked a renaissance in Finnish distance running. But his influence continued to be felt in New Zealand, where the great middle-distance runners of the 1970s, Rod Dixon, John Walker and Dick Quax, benefited from his training legacy.

Lydiard is also credited with sparking the jogging boom of the 1960s and 70s by encouraging people to run to stay fit. Prior to this, "fun runs" and mass-start marathons were non-existent. Marathons were the preserve of a special breed of athlete, "nut-cases," Lydiard called them.

A feature of the mass-start marathons of today is the presence of large numbers of older runners. Says Garth Gilmour in the foreword to Lydiard's Distance Training for Masters:

[T]he bulk of those huge fields have always been masters runners. Many began as keep-fit joggers who became so fit that the dormant instinct to compete and to reach for personal goals roared back into action. For people learning and succeeding to run well, it became a logical challenge to complete a 10-kilometres fun run or race, then a half-marathon and then that ultimate, a full marathon, to see how far and how fast they could go. The original intention, merely to run regularly for their health's sake, escalated into today's mass-start marathons all around the globe.

A plodder

2010-12-12T15:31:00.003+13:00

According to New Zealand film director Michael Bennett, who last year completed the New York Marathon, there are so many similarities between film-making and running it's ridiculous.

"You have to be so utterly committed to both. I've got no talent as a runner. I'm only a plodder. The only thing I bring to running is commitment, focus and bloody-minded determination, and whatever talent I have as a film-maker is based around those same three things."

Yeah, that's me. A plodder.

Medium-term goal: Christchurch City 2 Surf, 27 March 2011.

Due back

2010-12-04T16:41:00.001+13:00

Christchurch City Libraries
Library name: Central Library
User ID: ***101100

Title: Distance training for masters
Author: Lydiard, Arthur, 1917-2004
Date charged: 19/11/2010
Date due: 17/12/2010

Title: Marathon runner's handbook
Author: Fordyce, Bruce, 1955-
Date charged: 19/11/2010
Date due: 17/12/2010

Rod Dixon

2010-11-19T09:13:00.005+13:00

A youthful-looking Rod Dixon popped up on the television the other day. Of the three great New Zealand middle-distance runners of the 1970s (John Walker and Dick Quax were the other two), Dixon was my favourite. Walker may have outshone him with his world record in the mile and Olympic gold in the 1500 metres, but Dixon was an extremely versatile athlete, posting world class times in everything from the 1500 metres through to the marathon.

Perhaps Dixon's greatest single achievement was winning the New York City Marathon in 1983. I remember watching this race live on television. It had what has been described as one of the most dramatic finishes the event has ever seen, with Dixon overtaking Geoff Smith of England in the final kilometre through Central Park to win by eight seconds in what was then the tenth fastest time for the marathon.

Here's a nice article about Dixon. And below is a recent video of Dixon talking about his New York City Marathon win with clips of the race. The scene at the end with Dixon raising his hands in the air while Smith collapses over the finishing line says it all.

The real-life murder case behind Any Human Heart

2010-11-14T11:48:00.003+13:00

William Boyd's Any Human Heart has been turned into a TV mini-series, and to coincide with its screening in the UK, the Scottish author has penned an article for The Guardian about one of the real-life events portrayed in the novel. Also in the excellent Books section of the Guardian website is this funny piece by New Zealand author Lloyd Jones.

Day 11: Chofu - Nihonbashi

2010-09-28T09:04:00.003+13:00

Distance covered: 23.1km
Weather: Stormy

The final day of a walk always brings mixed feelings, of anticipation of reaching the end, of euphoria at crossing the finishing line, of satisfaction at achieving a goal, of relief at the thought of not having to get up the next morning and shoulder that goddamn pack, of regret that the adventure is over, of emptiness.

I woke after a poor night's sleep. My hotel room got quite hot during the night, but I was loath to attempt adjusting the air conditioning given the age of the equipment. Breakfast was a set menu of an omelet, a slice of orange, two small wiener sausages (which I ate!), salad, soup and toast. I found a nice table by the window but had to move when a smoker arrived at the next table and lit a cigarette. I can put up with a certain amount of cigarette smoke during the day and in the evening, but first thing in the morning, and especially during breakfast, my tolerance is very low.

It was raining as I set off at 8am and proceeded down Route 20 to Sengawa, where I spotted the Kewpie Mayonnaise factory my friends from the previous evening had mentioned. It says something about the quality of the scenery between Chofu and Shinjuku that this was one of the highlights worthy of a photograph. Things got much worse. An hour or so later I found myself walking beside the raised Shuto Expressway. It remained by my side for the next eight or so kilometres, all the way to Shinjuku.

I took my only break of the morning at a 24-hour McDonalds near Sasazuka. There were a dozen or so people upstairs, most of whom were making use of the free Wi-Fi and working away on laptops. There was one couple asleep.

Shinjuku itself has some spectacular architecture, made even more spectacular by the thunder and lightening that coincided with my arrival. My route took me passed Shinjuku Park Tower (whose occupants include the Park Hyatt Hotel of Lost in Translation fame), the towering Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, and Shinjuku Station, the busiest station in the world.

My hotel was on the other side of the station just off the Koshu Kaido, so I stopped off for a quick break and to dump my pack (Mrs Fool had checked in the day before but was out when I arrived). I had lunch at a nearby restaurant and then set off, minus my rain jacket and rain pants but with my trusty umbrella in hand, on the final leg of my journey to Nihonbashi, some six kilometres away. My feet were soaking wet by this stage (after two days of walking in the rain my shoes were completely waterlogged), but I enjoyed the walk through Yotsuya and Kojimachi, and by the time I reached the grounds of the Imperial Palace the rain had stopped.

I followed the moat around to Marunouchi, cut through Tokyo station, and arrived at Nihonbashi just after 3pm. I laughed when I saw there were major roadworks going on over the bridge and cones everywhere.

After some celebratory coffee and cake at a coffee shop, I made my way back to Tokyo station and caught a train to Shinjuku.

Day 10: Hachioji - Chofu

2010-09-27T15:53:00.002+13:00

Distance covered: 22.5km
Weather: Rain

I sat by the window in the hotel's second-floor restaurant and watched people with umbrellas pass by on the street below as I breakfasted on freshly baked pastries, a hard-boiled egg and coffee. Not a great day for taking photos or admiring the scenery, I thought, but as I was already in the grip of the urban sprawl of greater Tokyo and would be restricted to busy Route 20 and the slightly less busy Route 229 for most of the day, the rain didn't turn out to be much of a hindrance.

I was in no great hurry to get under way, and it was 8.30am by the time I'd packed, put on my rain gear, checked out and hit the pavement. After about five kilometres of straight road, I made a dog leg and crossed the Tama River. Just before the river I passed a doll shop in front of which stood these two massive, very bedraggled-looking dolls. They kind of sum up how I felt at the time.

The climb over the Tappi bridge was probably the only climb of the day, and helped break up the monotony of the straight, flat roads I would be pounding for the next two days. On the opposite side of the river was a monument marking the spot of the original river crossing.

A little further on I passed a McDonald's and went in to take a break from the rain. The lovely aromas inside made me feel a bit peckish, so I ordered some hotcakes, a hash brown and a coffee. I pushed on and by lunchtime had reached Fuchu. For lunch I found a Saizeriya and had pizza. Nearby was a large shrine, and in the shrine car park I spotted this tiny car, probably the smallest car I've ever seen.

Then it was back on Route 229, which took me all the way to my goal for the day: Chofu. Although it was right by the station, I had a bit of trouble finding my hotel and ended up walking round the block a couple of times. After freshening up, I met a couple of friends from nearby Sengawa and we went out for a nice Indian meal. It was still raining as I bid my friends farewell and headed back to my hotel. I was in bed and asleep by 9pm.

Day 9: Uenohara - Hachioji

2010-09-26T16:03:00.003+13:00

Distance covered: 27km
Weather: Fine

I woke at the ridiculous hour of 4am (after 10 days my internal clock still hadn't adjusted from New Zealand time) and read for a while before dozing off again until 6am. The breakfast buffet was very strange. Gone were the mini-omelets, replaced by scrambled eggs of the strangest, watery consistency. To go with this I had grilled fish (trout, I think), chips with tomato sauce, and tinned peaches.

I left the hotel at 8am, and for the first hour or so the up/down terrain of the day before continued as I made my way along the Sagami River towards Lake Sagami. I took a break at Sagamiko station. The station was quiet when I arrived but was soon filled with hikers arriving by train from Tokyo.

Since I was about to leave the main road and head over the final big pass of my walk (Kobotoke Pass), I stopped at a convenience store to get some rice balls and pound cake to take with me for lunch. It was a Sunday, and there were quite a few cyclists on the road, some of whom stopped at the convenience store to shop. There were also a couple of bosozoku in the car park waiting for their mates. They passed me further down the road, about a dozen of them riding their bizarrely modified motorbikes at high revs but low speed, holding up the traffic behind them.

I left the main road shortly after passing through the old post town of Obara and followed a narrow road that went under the Chuo Expressway and up to the start of the walking track up to the pass. To my great relief, the track was well maintained and there were plenty of other hikers to reassure me I was heading in the right direction. The weather was also good: fine but not too hot. Still, it took me much longer to reach the top than I imagined. I got there at 12.45pm and sat on a bench to eat my onigiri and pound cake. As I was eating my lunch I watched lots of people coming and going, not only along the Koshu Kaido but along other tracks that all seemed to converge at the top of the pass. There was a good view of Hachioji and, in the distance, my final destination: Tokyo.

I began the descent and reached the bottom about half an hour later where there was a bus waiting to take day hikers to Takao station. I think I was the only hiker who didn't get on the buss. At Takao station I took a break before making my final push into Hachioji, which was a more-or-less straight run along Route 20. I reached my hotel at 4.45pm and did a load of washing before heading to a nearby Saizeriya restaurant for dinner. It was raining lightly as I made my way back to my hotel. According to the weather forecast, more rain was likely tomorrow and the day after.

Day 8: Otsuki - Uenohara

2010-09-25T10:05:00.004+12:00

Distance covered: 21.3km
Weather: Cloudy then fine

It was raining when I peeked out my hotel room window at 5am, but by the time I got up at 6am the rain had stopped. I breakfasted from 7am (as at the other Route Inn hotel I'd stayed in at Nirasaki, the bread selection was poor and I went Japanese-style: squid rings, mini-omelets, salad, fruit, rice and miso soup). I then packed a few essentials in my bum bag and donned my rain jacket (it was the coolest morning so far) before walking to the station to catch the train back to Otsuki. The departure information board showed a train bound for Otsuki and Fujinomiya departing at 8.06am, but thinking I was at Otsuki instead of Uenohara I didn't get on. I had to wait for the next train to Otsuki, which didn't leave until 8.26am.

I reached Otsuki at 8.45am and rejoined the Koshu Kaido. A few kilometres down the road I came to the Sarubashi, or Monkey Bridge, which officially ranks as one of Japan's "three most unusual bridges". The present bridge is a 1984 replica of the original, which was probably built in the early 7th century. The unusual design is a result of the support mechanism necessitated by the inability to use columns given the distance (31 metres) between the bridge and the river below.

A Hiroshige print showing Sarubashi

I followed Route 20 to Torisawa, where I bought some hot chips at a convenience store before leaving the busy main road. For the rest of the day I was walking on much quieter roads which, after an initial steep climb, took me through pleasant, rolling countryside including the old post towns of Inume and Nodajiri.

A couple of times I crossed the Chuo Expressway, one of the two main highways connecting Tokyo and Nagoya. After the second of these crossings I spotted a large "service area" - a covered mall-like complex containing souvenir shops and restaurants for people traveling on the expressway - and decided to have lunch there. However, eating at one of the restaurants required queuing to buy a ticket, so I bought some bread at a bakery and ate outside instead. It felt strange rubbing shoulders with all the city folk with their fine clothes and lap dogs. Sweaty and wearing casual walking gear, I felt even more out of place than usual.

View of the service area where I had lunch (behind the trees on the
right) and the Kanto plain (through the gap in the hills on the horizon)

By now the cloud had mostly disappeared and it was fine and warm. I left the service area and continued on to Uenohara, arriving at around 3.30pm. For dinner I bought some cold soba noodles, sushi, and a purin at a convenience store and ate in my room.

Day 7: Tsuruse - Otsuki

2010-09-24T11:54:00.005+12:00

Distance covered: 27km
Weather: Cloudy

As I was checking out of my hotel in Kofu, the receptionist glanced at my pack and asked, "Are you going mountain climbing?"
"No, just walking," I said.
In fact I knew little about what lay in store for me on the road ahead, only that it was the most difficult stage of the Koshu Kaido and included a 1100m high pass.

From the hotel I walked to Kofu station and caught the 7.38am train back to Kai-Yamoto. By 8.30am I had rejoined the Koshu Kaido at the point where I'd left it the day before. Rain was forecast, but it was cloudy and mild as I started the climb up to Sasago Pass, ideal conditions for walking. The narrow road passed underneath the Chuo Expressway and wound its way up to the old post town of Komakai, now a sleepy little farming village. I caught my breath and had a few slugs of water before continuing on. After negotiating a series of hairpin turns I left the road and joined a walking track. At this point there was a basket containing a selection of walking poles fashioned from branches, indicating that the worst of the climb was still to come.

The track followed a stream, which I had to traverse several times, either by crossing narrow, rickety bridges or jumping across with the aid of stepping stones. As I continued to climb, the track became narrower and less defined. After one fording I was unable to work out where it started again on the other side. I eventually found it again twenty or so metres upstream.

I briefly rejoined the narrow road I'd been following earlier in the morning before leaving it again as it disappeared into a tunnel. According to my map, the top of the pass was less than a hundred metres ahead. I carried on, and although judging distance traveled is difficult when the route is steep, I was sure I'd gone further than 100 metres. I spotted a T-junction ahead with a sign. Surely that must be the top, I thought. But the sign made no mention of a pass, only indicating that the route to the right went to Sasago station while the route to the left went somewhere else (I couldn't read one of the characters). The route to the right was completely overgrown, so figuring that the more well-traveled route was the correct one, I went left.

The path followed a ridge and took me up, then down, then up again. Something didn't feel right (surely I should be descending by now, I thought), so I turned around and went back to the T-junction. I looked at the sign again (one part of which had been ripped off and lay on the ground). I took out my compass and studied my map in a vain effort to work out exactly where I was. Visibility was poor due to the cloud that was now swirling all around me, and the trees swayed menacingly in the chilly wind. I felt incredibly lonely. I hadn't seen another human since leaving Komakai. To lift my spirits and give me a much needed energy boost I ate a few handfuls of Scrummy Mix. I set off again on the path to the left, but it still didn't feel right, so I turned around again and went back to the sign. Only after unfolding my map did I realize the Koshu Kaido actually passed Sasago station. I laughed. Obviously I should have turned right at the T-junction. But why was the path so narrow and overgrown? I followed it for a few metres until it disappeared down a steep, almost vertical slope. There was a rope tied to a tree at the top with knots every metre or so. "You've got to be joking," I said out loud.

Reluctantly, I gripped the rope and slowly eased myself down. After reaching the bottom of the slope I followed the overgrown track until it reached a clearing. There I found a well-established path and a sign: Sasago Pass! I retraced my route in my head and soon figured out where I'd gone wrong. I remembered coming to a shrine just after crossing the road after it went into the tunnel. There was a fork in the path, and without much thought I'd taken the path that passed in front of the shrine instead of the path that went off to the right. I'd inadvertently added at least a kilometre of climbing and goodness knows how much time to the day's walk.

The good news was it was downhill the rest of the way, and although I took another wrong turn shortly afterward, I was soon out of the woods and back on Route 20. At 12.45pm I passed the Sasaichi sake brewery. According to a large digital display on the side of the road the temperature was 15 degrees. Quite a change from the 35 degrees of two days ago. Attached to the brewery was a small restaurant so I stopped and had lunch of kitsune soba noodles. I then rejoined Route 20 and followed it all the way to my goal for the day, Otsuki, arriving there at around 3.30pm. Shortly before reaching Otsuki station I spotted a Gusto family restaurant and went in for a second lunch of spaghetti with shrimps and crab meat. I downed a couple of delicious espressos from the machine at the drink bar before heading to the station to catch a train to Uenohara.

After arriving at Uenohara station I had to walk a couple of kilometres to get to my hotel. It was uphill (something I hadn't gathered from checking the route on the Internet) and for the third time since leaving Kofu that morning I got lost. I finally arrived at the hotel at around 5.15pm. To make what had been a terrible day worse, the trousers I'd washed the night before were now covered in mud from the rope descent to Sasago pass. Luckily the mud was mostly below the knees, so instead of washing the whole garment I cleverly unzipped the bottoms and just washed those.

Interlude: Kura of the Koshu Kaido

2010-09-23T23:43:00.001+12:00

Below are just some of the many photographs of kura (storehouses) I took while walking from Shimo-Suwa to Tokyo. Enjoy!

Day 6: Kofu - Tsuruse

2010-09-23T14:54:00.004+12:00

Distance covered: 28.9km
Weather: Rain

Conscious that I had a long day ahead, I got up at 6am with the aim of leaving my hotel at 7am. Seeing as I was staying at the same hotel that night (I intended to catch the train back to Kofu at the end of the day's walk), I didn't even need to pack, but for some reason I was late getting away and didn't hit the road until 7.15am.

Rain was forecast but for the first couple of hours it was dry and the road flat. I'd left my pack at the hotel and had with me just by bum bag. With no room for my rain jacket and pants, I'd be relying on my folding umbrella if it did rain. After days of having at least one hand free, it felt a bit awkward carrying my water bottle in a plastic bag in one hand and the walking map in the other. Things got really awkward when it did start to rain and I had to hold the umbrella as well. I eventually thought I'd sorted everything out, but then I realized I was missing something: the map! I looked back and saw it on the road about 20m behind me. Luckily I was able to run back and pick it up before it blew away or was run over by a truck.

The vineyards of Katsunuma

I spent the entire day in the Kofu basin, which is famous as a fruit-growing region. Grapes are an especially popular crop, having been grown here for some 800 years ago. Wine production only started in 1890, although today Yamanashi is the number one wine-producing region in the country. The area around Katsunuma in particular is full of vineyards where you can stop to pick your own grapes for eating or taste the local wine. I also saw many excellent kura, including a rare three-storied one and one converted into a wine shop.

After Katsunuma the road started to climb as it approached the Sasago pass, which I'd be walking over the next day. I reached my goal of Tsuruse at 1.30pm and bought lunch at a convenience store before heading to Kai-Yamato station to catch the train back to Kofu. I had to wait 25 minutes for the next train, which to make matters worse was five minutes late (a rarity in Japan). Although the temperature was in the mid-twenties for most of the day, I felt quite cold as I waited on the station platform in the wind and rain. I just hoped the weather would be better the next day, when I'd be making my first foray into the mountains.

Day 5: Nirasaki - Kofu

2010-09-22T10:36:00.005+12:00

Distance covered: 12.6km
Weather: Fine and very hot!

Thinking that breakfast was from 7am, I went down to the hotel restaurant a few minutes before the hour to find it was full (it actually opened at 6.45am), and had to wait a few minutes to get a table. It was billed as a "Japanese and Western style" buffet, but the selection of bread and pastries on offer was so poor I went for a Japanese-style breakfast of rice, miso soup, grilled fish (trout, I think), mini omelets, deep-fried squid rings (!?), and salad. I had a small coughing fit in the middle of the meal and felt a bit nauseous for a few minutes, a reaction to the unfamiliar morning menu (at home I'm a toast and coffee man) or possibly to the heat.

I left the hotel at 8.45. My goal for the day, the city of Kofu, was just 12.6km away, so I took it easy and made sure to drink lots of water given that the temperature was forecast to hit 32 degrees. After the sunburnt head debacle of the previous day, I'd switched to my Nike cap.

The scenery grew increasingly urban as the day wore on (Kofu is the capital of Yamanashi prefecture and the largest city in the area), although there were still plenty of nice old kura and other buildings and I enjoyed the views of the surrounding mountains. I even caught a glimpse of Mount Fuji in the afternoon, albeit behind a cloak of haze.

At around midday I passed the Yamanashi Prefectural Museum of Art. I knew they had a substantial Millet collection as well as some Henry Moore sculptures. But I had another reason for stopping, and that was to escape the fierce heat. As I learnt later that evening, the temperature in Kofu reached 35.7 degrees that day. In that kind of heat, any concern for sartorial elegance is abandoned as one's instinct for self-preservation kicks in. In short, I put a towel on my head.

I spent an hour or so in the air-conditioned museum checking out the Millet collection as well as a fascinating exhibition of photographs by Felix Thiollier, a pioneering French photographer whose works (including some of the very first color photographs) have only recently come to the attention of the art world.

For the last few kilometeres into Kofu I was thankful for the shade the taller buildings of the city provided. I headed for the station area and lunched on spaghetti, salad, and iced coffee before booking into my hotel at around 2.45pm. After doing some washing in the bathtub (there was no coin laundry), I visited the basement food floor of the department store just down the road and bought a small can of beer and some deep-fried squid rings and some sushi and salad for dinner. As breakfast wasn't included at my hotel, I also got some yoghurt and bread for the next morning. Back in my hotel room, I checked out the weather on the TV to find rain was forecast, which sounded just fine after the scorching heat of today's leg.

Day 4: Tsutaki-juku - Nirasaki

2010-09-21T13:13:00.005+12:00

Distance covered: 28.4km
Weather: Fine

The soreness in my legs and hips from the evening before had gone by the time I got up shortly after 6am. I've probably mentioned this before, but the body's ability to recover completely overnight amazes me.

At 7am I went down and got some bread and coffee from the little buffet in the lobby and ate breakfast in my room. I then checked out and headed to the station where I caught a taxi back to the Tsutaki-juku rest area, the point where I'd left the Koshu Kaido the day before. The fare was about half of what I paid then. I guess I was charged extra for the taxi to come from Kobuchizawa to get me.

At the rest area I stocked up on water before rejoining the Koshu Kaido. The temperature was forecast to reach the thirties, and I didn't want to be caught without water again.

It was 8.30am by the time I started walking. For the first few kilometres I followed a narrow road next to Route 20 through rice-farming country. The annual rice harvest was underway, and in drained paddies next to the road farmers were busy cutting the plants and hanging them up to dry in preparation for threshing. The cutting and threshing were done by machines, but the hanging seemed to be an entirely manual operation.

At around 10.15am I reached the post town of Daigahara. I passed an old sake brewery called Shichiken and popped in with the intention of using the toilet, but on hearing that I was walking the Koshu Kaido the proprietress insisted I taste one of the local brews. She told me a bit about the history of the brewery and explained the sake-making process. The tasting room was quite new, but the main building dates back to the Edo period. The large ball seen hanging under the eaves in the photo is called a sugidama. It's made from cedar needles and traditionally lets people know not only that sake is available but the degree of maturity of the brew. The greener the ball, the younger the sake.

As usual, midday came and went without me finding a suitable restaurant for lunch, so I bought a cold salmon-and-rice dish and some deep-fried goodies at a convenience store which I washed down with an iced coffee. Shortly after getting underway again I passed this curious object on a hillside overlooking the town of Maruno.

The sign next to it mentioned a scarecrow festival, so my guess is it has something to do with that. There are some photos of the festival here.

A little further on, while crossing the Kamanashi River, a noticed two figures standing on the bridge ahead of me, one of whom looked familiar. It was the retiree from Nara I'd met the day before. He was even more surprised to see me, since he'd just been telling his new acquaintance (a farmer who'd stopped on the bridge to check out the fishing prospects in the river below) about a strange New Zealander he'd met whose hobby was walking the old highways of Edo-period Japan. The three of us had a good old chat and then the retiree and I bid the farmer farewell and headed on together into the town of Nirasaki. I never did learn his name, but he did tell me he was 62 and an avid mountain climber.

The farmer and the mountain climber

I checked into my hotel in Nirasaki just after 3pm. When I got to my room and took my sun hat off I was surprised to see two pink patches on the skin just above my temples. It didn't take me long to realize that the sun had penetrated the mesh side panels of my sun hat. The mesh provided welcome ventilation, but the designers obviously hadn't taken into account the consequences for the follicly challenged. My hands were also slightly sunburnt.

Later that afternoon I walked down to the station area of Nirasaki and found a Coco's family restaurant. As you may recall from my Nakasendo and Tokaido diaries, the Coco's seafood soup spaghetti is one of my all-time favourite Japanese family restaurant meals, and I was delighted to find it still on the menu. Unfortunately it wasn't quite up to the usual standard. I was well into my meal before I remembered Mrs Fool had asked me to take photos of the food highlights of my trip. I took some photos anyway. So here are the remains of the seafood soup spaghetti dish:

And here are the remains of dessert, a green tea fondant with ice cream and azuki beans:

Day 3: Chino - Tsutaki-juku

2010-09-20T15:25:00.005+12:00

Distance covered: 18.6km
Weather: Drizzly then fine

I got up at 5.30am and breakfasted on the rum raisin cakes, fruit yoghurt, and iced coffee I'd bought the night before. It was drizzling as I left the hotel at 8am but stopped after a few minutes. I had to walk a couple of kilometres to rejoin the Koishu Kaido, and along the way I passed the shrine where yesterday's festival had ended. I expected to see the pillars in place, but they were still lying on the ground, so I didn't feel so bad about leaving the festival early. There were some people milling around and I figured they were going to raise the pillars in the hours ahead. Unfortunately I didn't have time to wait around, so after taking a few photos I continued on to Chino station to rejoin the Koshu Kaido where I'd left it the previous day.

The logs at Tatsuya Sukura shrine ready for raising

Half an hour or so later I passed another shrine and heard shouting and band music. As luck would have it, there was another Onbashira festival in progress and they were in the middle of raising one of the pillars. It was quite a display. I watched while the pillar was raised by hand by teams of festival-goers using ropes passed around tree trunks, with three guys clinging to the top of the pillar giving occasional displays of acrobatics to the accompaniment of chanting and bursts of music from a small band.

Raising a pillar at Sakamuro shrine

All hands to the rope!

Securing the erect pillar

Another pillar ready for raising

I watched until the pillar was fully raised, then continued on my way along the Koshu Kaido, which for most of the morning followed busy Route 20. Just after passing through the post town of Kanazawa I came across this magnificent old keyaki tree marking the site of an ichirizuka, or route marker.

I was pretty hungry at this stage and running out of water, but there were no restaurants in sight. I passed another hiker going the same way as me, but since he seemed busy taking a photograph of something and I was desperate for water, I didn't stop to say hello. I little further on I spotted a vending machine down a side road and went to get a couple of bottles of water. The other hiker must have overtaken me during this pit stop, because shortly after rejoining the Koshu Kaido I saw him standing by the side of the road chatting to a couple of old women who were sitting at the entrance to a heavily wooded park.

One of the old women saw me and shouted, "Hey, you can't come here without looking at this park. It's wonderful." I went over and introduced myself. The other hiker was a retiree from Nara who spent his spare time wandering the countryside listening to all sorts of stories locals had to tell. He was collecting these stories as a kind of unofficial, unwritten history of the country. After listening in on the conversation for a while, I excused myself and went to look at the park, which according to my map was called Fujimi park. It was nothing special, but I guess if you hadn't seen many parks you might think it was wonderful.

I was eager to press on, since when I mentioned my goal for the day to the people I'd just met they thought I still had a long way to go. Soon after this I came across a stretch of the Koshu Kaido that was marked impassable on my map, which gave two alternate routes. I followed what I thought was one of these alternate routes but the path soon disappeared and I found myself in a woods wading through waist high grass. I resisted the urge to turn back and struggled on till I saw a road in front of me, which I reached by scrambling up a bank. Minutes later I was back on the Koshu Kaido after seeking directions at a scrapyard.

For the next few kilometres I followed a quiet country lane before rejoining Route 20 with about four kilometres to go. The lane was up and down but the pleasant scenery took my mind off my tiring body. I finally arrived at the Tsutaki-juku rest area at around 2pm. I still hadn't had lunch (though I'd been snacking on Scrummy Mix throughout the day), so the first thing I did was have a bowl of soba noodles with mushrooms. I then turned my attention to figuring out how to get to my hotel, which was several kilometres north in the town of Kobuchizawa. I'd intended on walking (it looked close enough on Google maps!), but when I asked a couple of local stallholders at the rest area about the road they said it was windy and uphill all the way, so I called a taxi instead. Not only was the road windy and uphill, but there were some roadworks along the way that would have made walking pretty dangerous, so I was satisfied that taking a taxi was the right decision.

I checked into my hotel at around 3pm. After relaxing and doing a bit of handwashing, I went out for dinner at a wee curry restaurant by the station where the recommended dish of the day was banana curry. It was delicious! On my way back to my hotel I bought a locally-made purin (a Japanese-style custard pudding) at a store inside the station. Unfortunately it had been in the freezer with the ice cream and was frozen solid, so I spent a few minutes back in my hotel room cupping the plastic container in the palms of my hands until it was soft enough to eat. It was still much nicer than the mass-produced purin they sell in convenience stores. I went to bed at around 9pm, my body sore but my taste buds well and truly satisfied.

Day 2: Kami-Suwa - Chino

2010-09-19T10:54:00.012+12:00

Distance covered: 6.9km
Weather: Fine

I woke feeling a lot more rested than the previous morning but with a slight tingle in my throat, usually a sign that a cold is on the way. Could it be that my downfall on this, my third major walking expedition, would be not an ingrown toenail or groin strain but a common cold?

I got up at 5.30am and an hour later went down to check out the hotel's buffet breakfast. There was a good selection of Japanese and Western fare, and I filled up on bread, pastries, fish, scrambled egg, and salad.

Having walked 5.9km the day before, I only had to cover 6.9km to reach my next destination: Chino. With plenty of time on my hands, I decided to check out nearby Takashima castle before hitting the Koshu Kaido. The castle was built in the 1590s but lay in ruins for many years before being rebuilt in 1970. It was originally known as the "floating castle" as its location on the edge of Lake Suwa made it appear to rise out of the water. However, as I mentioned yesterday, the lake level has fallen considerably since the Edo period, and the castle is now quite a distance from the lake.

After returning from my castle walk I checked out of my hotel and rejoined the Koshu Kaido at around 9.45am. I took my time, stopping frequently to take photos of some of the lovely kura (storehouses) I saw along the way. I reached Chino station at 11.45am and headed to the art gallery where I had lunch before checking out a couple of exhibitions.

Just as I was about to set off to find my hotel, I noticed a crowd of people on the main road in front of the station preparing for some kind of festival. It was in fact an Onbashira festival. I had been under the impression that there was only one Onbashira festival, the famous one held in April and May that includes the ki-otoshi ceremony (in which young men "ride" huge logs down steep slopes) and climaxes with the ceremonial erection of the logs as pillars at the lower shrine of Suwa Taisha. But in fact dozens of Onbashira festivals are held all around the area. Like the famous festival at Suwa Taisha, these smaller festivals are held just once every seven years, and involve the symbolic renewal of the shrine at the centre of the festival through the raising of four onbashira (pillars) which have been dragged to the shrine by teams of festival-goers.

Preparing for departure

I had arrived just as the teams were about to set off for the shrine, which was about a kilometre away. The organizers generously invited me to join in (actually, unlike the main Onbashira festival, anyone can take part in these local Onbashira festivals), and so shortly after 1pm I took hold of a rope attached to the first log and helped drag it down a slope and through a series of narrow streets to the shrine. In fact I found it difficult to pull the rope and take photos at the same time, so after a hundred metres or so I let go of the rope and walked beside the log the rest of the way.

Through a torii and down the first slope

Around a bend

Hitting a snag

Pushing and shoving

Nearly there

Arriving at the shrine

We arrived at the shrine (called the Tatsuya Sukura-jinja) at around 2pm, and much as I wanted to hang around for the pillar raising I was pretty hot and bothered (it was 27 degrees) and decided to head for my hotel.

I checked in at 3.10pm. Unfortunately breakfast wasn't included in my package, so after dinner at a Coco Ichibanya curry restaurant I popped into a supermarket and bought some things to eat the following morning. On the way back to my hotel I also passed a large shopping complex with a MontBell store. I had a quick look for a belt but didn't see anything that took my fancy. By 9pm I was in bed, feeling satisfied after a day that, despite the short distance covered, turned out to be very rewarding.

Day 1: Shimo-Suwa - Kami-Suwa

2010-09-18T10:54:00.004+12:00

Distance covered: 5.9km
Weather: Fine, then cloudy

I got up at 5am after a poor night's sleep and after showering and dressing I began to sort out my luggage. I'd arrived in Tokyo the previous evening with a suitcase containing my pack and the things I needed for my walk as well as some additional clothes and other items I needed for the week I'd be staying in Tokyo with Mrs Fool at the end of the walk. So I transferred all the things I wouldn't be needing on my walk into the suitcase, which I intended to leave at the hotel ready for my return to Tokyo in ten days time.

It was at this point that I realized I'd left the belt that goes with my walking trousers at home. I did have the heavy leather belt with the big buckle that goes with my jeans, but I was reluctant to take it as I'd noticed during my Nakasendo walk that the weight of my bum bag caused the prong to wear a hole in my top. I pondered my options. Duct tape might work, but I didn't have any. I had some surgical tape, but that was too thin. Neither did I have any string. I briefly considered buying a new belt, but decided that would be too extravagant. The only other option I could think of was to go beltless. In the end I concluded having a hole in my top was preferable to walking 220km with my pants around my ankles, and so I went with the leather belt.

At 6.30am I went down for breakfast of white toast and jam, shriveled croissants, and tasteless coffee. Throughout the meal, I could see a couple (him a foreigner, her a Japanese) schmoozing on the footpath across the road from the hotel, and wondered if they'd been up all night partying or were in the process of parting after a night in one of Shinjuku's love hotels.

I'd booked a seat on the train for Kami-Suwa leaving Shinjuku station at 10am, so to fill in time I walked around Shinjuku and had another coffee (a nice one this time) at Doutour. I went back to the hotel and checked out at around 8.45am and made my way slowly to the station.

The Super Azusa limited express runs on the Chuo Line, which roughly follows the path of the Koshu Kaido. The journey from Shinjuku to Kami-Suwa took two hours and nineteen minutes. I would spend ten days walking back along the same route. I amused myself on the train by among other things listening to my favourite train band, The Chills, on my iPod (a late inclusion on my gear list). I consider "Hidden Bay" ("Maybe I'm a fool, a fool, a fool / But baby you're so cool, so cool, so cool") the best pop song for listening to while riding on a train. It also has the advantage of being followed on the album Kaleidoscope World by "I Love my Leather Jacket", one of the best pop songs for listening to anywhere, anytime.

I arrived in Kami-Suwa at 12.19pm and walked the short distance to my hotel. It was too early to check in, so I dumped my pack and after buying lunch at a nearby supermarket rode a local train one stop to Shimo-Suwa, the starting point of my walk. I'd originally intended to rest today and start walking the following day, but I felt good enough to walk the 5.9km from Shimo-Suwa to Kami-Suwa. I took it easy, taking a long break to look around the lower shrine of Suwa Taisha, one of Japan's oldest shrines and the scene of the climax of the famous Onbashira festival. For the five or so kilometers from the shrine to Kami-Suwa, the Koshu Kaido clings to the hillside high above Lake Suwa, while the railway line and main road follow paths closer to the edge of the lake. This puzzled me until I learnt that the lake level is much lower today than it was in the Edo period.

It was fine and warm (around 25 degrees) when I started out, but had clouded over and was threatening to rain by the time I got back to Kami-Suwa at around 3.15pm. I checked in to my hotel, then wandered down to have a look at Lake Suwa. For dinner I chose a restaurant overlooking the lake, where I sampled a glass of what passes for white wine in nearby Nojiri, a relatively new wine-making area I passed through in 2007 while walking the Nakasendo. The food was nice though, and the staff friendly and helpful in meeting my request for a meatless meal in a restaurant I later learnt specialized in local pork.

Back in my hotel room, I watched TV before going to bed at around 9pm. I was feeling positive about the days ahead. I had no injuries, and my body felt good, with none of the stiffness I'd experienced the day before.

Notice

2010-09-16T12:37:00.003+12:00

Dear readers

Tomorrow I fly to Japan to walk the Koshu Kaido. Here is my final schedule.

Day 1: Shimo-Suwa - Chino (12.8km)
Day 2: Chino - Araki (18.6km)
Day 3: Araki - Nirasaki (28.4km)
Day 4: Nirasaki - Kofu (12.9km)
Day 5: Kofu – Tsuruse (28.9km)
Day 6: Tsuruse - Otsuki (27km)
Day 7: Otsuki - Uenohara (21.3km)
Day 8: Uenohara - Hachioji (26.7km)
Day 9: Hachioji - Chofu (22.5km)
Day 10: Chofu - Nihonbashi (23.1km)

I'll be posting a full report soon after I get back on October 4, but if you can't wait that long you can check my progress on my other blog:

http://tokaido2009.blogspot.com/

Regards
The Walking Fool

Yukon

2010-09-13T10:47:00.000+12:00

In Vancouver I had sold my first gun, never having had an occasion to use it, and I was scared of the thing anyway. On my way north this time, however, the incessant panic talk had stampeded me into buying a gross and unwieldy shotgun - a "Savage," so it said on the barrel.
To learn something more about the weapon, I took it to the local gun expert, which in this land populated with nothing but gun experts happened to be the assistant postmaster. He confirmed my worst fears: "It's factory-flawed. You've got one shot and then you might as well chuck it." We agreed that one shot would probably only enrage several hundred pounds of bear and all but guarantee for me a swift and messy exit from this life.
Fortunately, I chanced to meet a man named Leach, chairman of the Yukon Trappers Association. "I've been in the bush for getting on thirty years," he said, "and never have I seen anything I didn't want to see."
"Well, what did you carry?"
"A bell." He then added, almost defiantly, "You won't need a bloody gun!" That did it. I happily abandoned the Savage.
Beyond the small settlement of Upper Liard, I came upon a herd of horses grazing beside the road. They eyed me and my pinging bell, for they, too, wore bells, partly for the same reason. It was an odd musical confrontation as our different notes momentarily mingled on that cool spring day.

From The Longest Walk by George Meegan

Distance walked since last post: 36.2km
Total distance walked since Koshu Kaido training began: 298.9km
Days left until departure: 4

Koshu Kaido gear list

2010-09-07T14:29:00.002+12:00

Bought a new long-sleeve top (half price at Columbia), a sun hat, and a pair of hiking socks last week. So this is what I'll be taking with me when I walk the Koshu Kaido:

Osprey Aether 60 pack (Sunburst)
Yellow pack liner with outdoor survival tips
Bum bag

Marmot Precip rain jacket (Grey)
Mont Bell Gore-Tex rain pants (Black)

New Balance 967 shoes
Columbia sandals

Outdoor Research Transit sun hat (Barley)
Nike cap (Black)

Kathmandu Ecofleece long-sleeve top (Blue)
Columbia Mountain Tech T-shirt (Night Train)
Columbia Mountain Tech long-sleeve T-shirt (Flame)
North Face short-sleeve top (Light Blue)

Columbia Silver Ridge convertible pants (Fossil)
Kaepa Shorts (Navy)

Underwear (5 pairs)
Thorlos socks (3 pairs)
Small towel (White)

Olympus µ 770 SW digital camera & charger
Cellphone & charger
Shaver & charger
Timex Ironman watch

Koshu Kaido walking map
Compass
Sunglasses
Toiletries (toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, sunscreen, lip balm)
Nail clippers
First aid kit
Insect repellent
Travel umbrella

Passport
Money, credit cards
E-ticket
Diary
Pen
Book
Bear bell/shotgun

Distance walked since last post: 13.4km
Total distance walked since Koshu Kaido training began: 262.7km
Days left until departure: 10

A wake-up call

2010-08-30T14:52:00.003+12:00

On Saturday I took advantage of the fine weather and the lull in my work schedule to walk up to the Sign of the Kiwi and back, a total distance of 16.2km. It's probably over a year since I've done this climb, and while I enjoyed it on the day I woke up the next morning with very sore legs and buttocks. I managed to make it to the supermarket and back today, but I'm still feeling the effects, which is a reminder that I still have a lot of work to do over the next three weeks before I head off to walk the Koshu Kaido.

Distance walked since last post: 19.2km
Total distance walked since Koshu Kaido training began: 249.3km
Days left until departure: 18

He had seen the dream

2010-08-27T11:12:00.000+12:00

George Meegan arrived in Nicaragua on his walk across the Americas just after the Sandinistas took power in 1979. He got a frosty reception from some Nicaraguans who mistook him for a gringo, but as usual our resourceful hero managed to find a way around this.

With little traffic to watch out for, I dashed on at a good lick. A tiny Swiss flag that I had attached to my gear fluttered behind me. I had picked up the flag at L'Escargot, one of Anthony's swank restaurants in San Jose, and was displaying it on the theory that it would defuse hostility; after all, Switzerland (unlike Britain) had no imperial background to raise a revolutionary's ire. (In fact, I could claim some right to carrying it, for Mum was born in Switzerland.) The flag now drew the attention of a Sandinista toting a submachine gun, who signaled for me to pull over and addressed me forcefully. "You are not a Swiss. You are a Yankee bastard - pretending to be a Swiss."
"I'm not, I'm not," I protested strongly. "I'm an inglés bastard pretending to be Swiss." My clumsy admission apparently disarmed the chap, who motioned me with his gun to pass.

On the whole, though, the predominantly young Sandinista soldiers treated Meegan with respect, which is more than could be said for members of the armed forces in many other South and Central American countries he traveled through. In fact, one Sandinista literally gave him the shirt off his own back.

"Hey, gringo, where ya going?" he first said. This was on an empty stretch of road high above a valley before the town of Dario. Two young military police of the Liberation Front driving by in a jeep had stopped to question me. They got out while their girl companion waited in the vehicle.
"I'm walking through Nicaragua, your republic." At this the three of them let out a spontaneous cheer. The girl now got out of the jeep and offered me a plastic bag full of sweet ice, bound at the neck, with a straw dangling into slush. As I gratefully sucked the synthetic udder dry they asked me more questions: "Where are you from? What are you doing here?" Prodded by their enthusiasm, I revealed more than I normally do. When they learned I was English, this pleased them enormously - at least I was not an American. I finished my story: "... and I'm the only man to have walked from Argentina to Nicaragua - and I'm going to try to reach Alaska." They were speechless, simply overcome with joy. My original interrogator, a well-built fellow, now introduced himself as Bismarck, removed his shirt, and with great ceremony placed it on top of the ragged one I was wearing - "for friendship's sake," he said.
"You must be careful, Jorge," were Bismarck's last words to me as he did up the buttons. "Our sun will burn you." To this day I clearly remember, in the magic moment that followed, the chill wind singing past the telephone wire high above us. As we stood on the bleak hillside, a shirtless Sandinista and a double-shirted Englishman, we were one. He had never asked, "Why?" He knew. We were brothers; he had seen the dream.

Distance walked since last post: 14.2km
Total distance walked since Koshu Kaido training began: 230.1km
Days left until departure: 21

The food of champions

2010-08-23T13:29:00.000+12:00

I'm almost halfway through The Longest Walk, George Meegan's account of his epic journey on foot from the bottom of South America to the top of Alaska. After a frustrating start (there were so many typos on the first few pages I almost felt like giving up), I'm now thoroughly enjoying it. Here's a brief extract which should give you a good idea of Meegan's slightly eccentric personality and endearing sense of humour.

On the approach to Puerto Supe I attained another milestone, completing 8,000 km, and by the time I reached town I was famished.
"Got any food?" I shouted up the single step of a waterfront hut, a makeshift restaurant.
"No. Have you?" came the reply from inside.
"Well, actually... yes. I have a coconut and a tomato."
"Fantastico!" And with that I was ushered inside, the great nut was cracked open with the help of a hammer, and all the family reached in. To the accompaniment of squeals of astonishment I then fried the tomato; for these people, it was like frying an orange. I assured them that all Britons do the same, which elicited further gasps. And thus the patron fed the restaurant.
The average restaurant I passed in the desert can only be described as ghastly. To keep things on the up and up, the floors are given a daily washdown with gasoline. A common story in these parts is that some hapless traveler once stubbed his cigarette out on one of these floors and everyone was lucky to escape with his life from the ensuing fire.
Cafe children were kept busy separating the good grains of rice from pebbles and other rubbish that comes in the same sack - time-wasting work that makes car washing interesting by comparison.

Meegan doesn't subscribe to what Alan Booth calls the "Protestant Walk Ethic" (i.e. eschewing all forms of road transport while on a long walk), but as he is out to establish a new record for the longest unbroken walk, whenever he does take a ride he is very careful to resume walking exactly where he left off. On one occasion he'd walked 14 km after a break of a few days in a town in Ecuador when the thought struck him that he may not have walked one four-block section in the town. Any gap in the journey would have robbed him of the record, so he went back and walked this few hundred metres.

Finally, another quote for those people wondering what (apart from coconuts and tomatoes) fueled the man who still retains the record for the world's longest walk:

I was hungry, and so after reaching the center of town, I spent a frustrating hour trying to get an onion. Of all the passions and food cravings I had in South America, the humble onion remained the king. For me a raw onion with salt on bread made a meal and provided a good vehicle for salt, which, after water, was my greatest need and desire in hot climates.

Distance walked since last post: 27.6km
Total distance walked since Koshu Kaido training began: 215.9km
Days left until departure: 24

Sad news

2010-08-20T15:23:00.002+12:00

Thank you all for your messages of support. Sadly, Oscar's condition worsened and we reluctantly decided to have him put down. He'll be sorely missed.

He's back

2010-08-14T14:38:00.000+12:00

Oscar came home this morning. A little thinner and dirtier, but with no apparent injuries. After giving him a welcome feed, we took him down to the vet, who thinks he may be partly blind. This would explain the wobbliness and vacant expression we noticed before he went missing. In all likelihood, he just got lost and couldn't find his way home.

The vet also thinks he may have a thyroid problem, which would explain his recent weight loss despite his almost insatiable appetite. If the results of a blood test confirm this, he'll have to go on some medication. He may not live much longer (he's well over 80 in human years), but we're determined to make his remaining time on this planet as comfortable as possible.

Oh, and he bit the vet.

Distance walked since last post: 6km
Total distance walked since Koshu Kaido training began: 188.3km
Days left until departure: 32

I got something in my eye*

2010-08-11T10:45:00.001+12:00

The elder of our two cats has been missing for three days. Unlike when our other cat went walkabout a couple of years ago, I'm afraid there won't be a happy ending to this story.

Oscar hadn't been himself for about a week. He was a bit wobbly on his feet and his pupils were extremely dilated. The last time I saw him was around midday on Sunday, when he was poking around in my study. He didn't show up for dinner that evening, and when he missed breakfast the next morning I was pretty sure we wouldn't see him again.

I won't go on about how cute Oscar was. Cuteness wasn't his forte. He was certainly playful and entertaining as a kitten. He always loved getting inside boxes, even if they were too small. In fact, the smaller the better. We used to push open tissue boxes just to watch him dive into them with his front legs outstretched, ending up with his head and front legs out one end and his back legs and tail out the other. But he had what in humans we would probably call a personality disorder, in that he would be happily rubbing up against your leg one minute then biting it as hard as he could the next. Since he was already around a year old when we got him (the previous owners had a young child and were nervous having a cat around), we accepted no responsibility for this behaviour, although this didn't make us any less nervous when unsuspecting guests (or suspecting family members) tried to pat Oscar or less shamefaced when he bit them.

As an adult, Oscar was rather stubborn and aloof. He did like a good lap to curl up on at night, but didn't enjoy being picked up and cuddled. He was also very strong. At one point we stopped letting him sleep in our bedroom because he would wake us up very early by jumping up onto Mrs Fool's bedside table and knocking over everything on it. But come morning he would throw himself against the door in an effort to get it, making an awful racket. We had to resort to barricading the door with a suitcase to stop him gaining entry.

For the last few years, Oscar's favorite sleeping spot has been on top of the Sky TV decoder in the living room. I think he liked the warmth. It can't have been the most comfortable of places to sleep. It was hard and a bit too small. Often his head or tail would dangle over the edge of the decoder and block the infrared window so that we couldn't change channels. Once or twice he fell off while sound asleep.

So, farewell Oscar. You were a good cat.

*One of the many memorable lines from the movie Spartan. You can see more here.

Distance walked since last post: 12km
Total distance walked since Koshu Kaido training began: 182.3km
Days left until departure: 35

2010-08-04T16:03:00.004+12:00

こいのぼりを見た。

Distance walked since last post: 33.2km
Total distance walked since Koshu Kaido training began: 170.3km
Days left until departure: 42

Order tracking

2010-07-28T16:50:00.000+12:00

Order No. XXX-0064-3823754990 placed 24 Jul 2010 (04:24:32) on BookDepository.com Order status: dispatched

"Word Painting"
by (author) Rebecca McClanahan
Qty: 1
$14.83
(Save $0.16)

"Herzog on Herzog"
by (author) Werner Herzog
Qty: 1
$14.40
(Save $1.60)

"The Longest Walk"
by (author) George Meegan
Qty: 1
$17.99
(Save $2.00)

Shipping: Free worldwide shipping
Total order value: $47.22

Distance walked since last post: 12km
Total distance walked since Koshu Kaido training began: 137.1km
Days left until departure: 49

Amble to Ilam

2010-07-23T12:29:00.002+12:00

Distance walked since last post: 17.2km
Total distance walked since Koshu Kaido training began: 125.1km
Days left until departure: 54

The lost flight of Pantaleon Quiroga

2010-07-19T15:43:00.001+12:00

The other week I decided to take a break from reading Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy and reread William Boyd's The Blue Afternoon. I was enjoying McCarthy, but at over 1000 pages, the three novels were a bit too much for me to get through in one go. And while the first book, All the Pretty Horses, is supposed to be McCarthy's least dark novel, it's far from uplifting, and after finishing the second, The Crossing, which starts off well with its description of the growing relationship between a young cowboy and a wolf he's supposed to kill but ends up escorting over the border to Mexico but drags a bit in the final hundred pages or so, I was definitely in the mood for something lighter.

I bought my copy of The Blue Afternoon last year in Wellington and finished reading it the day I had my nose job. It's a love story/murder mystery set mostly in the Philippines at the beginning of the 20th century. This was during the U.S. occupation, which, as I've mentioned previously, sparked quite a bit of bloodshed. The male protagonist, Salvador Carriscant, is a progressive surgeon in Manila, who's disliked by his conservative peers but has the support of a young anesthetist named Pantaleon Quiroga. One of the subplots involves Quiroga's construction of a flying machine he calls the Aero-mobile, part of an effort to win the international Amberway-Richault Prize for the first powered flight of over 100 meters. Carrriscant reluctantly agrees to act as Quiroga's copilot on the Aero-mobile's maiden flight, but as the following passage indicates, thing don't exactly go to plan.

The time had come. As if in a dream Carriscant found himself climbing into the rear saddle in the nose of the Aero-mobile. The two warping handles jutted up in front of him and without thinking he grasped them firmly, pulling them this way and that and causing the tail to turn in response. A soft salvo of flash powder greeted this impulsive gesture. Behind him Pantaleon began to swing the propeller. Carriscant prayed earnestly for a fuel leak, a faulty connection, a blown gasket, anything, but on the third attempt the pistons fired and the shrill irate roar of the Flanquin filled his ears. He felt the vibrations travel up his spine and suddenly he wished he was wearing different clothes: he felt a complete fool in his white linen suit and his glossy English brogues. Pantaleon flapped round the wing in his leather coat as the second propeller began to turn. He climbed into the forward saddle and inserted his feet into the stirrup controls. He twisted round to face Carriscant, his eyes bright, two darker spots on his brown face where his blush glowed.
'Thank you, my friend,' he said emotionally. 'All that bad feeling is behind us now. Please tell me it's so.'
'Completely forgotten, Panta.' He paused. 'Now, you're quite sure this is safe.'
'You're more at risk in a carromato,' he said, with serene confidence. 'Now remember, only when I reach up for the air-catcher do you take over the warp controls. Otherwise, do nothing.'
'Right.'
Pantaleon reached up to the twin handles above his shoulder and pushed them, raising the long flap on the leading edge to its full extent. Then he turned up the throttle control to full and the Aero-mobile began to thrum and judder violently. He gave the signal to the boy to pull away the wooden chocks and released the brake on the bicycle wheels.
With a brutal jerk the Aero-mobile lurched forward. Carriscant was flung backwards and as the whip crack effect hurled him forward again his nose smashed heavily into Pantaleon's back between his shoulder blades. His vision dimmed as his eyes flooded with salty tears and he sensed, rather than saw, the hot plumes of blood jet from his nostrils.
He was aware of the tremendous noise of the engine and the hollow drumming sound of the wheels on the roadway planks as the machine began to pick up speed. As he blinked his eyes clear he saw the dark dripping splash of his blood on Pantaleon's coat back and, to his horror, he realised that his entire front was a sopping swathe of red, that pools had gathered in the creases in his lap and that more was still snorting from his nose.
'Stop!' he screamed. 'You've got to stop it!'
Pantaleon was sitting hunched forward over his controls, oblivious, like a racing cyclist in a sprint. Carriscant now felt the speed of their passage whip the ribbons of blood and snot away from his nose to sprinkle the rear section behind him, the heavy drops pattering on the stretched fabric. Then there was a sudden decrease in noise and he realised the drumming of the wheels had ceased. Beyond his left thigh he saw the cruciform shadow of the Aero-mobile begin to shrink slowly. To his absolute horror he realised that they had taken to the air.

Distance walked since last post: 3km
Total distance walked since Koshu Kaido training began: 107.9km
Days left until departure: 58

Japanese artist continues testing own plane

2010-07-18T14:20:00.002+12:00

Hachiya Kazuhiko's plane, which was unpowered when I blogged about it late last year, now has a jet engine! This recent video shows him doing some taxiing.

Distance walked since last post: 3km
Total distance walked since Koshu Kaido training began: 104.9km
Days left until departure: 60

U.S. rules may bar Iroquois from lacrosse champs

2010-07-17T15:03:00.001+12:00

The Iroquois people invented lacrosse, but their national team has missed the start of the world championships in England because the U.S. authorities no longer recognise their passports.

"Lacrosse is our game - we are the originators, we invented the game, there are 60 countries that play our game," said Denise Waterman, a member of the team's board of directors. "And now we can't go to a tournament that's honoring our game? It's almost unbelievable that this is happening."

You can read the full story here.

Distance walked since last post: 18km
Total distance walked since Koshu Kaido training began: 101.9km
Days left until departure: 61

The Sakura-michi International Nature Run

2010-07-04T13:49:00.001+12:00

If you're a long-time reader, you may recall that I gave up running around eighteen months ago (just as I was starting to really enjoy it) after my knees started playing up. Every so often I get the urge to start running again. I got the urge again a couple of nights ago while watching a program on Japanese TV about the Sakura-michi International Nature Run.

The Sakura-michi International Nature Run is a 250km ultramarathon that follows a course from Nagoya on the Pacific Ocean side of the main Japanese island of Honshu to Kanazawa on the Japan Sea side. It was established to honor the memory of Sato Ryoji, a bus conductor who worked on this route and dreamed of planting cherry trees along its entire length. He managed to plant some 2000 trees in his spare time before dying at the age of 47.

The program focused on two runners, a man and a woman, both of whom only started running in their thirties. The woman, Kuwahara Akie, was also very sick in her teens, a good deal of which she spent in hospital. Both runners finished well within the cut off time of 36 hours. To put their achievements in perspective, they ran in under 36 hours further than the distance I intend to cover in ten days when I walk the Koshu Kaido.

Watching the program, one thing that struck me was that the event seemed less like a race and more like a social occasion for many of the runners, members of an elite club who get pleasure from putting their bodies through absolute hell, battling themselves to finish and improve on their previous times rather than their opponents.

Only 100 runners - 80 from Japan and 20 from overseas - are chosen to compete each year. The entry fee is 45,000 yen.

Distance walked since last post: 3km
Total distance walked since Koshu Kaido training began: 83.9km
Days left until departure: 74

Dreaming of 'the big one'

2010-06-30T16:09:00.006+12:00

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

2010-06-26T11:19:00.000+12:00

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

2010-06-19T15:08:00.002+12:00

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

2010-06-15T12:16:00.003+12:00

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

2010-06-12T11:13:00.003+12:00

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

2010-06-08T13:38:00.005+12:00

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

2010-06-04T15:02:00.000+12:00

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

2010-06-02T09:53:00.005+12:00

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

2010-06-01T10:03:00.001+12:00

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.

Shoe shopping

2010-05-17T15:14:00.001+12:00

Last week I went shoe shopping, and I didn't even leave the house.

I was thinking about what shoes I'll use when I walk the Koshu Kaido later this year, and decided that of all the shoes I've walked in over the years, the most comfortable were probably the New Balance 748s I wore on the Nakasendo in 2007. The only drawback was they weren't waterproof. So I checked out Amazon to see what they had in the way of waterproof New Balance walking shoes.

This pair of Gore-Tex-lined 977s caught my eye. I thought they looked pretty cool. At US$100, the price wasn't bad either. With the New Zealand dollar so strong at the moment, even with shipping included they shouldn't be more the NZ$200, I thought. On further inspection, however, I discovered that Amazon wouldn't ship them to this part of the world.

I then checked the US New Balance online store. They had the 977s for US$140, but they wouldn't ship to New Zealand either. After trying various other US-based online shoe retailers, none of which would ship New Balance shoes here, I checked New Balance's New Zealand online store. Knowing that a couple of years ago New Balance had drastically reduced the range of walking shoes they sold here to just a couple of models, I didn't hold out much hope, and sure enough they had very little, and nothing waterproof.

There was an 0800 number, so as a last resort I decided to give them a call to see if there was any chance of getting hold of some 977s. To cut a long story short, the answer was no. But when I explained what I needed them for, the man on the phone recommended some 967s instead. I hadn't heard of these before. It didn't take long, however, to work out that they were the replacement for the 966s, a pair of which I'd worn last year when I walked the Tokaido. (You may recall that these were actually women's shoes that I bought on sale. I think they were actually too narrow, because my left little toe took quite a beating on the Tokaido walk, and I ended up loosing the toenail.)

The funny thing was I hadn't seen the 967s either on Amazon or on any of the New Balance websites. When I mentioned this to the man on the phone, he said he'd have a word to the people in charge and that they should appear the next day. I was a bit skeptical, but sure enough when I checked the US and New Zealand online stores the next morning the 967s were there.

So, I put in my order and a few days later they arrived on my doorstep. I was a bit nervous about buying a pair of shoes without trying them on. Then again, rarely have a tried on a pair of New Balance shoes that don't fit. Also, I knew they came with a 30-day unconditional returns policy. I needn't have worried, however, because they fit perfectly.

The Minnesota Declaration: Truth and fact in documentary cinema

2010-05-12T10:14:00.000+12:00

LESSONS OF DARKNESS

1. By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.

2. One well-known representative of Cinema Verité declared publicly that truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest. He resembles the night watchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures. "For me," he says, "there should be only one single law: the bad guys should go to jail."
Unfortunately, he is part right, for most of the many, much of the time.

3. Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.

4. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.

5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.

6. Filmmakers of Cinema Verité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts.

7. Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.

8. Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: "You can't legislate stupidity."

9. The gauntlet is hereby thrown down.

10. The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn't call, doesn't speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don't you listen to the Song of Life.

11. We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.

12. Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species - including man - crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota
April 30, 1999
Werner Herzog

Tentative Koshu Kaido schedule

2010-05-07T13:56:00.003+12:00

Day 1: Shimo-Suwa - Chino (18.8km)
Day 2: Chino - Araki (21km)
Day 3: Araki - Nirasaki (26.7km)
Day 4: Nirasaki - Kofu (14.2km)
Day 5: Kofu – Komakai (21.7km)
Day 6: Komakai - Otsuki (23.1km)
Day 7: Otsuki - Uenohara (21.1km)
Day 8: Uenohara - Hachioji (28.6km)
Day 9: Hachioji - Chofu (20.7km)
Day 10: Chofu - Nihonbashi (25.7km)

Order tracking

2010-04-30T15:15:00.003+12:00

Order No. XXX-549-9462494838 placed 27 Apr 2010 (01:15:39) on BookDepository.com
Order status: dispatched

"The Selfish Gene"
by (author) Richard Dawkins
Qty: 1
$12.06
(Save $7.89)

"Jazz"
by (author) Gary Giddins
Qty: 1
$30.03
(Save $9.92)

"The Border Trilogy"
by (author) Cormac McCarthy
Qty: 1
$13.68
(Save $3.21)

Shipping: Free worldwide shipping
Total order value: $55.77

My next walk

2010-04-28T09:08:00.001+12:00

I've started planning my next walking adventure: the Koshu Kaido. One of the gokaido, or five main highways of Edo-period Japan, the Koshu Kaido (labeled C on the map below) is just over 210km long and connects Tokyo with Shimo-Suwa in Nagano prefecture.

Shim-Suwa is also on the Nakasendo, which I walked in 2007 (you can read a bit about it here and here). Since I started both that walk and last year's Tokaido walk in Kyoto, I thought it would be nice to start in Tokyo this time. However, I changed my mind after looking at the following graphic from the glorious Papa Walks the Koshu Kaido website showing the change in elevation along the way (Shimo-Suwa is on the extreme left and Tokyo on the extreme right). So for the third time in four years I'll be walking to Tokyo.

The Imperial Hotel

2010-04-20T13:41:00.001+12:00

They say you should stick to blogging about things you know something about. I don't know much about architecture, but I know what I like, and I like Frank Lloyd Wright. So this post is about the Imperial Hotel.

The Imperial Hotel today

The Imperial Hotel in Tokyo is a dour, unimaginative, uninspiring piece of architecture. Looking at it today, it's hard to imagine that half a century ago there stood on the same site one of the most imaginative and inspiring building's ever created.

I can't remember when I fell in love with Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel, but it was probably around 1991 when, while a student at Nagoya University, I visited Meiji Mura, an open-air museum of architecture in Inuyama. It was here that the hotel's main entrance hall and lobby were relocated in 1968 when the building was demolished to make way for the present Imperial Hotel. I remember walking around inside and being impressed both with the ornateness of the interior (which features intricately carved lava rock) and with how cool it was despite the heat outside and the lack of air-conditioning.

What's left of Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel at Meiji Mura

When Wright was commissioned to build the Imperial Hotel in 1915 he was asked to come up with a design that would withstand Tokyo's frequent earthquakes and fires. He achieved this partly by using floating foundations - an idea that was widely criticised at the time. Who would have imagined that so soon after its completion in 1923 - on the very eve of its official opening, in fact - Wright's design would be put to the ultimate test in the Great Kanto Earthquake. And while legend has it that the Imperial Hotel was one of the few buildings in the city centre to survive the earthquake and subsequent fires unscathed, there was some damage, including slumping and bulging of the floors. This slumping along with wartime damage and the demand for a more modern hotel with larger rooms were among the reasons cited for the demolition of Wright's Imperial Hotel in 1968.

The Imperial Hotel in the 1960s

While in Tokyo last month I stayed just across the road from the new Imperial Hotel and the day before I left I went over to have a look. I was pleasantly surprised to find a small exhibition in the lobby celebrating the 120th anniversary of the hotel, which included quite a few photos of, and small items (chairs, plates, etc) from, Wright's hotel. I learned quite a few things, including that Wright designed not only the building but almost every aspect of the interior design, even down to the dinnerware. In fact the project consumed him, and he spent much of the time between 1915 when he took on the job and 1923 when it was completed living in Japan. But his interest in that country dates back even earlier. He began collecting Japanese woodblock prints in the 1880s, and when he went overseas for the first time in 1905 it was not to Europe but to Japan, which he called "the most romantic, most beautiful" country in the world.

Imperial Hotel coffee service, produced according to Wright's design

Another thing I learned was the derivation of the Japanese word baikingu, meaning a smorgasboard or buffet-style meal. I knew that it came from the English word "Viking", but the exact derivation was a mystery to me. Well, it appears that in 1958 after a trip to Europe, the Imperial's manager decided to open Japan's first smorgasbord restaurant at the hotel. However, the word "smorgasbord" was considered too long and difficult for Japanese to pronounce, so they decided to name the restaurant the Viking. The name became synonymous with this style of dining, and so it was that the word baikingu entered the Japanese lexicon.

The Road

2010-04-17T03:42:00.003+12:00

A couple of weeks ago I asked my sister if she wanted to go and see the movie The Road. I remembered she'd read and enjoyed the book, by Cormac McCarthy, and I think we'd even talked about the movie and the excellent reviews it was getting. So I was a bit surprised when she told me she didn't really want to see it. The reason she gave was that she thought she'd find it too depressing.

I first heard of McCarthy when the movie No Country for Old Men came out (he also wrote the novel on which that movie was based), but I only really became interested in reading his work after he was mentioned several times in Don Watson's American Journeys, the book about traveling around the United States by rail which I read last December. This story about McCarthy auctioning his old typewriter, which appeared in various newspapers at around the same time, further piqued my interest.

Anyway, since my sister wasn't keen to see the movie of The Road, I decided to read the book. I found a copy of it on the shelves at the public library and finished reading it the other day. It is very dark, although like American Rust, the novel I read last year in which the protagonists seem to wander from one hopeless situation into another, it was saved by an ending that, while not exactly happy, does provide some hope. Now that I'm used to McCarthy's quirky style of writing (he omits apostrophes in negative contractions like hadnt and isnt and doesn't use quotation marks for speech) I might see if the library has any of his other novels.

Jasmine

2010-04-09T16:25:00.001+12:00

The more I hear about Keith Jarrett's soon-to-be-released new album Jasmine, a collaboration with bassist Charlie Haden, the more I look forward to it. From the liner notes (you can read the full text as well as the track listings here at Amazon):

An ecstatic moment in music is worth the lifetime of mastery that goes into it, because it can be shared.

Nothing in life is that funny

2010-04-05T14:40:00.002+12:00

I always hesitate to call myself a jazz fan. Yes, these days I listen almost exclusively to jazz, but my tastes are quite limited (I prefer acoustic, melodic, melancholic jazz, and above all jazz that moves me) and there's a lot of jazz I don't particularly like. One thing I have a real aversion to is jazz vocals. So, for example, in deciding which jazz club to visit during my recent trip to Tokyo, the first thing I did when going through the schedules on the club websites was disregard all the dates with vocalists.

As with most rules, there are a couple of exceptions. I've always quite liked Tony Bennett. Which is lucky, because a couple of Christmases ago my brother, knowing that I was a Bill Evans fan, gave me The Legendary Sessions, a CD of duets by Evans and Tony Bennett. The other exception is trumpeter and singer Chet Baker.

Until recently I'd resisted listening to Chet Baker, not only because he sings, but also because I was put off by his image as the pin-up boy of West Coast cool jazz, which caused me to dismiss him as a lightweight. According to Wikipedia, between 1966 and 1974 Baker did record music that could be classified as early "smooth jazz," but from what I've heard of his recordings from the 1950s before his heroin addiction got the better of him and in the 70s and 80s when he cleaned himself up enough to make a comeback, he was anything but a lightweight. His music certainly has many of the qualities I look for in jazz.

Baker's abilities have always been the subject of controversy. He could barely read music, and he was no great technician, sticking to the trumpet's middle range and employing little or no vibrato. His singing, described as "an acquired taste" and having "an innocence and a sexual ambivalence that is vaguely unsettling," helped him acquire a mainstream audience beyond jazz, but it also attracted scorn from jazz purists, who were incensed when he won popularity polls in jazz magazines ahead of such distinguished contemporaries as Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis.

In the 1950s, his youthful good looks saw him courted by Hollywood (he appeared in the 1955 film Hell's Horizon), and for a time he lived the life of a movie star, his popularity among women, contempt for rules, and love of fast cars earning him a reputation as the James Dean of jazz. But he turned down an offer of a Hollywood studio contract so that he could continue to tour as a musician.

Baker's drug habit (he became addicted to heroin in the 1950s) began to interfere with his career in the 1960s. He fled to Europe to escape a drugs charge in the U.S., only to be jailed in Italy and expelled from England and Germany for drug-related offences. He returned to the U.S., but was forced to switch from trumpet to flugelhorn after losing several teeth in the mid-1960s. He left for Europe again in 1975, living out of a suitcase for the rest of his life. By this time he was playing the trumpet again, his sound "frail, airy, almost ethereal." Years of heroin use had taken its toll, not only on his playing but also on his looks. According to the liner notes to Chet Baker: The Collection (a compilation of Baker's mid-1950s recordings for the Pacific Jazz label):

By the time of his death in 1988 his face told his story. Much photographed, the boyish good looks of the 1950s Pacific Jazz album covers had disappeared with the ravages of a junkie lifestyle, his lined face displaying the all too tangible evidence of addiction. "They're laugh lines," he once quipped to fellow trumpeter and arch-humorist Jack Sheldon. "Nothing in life is that funny" came the response.

And while I'm quoting liner notes, here are some more, this time from Broken Wing, one of the many albums Baker recorded in Europe in the 1970s and 80s as he was struggling to resurrect his career:

After praising him to the skies - abusively, in his estimation - when he was the West Coast trumpeter-playboy, the men of America's "show-business" had looked the other way when, unrecognisable, with the craggy face of an old Indian, Chet was trying to emerge from what might possibly have been the nearest thing to hell. "There are no second acts in American lives," wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald.

My lucky hat

2010-04-02T14:13:00.000+13:00

I've just returned from a week-long trip to Tokyo. To make sure everything went smoothly, I took along my lucky Italian felt hat.

I bought the hat in Florence in 1994 during a trip to Switzerland, Italy, France, and London. From memory it was at San Lorenzo Market, where I'd earlier resisted buying a leather jacket despite the stall owner's insistence that he had one "just for me," a line I found about as convincing as the one from the man standing outside the Indian restaurant in Avignon, who, on hearing that I was from New Zealand and Mrs Fool from Japan, exclaimed, "Ah, Japan, India and New Zealand form a triangle!"

Guy in hat with bicycle (Paris, 1994)

And although I'm not generally superstitious by nature, it's hard to ignore the fact that since then I haven't been involved in a single hijacking, plane crash, kidnapping, or other major calamity overseas while I've had my Italian felt hat with me.

On the other hand, I didn't have my Italian felt hat with me the day in March 2005 when, while bicycling through the picturesque countryside near the town of Ubud on Bali, I fell victim to a daring young motorcycle-mounted thief who lifted my bag containing my video camera from the basket in front of my very eyes before speeding off into the distance. (The loss of the camera I quickly came to terms with, but the loss of the film inside it, which contained footage I'd shot at Borobudur a few days earlier, was a real shock.)

Neither did I have my Italian felt hat with me on the ferry from Mandalay to Bagan in February 2007 when I suffered food poisoning, robbing me of the best part of two days of my five days in Bagan, one of the most beautiful places on earth, where I also had the misfortune of renting an Indian bicycle whose chain came off no fewer than three times in the course of a single morning (although on each occasion I was aided in getting it back on by kind and enterprising locals, one using a machete and another a metal Chinese soup spoon).

My trip to Tokyo was a resounding success. But who knows what disasters would have befallen me had I not taken my lucky hat.

Breaking the sock rule

2010-03-17T09:03:00.003+13:00

It's usually best to match your socks to your pants rather than to your shoes, but there's one exception: With cream pants and black shoes, black socks look better.

Debate.

Bananas

2010-03-13T12:33:00.000+13:00

Together with some 2500 other people, I attended a lecture at the Christchurch Town Hall on Thursday evening by the celebrity atheist Richard Dawkins. His reception, which was described in the local newspaper as a "rock-star welcome," reminded me of that extended to another great iconoclast, Noam Chomsky, when he gave a talk here back in 1998. The difference was that while Chomsky spoke in front of an invited audience at Canterbury University, Dawkins lectured in front of a paying crowd, most of whom had bought tickets for $15 (although someone reportedly paid $132 for a ticket to the sold-out event on Trade Me).

People attending Thursday's lecture were greeted at the entrance to the Town Hall by a small group of Christians who were handing out free copies of Darwin's The Origin of Species. The catch was that this edition, published by Christian minister and evangelist Ray Comfort in 2009 after he discovered that the text was in the public domain and distributed at universities in the U.S., includes a "special introduction" penned by Comfort (although a section of it was alleged plagiarized from a text by Dr Stan Guffey, a biologist at the University of Tennessee) in which he seeks to discredit Darwin's work.

I haven't read the special introduction yet, but if Comfort's antics in this YouTube video are anything to go by, it's sure to be quite amusing. In the video, Comfort argues that the fact that bananas fit comfortably into our hands and mouths is proof that god designed them to be eaten by humans. There's so much wrong with this argument that it's hard to know where to begin in refuting it. But how about the fact that the modern banana depicted in the video is the result of years of human cultivation and propagation, one of the effects of which has been to remove the large seeds that once made the eating experience less enjoyable.

Incidentally, although he now lives in the U.S., Comfort was born in New Zealand, and began his preaching career in Christchurch.

The Fighting Fool

2010-03-07T14:43:00.001+13:00

One of the advantages of growing up in an academic household was that the family home was always full of interesting books. This was especially true in my late teens after my mother went back to university to study and later teach Eastern religions and after my parents came back from a year teaching English in China, when the family library took on a real exotic flavour.

One day while perusing the bookshelf in the living room I came across a Tai Chi manual complete with photos and English instructions. I'd been interested in the martial arts for years (this was back in the days of Bruce Lee, whose movies I enjoyed) but I'd been too timid to actually go to classes and learn. With this book, I thought, I could study on my own at home. And so it was that I took my first tentative steps towards learning a martial art.

Many years later, while living in Japan, I took up Shorinji Kempo, which I stuck at long enough to gain a first-degree black belt. Sounds impressive, but a first-degree black belt is really just a learner's license. It means you've learned the basics and are ready to begin mastering the art. I have many pleasant memories of those years learning Shorinji Kempo, of my kind and generous teacher and his wife, also proficient in Shorinji Kempo, and of my fellow adult students, some of whom were learning with their sons and daughters. But by this time Mrs Fool and I had decided to return to New Zealand, and although I could have continued with Shorinji Kempo here, my enthusiasm had waned to the point where I was no longer willing to put up with the niggling injuries that are part and parcel of martial arts training like blisters and calluses on the soles of the feet, twisted ankles, and stubbed toes, and the inevitable not so niggling injuries, which in my case included a cracked wrist, sustained in a competition when I tried to block a kick with my lower arm. I lost that bout but was awarded a cup at the end of the day for my efforts. I had to pose with the cup for a photo, which I'm pretty sure aggravated my injury.

Walking Fool with cup (c. 1993)*

Which is all by way of introduction to the announcement that, something like thirty years after my first attempt, I've started learning Tai Chi again, this time properly with a teacher. I'm taking a course called Tai Chi for Health at the WEA. It's based on a variation of Sun style Tai Chi devised by Dr Paul Lam, a physician and arthritis sufferer who took up Tai Chi to help his own arthritis and has since established what seems to be a mini-empire with DVDs and books on everything from Tai Chi for Diabetes and Tai Chi for Back Pain to Tai Chi for Kidz (there's no Tai Chi for Cats yet, but I'm sure it's not far away).

The course I'm taking is aimed at older folks (I'm pretty sure I'm the youngest student), so it's very easy on the body. I've been to five classes so far and have been practicing a bit at home using one of the DVDs. Although I'm skeptical about the whole concept of chi (or ki as it's called in Japanese), I'm already noticing some benefits in that I feel really relaxed and in a heightened state of awareness after a Tai Chi session. I think this is due to the slowness of the movements, which as well as strengthening the joints and muscles seems to have an almost meditative effect.

*Both left-facing and right-facing swastikas have been associated with Buddhism for many centuries. Shorinji Kempo has links to a type of Buddhism called Kongo Zen, and the left-facing swastika (omote-manji in Japanese), which symbolizes compassion, was attached to Shorinji Kempo uniforms in Japan and was part of the Shorinji Kempo logo until 2005, when it was abandoned on the grounds that it was hindering the growth of Shorinji Kempo overseas.

Privilege

2010-03-03T09:29:00.000+13:00

When I checked Tomasz Stanko's official website the other day and saw that he was due to play in San Francisco and New York next month as part of a U.S. tour to promote his new CD, Dark Eyes, I recalled a comment I made back in November last year about timing my proposed epic rail journey across North America to coincide with a concert by either the Polish trumpeter or my other musical hero, pianist Keith Jarrett, and ever so briefly considered flying over to see Stanko in San Francisco and then traveling by rail to New York to see him again at Birdland (and to eat grilled stuff with Erik).

I then remembered that I'm visiting Tokyo later this month and couldn't possibly afford to make another overseas trip so soon after that one. Also, the Keith Jarrett Trio is performing in Tokyo in September-October, and I've promised to take Mrs Fool to see them to celebrate our wedding anniversary. And while I'd dearly love to see Stanko perform live again, the prospect of seeing him with his new quintet doesn't excite me as much as that of seeing him with his old quartet (with Marcin Wasilewski on piano), which I had the pleasure of doing back in March 2009. It seems that that quartet is a thing of the past. It produced just three CDs, including the sublime Lontano, which took me a while to get into but is now one of my all time favourite albums. I consider it a privilege to have seen that quartet perform live.

As Jarrett himself confirmed to an Italian audience in 2007 during one of his infamous outbursts, seeing Keith Jarret perform is also a privilege. Unlike Stanko, however, Jarrett doesn't believe in changing the personnel in his groups much. In fact his current trio (with Gary Peacock on bass and Jack DeJohnette on drums) has been playing together for more than 25 years. And while I'm definitely looking forward to seeing the trio in Japan, if I had a time machine one of the first things I'd do, probably even before going back to Wellington on the night of 7 March 2009, would be to go back to the Village Vanguard in New York on the night in May 1979 when Jarrett's "European Quartet" (with Jan Garbarek on saxophone, Palle Danielsson on Bass, and Jon Christenson on drums) recorded the album Nude Ants. According to Ian Carr's Keith Jarrett: The Man and His Music, Garbarek was having an "off-night," but even that couldn't spoil the magic.

The Bridge

2010-02-28T18:56:00.000+13:00

Flayed Bonito

2010-02-13T15:24:00.001+13:00

The other night Mrs Fool and I went to a floor talk at the Canterbury Museum. The talk, by Dr Richard Bullen of the Art History and Theory programme at the University of Canterbury (who, according to his profile on the university website, was voted Lecturer of the Year by students in the College of Arts in 2008), was presented in conjunction with the museum's Pleasure and Play in Edo Japan exhibition.

I was aware that the museum had a huge number of Japanese dolls, pottery, and other artifacts that never go on display, but what I didn't know is that they also have a sizable collection of Japanese paintings and woodblock prints from the Edo period. Most of these are part of a collection assembled by shipping magnate Sir Joseph Kinsey and donated to the museum in the middle of the 20th century by his daughter, May Moore. Only recently have these works been properly identified, and many of them are being exhibited for the first time.

Flayed Bonito (c.1847-1849) is one of two works in the exhibition attributed to Katsushika Hokusai, who's probably most famous for his print Great Wave off Kanagawa. The exhibition catalogue informs us that the fish's "mass, and its delicate, moist surface are rendered through the overlay of colours to describe the subtly modulated variations of hue in the lightly glowing pink, red and apricot striations of the flesh, the dense, dark tones of the skin, and the dancing highlights on its surface", but I'm sure you already knew that, and that the "anthropomorphic smile of the bonito introduces an element of humour and playfulness into the composition".

The exhibition runs until 7 March.

Fire!

2010-02-09T13:07:00.001+13:00

Just after nine o'clock last night there was a loud knock on the front door.
"You'd better get out," said a voice, "your neighbour's hedge is on fire!"
It took me a moment to realise that my neighbour didn't have a hedge. It was our hedge that was on fire!

It's the third time in about seven years that we've had a hedge fire. The first one nearly burnt the house down. And although this one was quite a distance from the house, the initial sense of panic was just the same. It didn't take long for the passerby who'd alerted me to the blaze to find the garden hose, but it seemed like an eternity before I managed to turn the water on (the gate to the courtyard where the tap was located was locked and so I had to go inside and get the keys and then go inside again to figure out which key was the right one as it was too dark to see outside).

The fire brigade arrived pretty quickly and we were reduced to the status of onlookers as they took over the firefighting duties. We joined, and were comforted by, the small crowd of neighbours who had gathered on the corner outside our house. If there's a silver lining to this particular cloud it's that we got to meet for the first time some neighbours who live in a nearby rental property and were reacquainted with quite a few others. And although this particular disaster wasn't exactly on the same scale as the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Hurricane Katrina, or the other tragedies covered in Rebecca Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster (which is still on my Amazon wishlist), last night I was reminded of the main finding of that book, which is that in disasters we are nearly all better people than we are in our everyday lives.

The White Man's Burden

2010-02-04T05:20:00.002+13:00

In The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War, which I've just finished reading, James Bradley (author of Flags of Our Fathers) details the circumstances of the U.S. takeover of the Philippines just over a century ago, an event that inspired Rudyard Kipling to write the poem "The White Man's Burden". The U.S. had long eyed the Philippines, formerly a Spanish colony, as a potential gateway to Asia, enabling them to compete with the British and Russians for the riches of China. Hawaii had been annexed by the U.S. in 1896 following a coup instigated by local Euro-American business leaders, and the Spanish-American War of 1898 provided an opportunity for the U.S. to gain control not only of the Philippines but also of Guam, providing yet another stepping stone across the Pacific.

In May 1898, with the help of Filipino freedom fighters (who backed the Americans on the understanding that they would be given independence once the Spanish had been driven out), the U.S. invaded the Philippines and soon surrounded the capital, Manila. Resigned to defeat, the Spanish agreed to hand over Manila to U.S. forces. With the Spanish on the run, the Filipino resistance leader Emilio Aguinaldo proclaimed the independence of the Philippines and began setting up a government. However, the U.S. reneged on their agreement to grant independence, instead agreeing to purchase the Philippines from Spain for 20 million dollars. This sparked the Philippine-American War, otherwise known as the Philippine War of Independence.

U.S. troops administering "the water cure" to a Filipino captive in 1901

The Philippine-American War lasted for just over three years and left over 4,000 U.S. dead and nearly 34,000 wounded. Figures for the losses on the Filipino side vary, but conservative estimates are that the U.S. forces killed some 20,000 resistance fighters and 300,000 Filipino civilians. During this war the U.S. military experimented with a variety of torture techniques, one of which involved holding the victim down and pouring water over their face and down their throat and nose until they either submitted or lost consciousness. If they passed out they were rolled aside and allowed to come to, whereupon the procedure was repeated. This form of torture was dubbed the "water cure". It is still practiced today under the name waterboarding.

The Philippines remained a U.S. colony until 1946. Following independence, the U.S. continued to occupy two large military installations, the Subic Bay Naval Complex and Clark Air Base, as well as several smaller ones. These were eventually handed over to the Philippines in 1992. The U.S. military still have several hundred troops in the Philippines as part of a counterinsurgency operation known as the Joint Special Operations Task Force - Philippines.

Hawaii became a U.S. state in 1950 after the grip on power held by the Euro-American business leaders who had controlled the islands since the 1890s was finally broken. Guam is an unincorporated territory of the U.S. While its people are U.S. citizens, they have no right to vote in presidential elections and their representative in the U.S. Congress cannot vote on legislation.

The Sugar Road II

2010-01-31T15:45:00.002+13:00

The other day Mrs Fool glanced up from the book she was reading and asked, "What was the name of that route in Kyushu you mentioned the other day?"
"The Nagasaki Kaido," I replied. "Why?"
"Well, it's mentioned in this book I'm reading."

Ubazakari hana no tabigasa: Oda Ieko no Azumaji nikki by Tanabe Seiko is a historical novel based on the diary of Oda Ieko, the wife of a Kyushu merchant who in 1840 set off with three women friends and several porters and bodyguards on a 3200-kilometre, five-month journey on foot that took them to among other places Miyajima, Osaka, Nara, Ise, Nikko, and Edo. Along the way they composed traditional Japanese poems, or waka, which are also included in the book. Oda was 52 years old at time, making her quite elderly given that the average life expectancy in Japan in the late-Edo period was somewhere in the late thirties. This explains the ubazakari of the title, which means something like "the prime of old-womanhood".

A couple of days after this conversation, Mrs Fool again brought up the subject of the Nagasaki Kaido.
"How long would it take to walk?" she asked.
"About ten days. Why?"
"Why don't we walk it together?"

It turns out she had been discussing the book with some Japanese friends over lunch, and they all agreed it would be a wonderful experience to do something like the walk undertaken by the women in the novel. Then Mrs Fool told them about my walking exploits, and they convinced her she should join me if and when I walk the Nagasaki Kaido.

Mrs Fool and I have done a few short walks together, but I never imagined the two of us would attempt anything on this scale. Things are still very much in the early planning stage. Mrs Fool doesn't want to be in Kyushu in autumn as it gets quite a few typhoons at that time of the year, and summer and winter are out for obvious reasons (too hot and too cold respectively), so the earliest we would consider doing it is the northern hemisphere spring of 2011. That would give me time to walk the Koshu Kaido on my own first, perhaps in October this year.

Obama announces high-speed rail plan

2010-01-29T09:01:00.002+13:00

Does the POTUS read Walking Fool? From the Guardian:

Barack Obama today called on Americans to climb aboard with his ambitious vision of building high speed rail corridors along 10 of the country's busiest routes.
In a high-profile announcement before leaving for a trip to Mexico today, Obama said America could not let itself be shunted to the side while other countries invested in modern transportation systems.

Read the rest (including at least one more bad railway pun) here.

The Sugar Road I

2010-01-26T11:05:00.000+13:00

When I mentioned a few posts back that I fancied doing a ramble around Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan's four main islands, I had no idea that Kyushu had a number of old walking routes which, like the go-kaido (five routes) on the main island of Honshu, were developed during the Edo period (1603-1868). In fact one of these routes, the Nagasaki Kaido, which links the port cities of Nagasaki and Kokura, is one of the most famous of these waki-kaido, or sub-routes.

Like the go-kaido, the waki-kaido were established by the Tokugawa shogunate to improve communications around the country, and were later used by feudal lords during their regular trips to the capital of Edo (now Tokyo), a requirement under the sankin kotai (alternate attendance) system, which was in force from 1635 to 1862. This system also applied to the Dutch traders based on the tiny artificial island of Dejima in Nagasaki, which was one of only a handful of Japanese ports open to the outside world during Japan's two centuries of seclusion in the Edo period. The head of the Dutch East India Company was required to make the journey to Edo yearly between 1660 and 1790 and once every four years after that.

Dejima

For the Japanese, this association with the Dutch traders lent the Nagasaki Kaido an exoticism that set it apart from the other routes. Even today, covers of guidebooks for the Nagasaki Kaido feature exotic animals such as elephants and camels. This exoticism is also reflected in the nickname given to the Nagasaki Kaido: The Sugar Road.

The nickname derives from the fact that imported sugar was an extremely rare and highly prized commodity in the Edo period. It was imported into Japan by the Dutch in Nagasaki, who took it with them when they traveled along the Nagasaki Kaido to present to the Tokugawa shogunate in Edo. The availability of sugar also explains its use in many popular dishes in and around Nagasaki, although the most well-known of these delicacies, Castella, was actually introduced by the Portuguese, who established Nagasaki as a port in the 16th century and occupied Dejima from the time of its construction in 1634 until their expulsion from Japan in 1639 as part of the crackdown on Catholics in the wake of the Shimabara Rebellion. Two years later the Dutch, who were anti-Catholic, were forced to move to Dejima from their base on the island of Hirado about a hundred kilometres to the north.

Incidentally, the port city of Kokura, which is now part of Kitakyushu city, was the primary target for the second atom bomb which was dropped on Japan on 9 August 1945. Bad weather over Kokura forced the pilot to head to the secondary target, Nagasaki.

Reading this could shorten your life

2010-01-18T14:35:00.001+13:00

Under the headline WATCHING TV FOR HOURS COULD SHORTEN YOUR LIFE, this recent article in The Press warned of the dangers of sitting in front of the TV for too long each day. It quoted a study carried out in Australia which found that people "who watched more than four hours a day had a 46 percent higher risk of death from all causes and an 80 percent increased risk for CVD-related death".

Someone wrote a letter to the editor a day or two later rightly pointing out that a) the risk of death from all causes is the same for everyone (i.e. 100%), and b) it's the lack of exercise rather than the TV watching which is the problem, and it would be just as accurate to say that reading books for hours could shorten your life.

I get a bit annoyed with people who regard television per se as some kind of evil. Yes, most of the stuff on TV is crap, but the problem lies in the way the technology is used rather than the technology itself. In other words, it's the commercial, ratings-driven model that's the problem.

Take The Wire, for example, which many people (myself included) regard as one of the best TV shows ever produced. As the show's creator, David Simon, has stated, the chances of it surviving on ratings-driven free-to-air TV were slim, so it was made for HBO, a pay-TV service. Sure enough, when the show eventually screened here in New Zealand, it was at a ridiculously late hour because Television New Zealand, despite being a state-owned broadcaster, is run according to a commercial, ratings-driven model.

I should also point out that, as I mentioned in my very first post, if it weren't for television I wouldn't have got into walking and this blog wouldn't exist, since it was after watching a documentary called The Naked Rambler on TV that the idea of walking the Nakasendo came to me.

By the way, if you're wondering what the subject of that doco is up to, well, according to this opinion piece in The Guardian (hat tip: my brother in Bhutan), he's still roaming around the UK naked and still getting arrested.

Chess update

2010-01-16T21:45:00.001+13:00

Black resigns! White (Walking Fool) wins!

The Pandolfini Effect

2010-01-16T10:51:00.001+13:00

I'm not a very voracious reader (except when I'm traveling, I normally only read for an hour or so each day before I go to sleep), so on Wednesday when I finished reading two books on the same day I was left feeling particularly satisfied. It helped that one of these books, American Rust, which right up until the day before had seemed destined for a truly unhappy ending, actually ended on a quite optimistic note.

There's hope for my chess game, too. The other book I finished was Pandolfini's Ultimate Guide to Chess. Although as I mentioned the other day this book is easy to follow, I probably only took in something like half of what was written. Still, this was enough to help me beat the chess game on my iMac for the first time ever (although admittedly I had the difficulty level set lower than normal), and so when my brother challenged me to a game I accepted, thinking it would be a good opportunity to see how much progress I had really made.

Black to move...

Two days later this game is still in progress. I think we're either at the end of the middlegame or the beginning of the endgame. Despite my brother's rather flattering comments and the surprising result of the poll on his blog, I think the longer the game goes on the more of an advantage he, as the vastly more experienced player, has. There should be a result later today.

Also on Wednesday I received the copy of The Imperial Cruise which I'd ordered from The Book Depository. Not only did I get free shipping by getting it from The Book Depository instead of Amazon, but I also got the paperback version, which isn't officially out yet and didn't even appear on Amazon until very recently.

The most challenging and entertaining game ever invented

2010-01-12T11:20:00.001+13:00

One of the tasks I've assigned myself this year (I hesitate to use the word "resolution", since according to this article in the The Guardian, New Year's resolutions are almost doomed to failure) is to improve my chess game.

I learned to play chess (or should I say, I learned the rules of chess) as a teenager, and have played casually on and off ever since, mostly against my brother Mark and more recently against my walking buddy Erik. But I never really thought much about things like tactics or strategy, and have never read a book about chess. So the other day on my way back from the doctor's I popped into my local library and picked more or less at random from the half a dozen or so chess books on the shelf a paperback called Pandolfini's Ultimate Guide to Chess.

It turns out to have been a pretty good choice. Although it starts with the fundamentals by explaining how each piece (sorry, "unit") moves, this book is really aimed at people like me who are familiar with the basics and have played a bit of chess but are ready to turn it up a notch. It's written in a casual style and is very easy to follow.

Although there are lots of diagrams in the book illustrating the various moves, I'm finding it helpful to have a chess set beside me as I read. One problem I was faced with was how to prevent our two cats jumping up and knocking the units over. I've gotten around this so far simply by keeping the cats out of the room while I'm reading, although one possible solution (a suggestion from my brother) would be to get one of these fancy vertical chess sets.

But is all this effort really worthwhile? Isn't chess just a waste of time, like watching TV (not The Wire, of course)? Shouldn't I be spending that time doing more important things? What will I gain from improving my chess game? Perhaps Pandolfini is right, and chess is "the most challenging and entertaining game ever invented", but it's still only a game, right?

(American Rust update: Things have gone from bad to worse for our two young protagonists. One is in prison, and the other is on the road somewhere between Pennsylvania and California, practically penniless after having been robbed by a fellow freight hopper.)

EMPTY

2010-01-09T15:03:00.002+13:00

My brother in Bhutan has launched himself into the blogosphere. You can see the results here.

A mystery solved

2010-01-07T15:58:00.006+13:00

American Rust is one dark, depressing novel. All of the main characters seem doomed, and I'm not holding out much hope for a happy ending. It's also extremely evocative and very difficult to put down.

In other news, in light of a couple of medical mishaps in recent years which could have turned into medical disasters, I decided to start the New Year by getting a new GP. His first task was to solve a problem which has been dogging me for the last couple of weeks in the form of dizzy spells which hit me first thing in the morning and last for an hour or two. On Tuesday things were so bad I felt quite nauseous.

I had a feeling these had something to do with a drug I'd been taking since I was diagnosed with a kidney stone last October, one of whose effects is to reduce the blood pressure. But what I couldn't understand was that I'd been taking this drug for over two months before the dizzy spells started. The other strange thing was that they appeared to get worse after I stopped taking the drug.

Anyway, I had my first appointment with my new GP yesterday morning, and after quickly checking to make sure my brain and other bits and pieces were working properly, he agreed that the drug was probably to blame. However, he also thought I might have been a bit dehydrated (dehydration being one of the common causes of dizziness). His advice to me was to go home and drink lots of water. So I guzzled down several glasses of water over the course of the afternoon and a couple more in the evening, and lo and behold I woke up this morning feeling almost completely normal. Not drinking enough water is also one of the major cause of kidney stones, so I'll definitely be making a point of keeping up my liquid intake in the future.

'I've learned a bit about Japan and a lot about myself'

2010-01-02T13:39:00.003+13:00

One of my first achievements of the New Year has been to finish reading Alan Booth's The Roads to Sata. While I enjoyed it immensely, I think Looking for the Lost is a better book. The historic episodes that inspired the three walks recounted in the latter (in the first Booth follows the route around the northern tip of Honshu described by novelist Dazai Osamu in his book Tsugaru, in the second he heads to Kyushu to trace the path of the retreat of Saigo Takamori at the end of the Satsuma Rebellion, and in the third he follows the Nagara River inland to one of the supposed hiding places of the remnants of the Heike clan following their defeat at the Battle of Dannoura in 1185) gave Looking for the Lost another dimension. Still, reading The Roads to Sata has made me think about my walking plans for the future. I still think I will tackle the Koshu Kaido next, but after that I fancy a less structured ramble, maybe around northern Kyushu, taking in the historic ceramic-producing areas in Saga prefecture, the city of Nagasaki, and the Shimabara peninsula.

Last night I started reading American Rust, a novel by Philipp Meyer which my sister gave me for Christmas. I only managed to read a chapter-and-a-half, but the book has already had quite an effect on me in the form of a disturbing dream in which I was confronted on a long-distance bus by an African-American who felt that I was invading his space. (There are no African-American characters in the first chapter-and-a-half of American Rust, but if you've read the book you'll be familiar with the events and tone that inspired this dream.) I woke suddenly just as this encounter was about to escalate into physical violence, and was unable to get back to sleep. The fact that there was an incredible, gusting Nor'wester blowing outside that sounded like it was going to lift the roof off didn't help. I got up and went through to the lounge, where I sat in semi-darkness on the sofa next to the youngest of our two cats, Gollum, until the wind died down.

I intend to follow-up American Rust with The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War, which looks at the relationship between the United States and Japan in the early years of the 20th century against the background of the ongoing westward expansion of the U.S. into the Pacific and Asia, an expansion that started with the events described in Manituana.

Still Looking for the Lost

2009-12-18T04:45:00.001+13:00

The Roads to Sata: A 2000-Mile Walk Through Japan arrived safely on Monday, just seven days after I ordered it from The Book Depository, so that was pretty impressive (international shipping is free, remember, although it should be noted that this doesn't apply to certain out-of-the way countries likes Bhutan).

I haven't started reading it yet as I'm still finishing off Looking for the Lost, which I'm thoroughly enjoying now after initially finding it difficult to get into. Looking for the Lost contains accounts of three different walks the author undertook in three different areas of Japan. In the second of these, Booth heads to the island of Kyushu and follows the route taken by Saigo Takamori (the real "last samurai") in 1877 when, in the dying days of the Satsuma Rebellion, he managed to evade capture by the numerically far superior government forces in Nobeoka and lead a band of several hundred followers cross country to his hometown of Kagoshima some 500km to the south, where he made his last stand on Mount Shiroyama. This part was the only part of this particular walk with which I was familiar, having hiked up Mount Shiroyama during a visit to Kagoshima in 2004.

Although my walking achievements pale into insignificance compared to those of Booth, I do feel a certain affinity with his basic approach. For a start he preferred sticking to roads, eating in restaurants, and sleeping with a roof over his head as opposed to staying away from roads and camping (he never carried a tent). He also maintained a strict rule of not using land transport of any kind during his walks, even on his rest days, a rule he called the "Protestant Walk Ethic."

In other respects our approaches to traveling on foot are very different. For example, while I enjoy having people around me I tend to keep to myself a lot while walking. Booth, on the other hand, was extremely gregarious, reveling in his encounters with all kinds of people, descriptions of which are among the most fascinating aspects of Looking for the Lost. As well, while I try to stay away from alcohol during long walks, Booth needed very little excuse to stop for a beer, often downing several bottles over the course of a day.

Booth has a Wikipedia page, but it's so perfunctory that I went searching for more information and came across this 1993 obituary from The Independent. One fact not included in the obituary but mentioned in the brief biography at the end of The Roads to Sata is that Booth had read most of Shakespeare's works by the age of ten.

Looking for the Lost

2009-12-15T10:50:00.002+13:00

By four o'clock a thick mist had hidden the hills. And at four-thirty, in the only grocer's shop I found to rest in that cold August day, I came face to face with one of the unlikeliest creatures you can encounter nowadays in the hinterland of Japan.
She was an unmarried college graduate, twenty-two or three, very bright and very pretty, who, despite studying for two years in Tokyo and working for another year at a day-care center in Miyazaki city, had come back to live with her aging parents on the shore of this lake in the middle of nowhere and help them run their shop. It was a move that almost anyone in her position, with her attractions, would have resisted, even though her mother was ill, she told me, and spent most of her time asleep. But the young woman looked content with her situation; or at least she looked more content than her father, who sat on the raised tatami of his living room, glaring suspiciously at us through his open screens for the entire time that I hung about his shop, which was as long as I could realistically make two large bottles of beer last, all ready to leap out and separate us at the first sign I displayed of committing aggravated rape.
"Aren't you bored here?" I asked the pretty young woman.
"Oh," she said, "I was born here, you see." Then she added, as though it explained the whole of life, "And there are fireworks in the summer."
. . . .

"What do you dislike most about this place?"
"The mosquitoes," she said brightly. "They're so big and black. Don't you think they are so big and black?"
I hadn't noticed any, I confessed, and she giggled. So I took my eyes off her face for a second and glanced around the shop for mosquitoes, and saw three of them, black and silent, feasting serenely between my knuckles.
I had better stay at the Fujiya Business Hotel, the pretty young woman told me. That's where she would stay if she were me. It was about three kilometers further up the road in the village of Murasho. Of course there was an old-fashioned ryokan as well, for men who came to fish in the lake. But a person of my tastes, accustomed to city life like she was, well, I should stay at the Fujiya Business Hotel. What on earth had they built a business hotel for, out here among these dams and mists? Oh, that was simply what they called it. It was more like a pension really, with a coffee shop downstairs and a few small bedrooms with showers. Sometimes she went to the coffee shop. There were no other coffee shops for miles and miles. Yes, sometimes she went to drink milk tea there. She would stay at the Fujiya, without a doubt, if she were me.

From Looking for the Lost: Journeys Through a Vanishing Japan by Alan Booth

Keyword Analysis (The walking fool)

2009-12-12T12:40:00.001+13:00

	Num	Perc.	Search Term
	9	12.00%	walking fool
	3	4.00%	The Sea at L'estaque
	3	4.00%	walking the tokaido
	2	2.67%	wanderlust quotes
. . .
	1	1.33%	walkin wardrobes nz
. . .
	1	1.33%	how to beat a creatinine test for kidney stones

Roads to Sata

2009-12-08T11:20:00.001+13:00

In Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit describes Alan Booth's Roads to Sata: A 2000-Mile Walk Through Japan as "delightful" and "a milestone in how far the literature of walking had come".

Originally published in 1985, Roads to Sata is an account of the author's journey on foot from Cape Soya, the northernmost point of Japan on the island of Hokkaido, to Cape Sata, the southernmost point on the island of Kyushu. It was one of the many books I borrowed from the Christchurch Public Library as a keen, relatively young student of things Japanese in the 1980s, long before I took up walking.

Solnit's mention of Roads to Sata made me want to read it again. Unfortunately it appears the library no longer has a copy. But it's still in print (in fact it's considered something of a classic now), so I've ordered it from The Book Depository (who, unlike Amazon, offer free shipping worldwide, as pointed out by a recent commenter). In the meantime I've borrowed the sequel, Looking for the Lost: Journeys Through a Vanishing Japan, which was published posthumously in 1995 (Booth died in 1993 at the age of 46).

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.

American Journeys and American exceptionalism

2009-12-05T17:00:00.001+13:00

The young man who sought the meaning of life among the poor and in religion, and the train driver who knew nothing of the world twenty miles either side of the tracks he drove, were both in their different ways expressions of American 'exceptionalism'. [Alexis de] Tocqueville, who coined the term, would have found their like in 1831. That is to say, at some level both shared the assumption of Americans, from the Pilgrim Fathers to George W. Bush, that America is different from all other countries because America is a country - the only country - blessed by God.

The idea is essential to the doctrine behind the War on Terror, to the strength of religion, the weakness of the social security system, the pervasiveness of the flag and other symbols of the nation; to its violence, its self-deceits and hypocrisy, its inability to confront its own contradictions, its childish fears and paranoia, and its mind-numbing provincialism. It is also, very likely, the reason for its power, its creativity, its capacity for self-renewal, its numberless heroic examples and the desire of people everywhere to live in the United States.

From American Journeys by Don Watson

Manituana and American exceptionalism

2009-12-03T13:20:00.001+13:00

You may recall my expression of puzzlement a while back at Wu Ming 1's statement in an interview that "Manituana is our novel on Iraq and the 'war on terror'". Well, things became a little clearer after I read the following exchange (from an interview on the Social Text website):

Marco Deseriis: Can you talk about Manituana in terms of political allegory relating to the War in Iraq.

Wu Ming 1: Right, because we started from a journalistic metaphor that was used in the weeks prior to the shock and awe bombing that began the  war in Iraq. This metaphor was  "the Atlantic Ocean is widening," with reference to the difference of opinion  between the US and Europe about the necessity of attacking Iraq, about the  complicity of Saddam Hussein's regime in the attacks of 9/11, and about Saddam  having hidden weapons of mass destruction. There was complete disagreement at the UN about this. And in Europe, most of the public, even  the right wing, was against attacking Iraq. For instance, in Italy 50% of the people are explicitly  fascist, but if I remember the figure correctly 92% of them were against the  war in Iraq. This marked a big  difference with what was going on in the US at the time. The same was true throughout  Europe. And many newspaper  articles kept talking about the widening gap between the EU and the US, one  that was never so great as at that moment. So we began to reflect on the history of the relationship  between the US and Europe. And of  course the beginning of that relationship was with the American Revolution and  the birth of the US as a separate country. At the beginning, the project was different. We wanted to write a novel set in 1876,  exactly one century after the revolution.  But one set in a parallel reality in which George Washington had been  defeated. This involved  reinventing a completely different reality, which was very difficult to handle, to the extent that we weren't able to imagine the changes that would be  necessary. So we came  independently to a conclusion: why imagine an alternate reality when the  American Revolution itself contains so many different realities, depending on  the different point of view that you choose? If you choose the point of view of Native Americans, the  American Revolution is something totally different. It's something really far away from what one expects. So we decided to write a novel set in  1775, at the beginning of the revolution, and lasting the whole course of the  war, until the Treaty of Paris, when the British Empire acknowledges the existence  of the US as a separate country.

Ashley Dawson: And so having written the novel, what do you make of the discourse of American exceptionalism?

Wu Ming 1: It's the birth of American exceptionalism; it's reflected in all the discourses and conversations that you find in the novel.

Ashley Dawson: But did your perspective on these questions change in the writing?

Wu Ming 1: I don't know what we thought at the beginning. It's the curse of  knowledge, that when you know something you don't remember how it was not to  know it. But it's a book on  American exceptionalism, seen from Europe. There are some conversations in the London section of the  novel that are deeply allegorical of American exceptionalism, seen from a  European perspective. And American  exceptionalism is still there; Obama is an exceptionalist like Bush. Of course, the politics are different,  but the exceptionalist assumptions are still there: the key role that America  has to play on the world stage, etcetera.  "We are the chosen ones" is the subtext underlying every discourse,  whether it's Bush or Obama.