Grassy Adventures
by projecthitchhiker on August 9, 2008
in Hitchhiking, Japan
People have been emailing me, telling me that I don’t post regularly enough, so here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to do a short post a week with a couple of photos (in addition to when I actually have something to say, rather than just reminiscing). Just to get me in the habit of posting something (however brief) every week. I’m just going to include random photos that I like or that have a story behind them.
Apparently, this weeks theme is grassy photos.
This one was taken in summer 2003, on the dikes of Grand Pre, Nova Scotia.
I had this crazy idea that I would walk the length of Nova Scotia, from Yarmouth to the Northern tip of Cape Breton. When I started telling my friends I was going to do it, they either wouldn’t believe me, or would tell me I was crazy and pointed out that I didn’t even really like walking (which is true).
It took me about a month and a half to walk the thousand or so kilometers — I took lots of breaks in towns I liked and generally kept a pretty slow pace. Just me, a giant blue backpack from the seventies, and about 15 pounds of granola bars.I had plans to write and publish a short travellogue about the trip, but as it turned out, a solo hiking trip through rural Nova Scotia isn’t terribly exciting on paper. Mostly because this was shortly after Fat Mike had transformed, and I was still terribly shy.
Highlights of the trip include waking up to giant waves crashing into my bivy sack because I camped too close to the ocean at low tide; spending the most intense lightning storm I’ve ever experienced camped behind a parking meter factory with my girlfriend who was visiting at the time (before we realized what the building was, I remember scratching my head at the end of this field of waist high grass and thinking, why the hell are there parking meters in the middle of the grass?); and the hospitality (and booze) of friends of friends all across the province.
This picture was from a hitchhiking trip in summer 2005 from Kumamoto (Kyushu, Japan) to Yakushima (an island south of Kyushu) with my college buddy Todd. When we finally got to the island, the locals kept on acting really surprised to see us (more than usual). We eventually found out that there was a vicious typhoon headed straight for the island and all the tourists (and a lot of the locals) had fled to the mainland (the ferry to the island had been mysteriously empty…). We did a quick 2 day mountain bike tour and made it out on the last ferry just before the island got hammered.
Todd has an amazing ability to pick up languages faster than probably anyone I know. One thing I’ve learned from watching him is that you can’t be attached to perfection. This is huge. In other words, take risks with your speaking, make a complete ass of yourself, laugh, and learn from your mistakes.