From the Mountains, Where They Carried Heavy Crosses

I found the name puzzling. "Sabae"  literally means Mackerel Bay, but the sea was nowhere to be found.  Viewed from my perch atop the temple grounds, all I could see through its Edo period gate were perfectly framed hills, rolling one into another, all covered in fresh green, dazzling the eyes. 

I'd found the old post road rather quickly.  I'd needed the GPS to guide me away from the station, but upon approach, it was quite obvious, the narrow stretch now a modern shopping arcade, if modern were the 1960s.  I'll revisit it when I finish a future walk here.  My intent today was to walk from this express train stop, down to Imajo, which is serviced only by local trains, but is where I left off in December 2013.   In completing this 20 km section, I'll later walk the remaining 90km as day-trips between express stops.  Easy in, easy out.      

Before leaving the temple, I sat awhile to read of this town's history on wikipedia, looking to see which renowned public figures were Sabae-ites.  But all I found were politicians, sports heroes, minor actresses, all strangers to me.  So I descended the stone temple steps worn and curved, signifying that others had enjoyed this same view over the centuries.  As I rounded the bottom and moved south, I passed before the general store, its hexagonal windows resembling those of Vietnam.

I moved beyond town, and crossed a broad river.  Beneath me, a flotilla of turtles flowed just off a sandbank.  The far bank was more village than town. The countryside began to re-exert itself, the houses growing more space between them, allowing the sky to cut a broad figure, challenged only by higher peaks to the east, slowly shedding their remaining snow drip by drip under the unseasonal heat.  Sharing this same sky was a large sign telling me the history of the sake distillery behind me.  Sadly the sign had outlived the distillery itself, the weathered and dusty crates visible behind dusty and broken glass.  And where the sky receded again, I found the city of Takefu. 

Bizarrely, I have a small role in the history of this place.   A few years ago, I came up here to take on a job I was offered.  It was a simple one-off, and I doubt that I was in the city for more than two hours.  Not long afterward, I'd received a mysterious phone call from a young woman who had gotten my number from the company who had contracted me.  She told me that she'd met me that day, and was hoping that we could get together for coffee and a chat.  I had absolutely no recollection of her, and at any rate, no interest in meeting her anyway.  I explained that I was married and had a young child, and that I wasn't looking to play around.  That ended the conversation at that particular occasion, but it hadn't ended the phone calls.  Within a few weeks she called me again, the second of what was probably four or five phone calls. They'd all end with my telling her that I wasn't interested in starting any sort of affair, which were her obvious intentions.  Ironically enough, it was she who provided the ultimate end to the conversation.  I noticed that she would repeatedly mention Poland, and express her fondness for Chopin, being a classical pianist herself.  When I asked why, she said, "Isn't that where you told me you were from?"  It was immediately clear that she'd confused me for someone else.  With a quick and gentle rebuke, I told her that she had the wrong guy, hung up, and I never heard from her again.

Takefu receded now as well, and I found myself walking in true farmland, between paddies flooded and reflecting cloudy sky.  I followed footprints of dried mud beside the small canal ever rushing to my right.  Flowers lit up the banks of the paddies with a brilliant blue.   This long and winding road led me to the hills above Imajo.  I was upon them before long, and it seemed as if the steep uphill that followed was a reward for the straight lines I'd been moving along since morning.  Yunoo Pass wasn't too high, but I was winded by the top.   I gazed down upon Imajo itself, this being the third and perhaps final time I'd visit.  I had wanted to get in earlier and look around, but I'd dawdled a bit, the overall walk today being one of the better ones, all prettily remote and unspoiled.  So yet again I found myself racing for a train I absolutely had to catch, literally running along the town's main street. But my eye did happen to catch a directional sign for a hiking path up a nearby mount, and as the mental footnote formed itself with almost an audible click, I reminded myself to never say never.   During the train journey home, I wondered about all the glory that I casually stroll past as my attention remains ever focused on the ancient trail beneath my feet. What else is out there, laying just beyond the edges of my knowledge and imagination?

MAP:  http://latlonglab.yahoo.co.jp/route/watch?id=c4ca6df40c407c38a8bda476d1d97e46

On the turntable:  "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Sdtk)"
On the nighttable:  "To Myanmar with Love"
 

Sunday Papers: Will Self

“I’ve taken to long-distance walking as a means of dissolving the mechanised matrix which compresses the space-time continuum, and decouples human from physical geography. So this isn’t walking for leisure -- that would be merely frivolous, or even for exercise -- which would be tedious. No, to underscore the seriousness of my project I like a walk which takes me to a meeting or an assignment; that way I can drag other people into my eotechnical world view. ‘How was your journey?’ they say. ‘Not bad,’ I reply. ‘Take long?’ they enquire. ‘About ten hours,’ I admit. ‘I walked here.’ My interlocutor goggles at me; if he took ten hours to get here, they’re undoubtedly thinking, will the meeting have to go on for twenty? As Emile Durkheim so sagely observed, a society’s space-time perceptions are a function of its social rhythm and its territory. So, by walking to the business meeting I have disrupted it just as surely as if I’d appeared stark naked with a peacock’s tail fanning out from my buttocks while mouthing Symbolist poetry.” 

On the turntable:  Koerner & Glover, "Live at the 400 Bar"

Nothing Gold can Stay

It was Kanazawa, and finding myself with a free afternoon, I decided to connect some dots.  While it appears from these pages that my feet are ever in motion (which is essentially true),  they move at a speed nowhere near that of the mind.  So it is that I have a ridiculous number of ideas for walks, and for the writing to inevitably follow.  This relationship of foot to hand could at one time have been compared to that of a simple dessert after a modest meal, but it has now shifted to that of an appetizer before a feast.      

One walk I envision is the complete Hōkkoku Kaidō, from its eastern end in Jōetsu, Niigata, 150 km along the coast to Kanazawa, then rounding south to connect with the Ōmi Kaidō which I'd begun in Imajō.  Numerous times I've walked a particular section while leading Walk Japan's Basho tour, so it seemed a good idea to knock off the 20 km that continued from there to my hotel.

I detrained in Tsubata and immediately jumped into the sole taxi waiting out in front of the quiet station. Hanging from the seat in front of me was an pamphlet for free cancer screenings.  I'd seen this type of thing before:  the ads for retirement homes; the ads for retirement services; the ads for grave stones.  It was a testament to just who was riding these cabs this far in the countryside.  

I had lunch in the shade of the michi-no-eki, overlooking a large patch of grass.  There was good ice cream here I remembered, but I forewent it to get moving.  I moved past a large soccer stadium built for god knows what, and carried on down a long straight stretch lined with shade trees, like the namiki of old.  I could imagine the cars of young lovers parked beneath them at night.  But from beyond them now in the full light of afternoon came the sound of things being pulled apart: the grinding of metal on metal; the gunning of an engine.  Something large was being torn out of existence.  

Thankfully the uguisu warbled in a stronger voice, one that seemed to punctuate my footfalls along this particular section.  It dawned on me that I don't often write about things I hear while walking.  For too much of the time, I've got music turned on, so as to blot out the roar of the traffic, and to temper the unpleasantness of walking the busier roads.  (Though on numerous occasions music has taken on the part of the muse.) And due to a recently deceased iPod, I could hear it all today, most especially the racket coming from the loudspeaker-mounted vehicles 'campaigning' for the election two days off.   These vehicles were most active in the rather new suburban community I eventually found myself in.  There was no real sense of history here at all, nor in the campaign messages echoing off its cheap frontages.

My road fed eventually into an older looking shopping street, which had a couple of ancient stone markers, designating lesser arteries diverging from this great thoroughfare.  Despite the Hōkkoku Kaidō's 1200 year history, very little remains but these stones, in a country spurred forward by the principle of the old being forcibly evicted by the new, a fact emphasized most magnificently by the cherry blossoms bursting above my head.         

I felt I needed a rest so took the opportunity to sit in a bus shelter, built like a little concrete hut as protection in these snowy northern climes.  I badly needed to pee, but was still in the midst of the 'burbs.  So having finished my bottle of tea, I began to refill it, thankfully with a volume slightly less than its allotted 500 ml.   That done, I dumped the warm contents into a drain, then, like a mafioso tossing away his weapon after a hit, disposed of the evidence in a bin beside a vending machine.  A few blocks up, my greeting to a dapper elderly gent went unreturned, which didn't set such a good example for the schoolkids playing within earshot.  Did his blanking me mean that word was already out about my piss-bottle antics?

I walked this road for the next hour or so. It wasn't particularly busy or noisy, but was rather bland on the eye.  The Kaidō eventually parted from it, leading diagonally away to the left, its surface now cobbled and somewhat preserved, leading me into a city that does a remarkable job of caring for its history.  I walked along it, passing old shops with wooden frontages, against the stream of high school students spilling out of a school at the top of the hill.  

I brought my day to a conclusion in an old machiya converted into a coffee shop.  There was an gallery attached to the front, where a fellow with a mullet was hanging photographs, the bowler hat atop his head straight out of A Clockwork Orange.  He was obviously one of this city's many bohemians, but I felt he looked a little unfinished without facial hair of some sort.  The cafe was run by two attractive middle-aged women, who I took to be sisters, not so much for any resemblance of face, but for their admiringly buxom figures.   

It was only a couple of kilometers from here to the end of my walk, a delightful zigzag amongst interesting little museums and funky galleries.  Kanazawa is certainly one of the most charming of Japan's regional cities, its name befitting a place filled with treasures far greater than I had ever imagined.  In a way, it is a shame that these treasures will be shared with the residents of Tokyo, who can now reach the city by Shinkansen in two and a half hours.  I fear for the character that will thus be lost in this town.  Luckily this year I will be able to get back up here a few more times while on tour, and will try to find some time to get out and explore.  But isn't this exactly the point of these walks in the first place, to get out amongst this country's history?  In this particular case, it is history in motion rather than history simply memorialized, and I am lucky to see it while it still exists. 

MAP:  http://latlonglab.yahoo.co.jp/route/watch?id=4872fd06a816f3eadf96e851b258d57a

On the turntable:  "1234: Punk & New Wave 1976-1979"
On the nighttable:  Will Self, "Psychogeography"

(untitled)

It takes so little
To shape a culture.
The symbiosis of water.

On the turntable:  "Putumayo Present Italian Cafe"

(untitled)

Remnants of the Taira,
Hide themselves in the deep hills,
To be found by Chinese.

On the turntable:  "Home Cookin'"

(untitled)

Shapes and shades.
Catching a glimpse of Edo,
Beneath the mask of spring.

On the turntable:  "Cold Mountain (Sdtk)"

(untitled)

Cutting a route
Through springtime clouds.
Nokogiriyama.

On the turntable:  The Orb, "Back to Mine"

(untitled)

Beyond the edges of wifi,
Exists an entire world.

On the turntable:  "The Rough Guide to Delta Blues"

 

(untitled)

There is still
Great beauty to be found,
Between the branches.

On the turntable:  "Grosse Point Blank"

(untitled)

As do the blossoms
So does the rain.
Deepening spring.

On the turntable; The English Beat, "I Can't Stop It"

(untitled)

In this remote corner,
The old and the new
Continue the dance.

On the turntable:  "Freedom of Choice"

Sunday papers: W. Somerset Maugham

"I would sooner be bored by Proust than amused by anybody else."  

On the turntable:  "Cajun early recordings"

(untitled)

Young and brazen,
Blossoms wave farewell to
The receding back of winter.

On the turntable:  "Samba Soul 70!"

(untitled)

Despite these twenty years,
My jaded eyes can still find beauty,
In a well-crafted cliche.

On the turntable:  "The Rough Guide to China"
 

(untitled)

Circles within circles.
Spring makes its way
Along the pilgrim's path.

On the turntable:  "The Rough Guide to Irish Music"

(untitled)

Late snow finds those
Who choose to hide
Above the terraces.


On the turntable:  Putumayo presents Rumba Flamenco"

(untitled)

Beauty on the cusp.
It's not the destination,
But in the journey.

On the turntable:  "The Rough Guide to Franco"

Sunday Papers: Thich Nhat Hahn

"My actions are my only true belongings."


On the turntable:  "Less than Zero (Sdtk)"

A Pearl, Inle

The only sound was that of a single oar pushing aside still water.  A man stood at the bow, turning the oar in figure eights with his leg, the wood trapped in the nook between calf and thigh.  The boat drifted toward a series of dark teak structures that would be my digs for the night, a semi-circular oasis surrounding a lush jungle garden.  Once the boat reached the dock, all the forward motion of the previous ten days came to a complete halt.

To reach this stillness required a great deal of speed and noise.  Motorbikes swarmed my car as it made its way out of Mandalay, nearly all the riders sensibly helmeted.   One exception was a longyi-clad  grandfather sitting cross-legged on the back, calm and composed as the driver raced through the intersection.  The highway to the airport was brimming with life, as vehicles and pedestrians alike utilized this well paved stretch.  A young woman sat with her toddler in the shade of a mile marker.  A young monklet trailed a long line of older monks, naughtily dipping into his begging bowl.  

My plane followed the hilltop pagodas to a landing strip currently being extended to handle the bigger jets to come.   At the moment this Heho airport was quite small, and its name had me humming an old punk anthem by The Ramones.  I found my driver and to my surprise was led to nice 4x4, from whose high seats I had a good view of the surrounding countryside. The houses here looked at lot sturdier than those of the lowlands, the brick walls offering more protection against the cold at this high altitude of 1200 meters.   Eventually, the road led down through a series of S-turns, above which the hillsides had been horribly shorn of trees.  The former military government had made a great deal of money from timber exports, and only 25% of Myanmar's native forest remains. 

The road leveled out, and we had returned to the heat of the plains.  But unlike further south, there was a richer color to the earth.   A couple of new bungalow hotels spread across the open land, the back of their compounds fortified by spiky sugarcane fields.  The colors deepened further the closer we got to the lake, arriving eventually at the bright green of newly planted rice.  

I was led to a long pirogue fitted with a dragonfly's tail of an engine.  It roared to life as I joined a procession of tourists in similar boats, completely ignored by locals and wildlife alike.  My own boat was the only one to leave the main channel, as it cut its way through a narrow channel lined with grass.  A lone egret stood still atop a high stalk.  Pagodas and huts sat upon platforms built a few meters over the water.  Beside them, men were hoeing their fields which were comprised of weeds and earth pulled up from the bed of the lake, then packed down into long rows.  Beyond this, the Inle Princess Hotel rose up, and for a moment, I expected to be greeted by Col. Kurtz himself.     

My own bungalow was at the very edge of the compound. I did very little for the next 24 hours but sit on my back deck, trying to read but constantly pulled away by the scenery.  Plumes of smoke rose from the plains and high hills beyond, as the farmers burned off large swaths of former growth in order to prepare the soil for the impending rice planting.  Some of these bits of black ash came spinning along the breeze and onto the surface of the pond before me.  A cowherd was on the other side, sitting in the shade of a lone banana tree as his animals plodded along through the grass.  A group of puppies was nearby, yelping and nipping at each other and their mother who was acting nonchalant.  The air was rich with birdsong, including one with a particularly demented scream.  At the high heat of mid-afternoon, all life seemed to disappear completely, leaving behind a silence near complete but for the rustling leaves of the banana tree, an almost butane hiss which almost seemed to contribute to the heat.    I found myself feeling very far away from the world.  There had been protests and mass arrests a few days earlier in Yangon, which had me keeping a single cautious eye out for further developments.  But in a secluded place like this, it was easy to ignore all political problems.  Rather than worry, I went inside to crawl beneath the mosquito netting for a nap.


The following day, my boat returned to take me out on the lake proper.  It was of a far greater expanse than I'd expected,  and breathtakingly lit by the sun of morning.  Silhouetted against the purple hills were hundreds of men in their respective boats, fishing or dredging up weeds to build new seed beds.  They stood in their narrow pirogues with the sure-footedness of water fowl, and equally muscled and lean.  The women seemed to all be in the market, sitting on plastic sheets and selling their wares.  A large majority were Shan, in their tell-tale colored blouses and head scarves.  The only thing in motion were the foreign tourists, looking large and lumbering as they made their way between the shaded rows.  The Burmese by comparison were all in the Phaung Daw Oo Paya pagoda that was quite busy this market day.   A number of people were applying gold to the five gold orbs that no longer had any resemblance to the Buddha statues that they had started as. After seeing the gold pounders in Mandalay, I had no interest in joining them, so turned and made my way back to my boat, which bobbed alongside dozens of others in the still water of the canal.  With a pull of the cable, the engine started with a roar, a roar followed by a series of subsequent roars, which led me all the way back to Kyoto, to my home, and to this very desk.


On the turntable:  "Urgh!  A Music War"
On the nighttable:  Daniel Mason, "The Piano Tuner"

Down in Mandalay

 

Few things spur the traveler on like a difficult-to-reach place with a poetic name.  That the name Mandalay was straight out of an actual poem by an actual poet added further zeal, despite the fact that the poet himself had never actually been there.  As it was, my own road to Mandalay was essentially a water route, followed by a small-prop plane that traced a simple arc high above during its quick thirty minute flight.  A fitting shortcut I suppose in an age where a quip holds far more weight than even the most masterfully crafted verse.    

And on first glimpse, the city seems to be resting on its laurels.  It was always a city prone to fire, and a series of fires during the 1980s wiped out whatever charm Kipling imagined it to have.   It has been rebuilt by the subsequent waves of Chinese immigrants,  along lines more practical than aesthetic.  Even the great palace that was the city's heart was destroyed during the war, and it could be said that the final king who ruled from there hadn't a heart at all, having arranged for the murder of seventy-two of his relatives in order to consolidate his power.  

Despite all this, the city still held it charm, in a way that a similarly sprawling Chiang Mai does.  In both cases, the residents lived at a far slower pace than their brethren in the larger commercial centers to the south. It was a city of life lived out on the streets, of bicycles, vendors, and ambling monks.  The subdued hues of the garb of the latter found a counterpoint in the young boys who were to soon join their ranks.  These aspiring novices were ushered out of the world of attachment with great aplomb.  Dressed in the finery of the ancient royals, they were paraded around the city in the back of pickup trucks, perched atop cheap plastic chairs.  Their female counterparts were similarly dressed up in metallic pink, ready to undertake an ear-boring ceremony, the idea of  which I found great ironic glee, at this Buddhist act of attachment.

Many of these pickups wound up at Mahamuni Paya, home to a Buddhist image supposedly constructed during the living Buddha's lifetime, which would contradict his very teachings. Regardless, this image was considered to be the most sacred in Burma.   As at Golden Rock, men were allowed to affix small sheets of gold to the image, in the hope of accruing spiritual merit.  Many generations of applied gold had given the Buddha a somewhat lumpy look, yet somehow, the ungilded face (lovingly washed every morning at 4 a.m. in a ceremony open to the public) has maintained its proportion to the body.  Far more interesting to me were the unadorned statues elsewhere on the temple grounds.  These were the ultimate travelers, having been carried from sacked capital to sacked capital, bearing such poetic names as Angkor Wat, Ayutthaya, Mrauk U.  Rather than good travel stories, these statues offered the power of healing, with believers rubbing a spot corresponding to their own physical ailment.        

We headed next to where Buddha's gold leaf was manufactured.  It was a noisy place, due to three bare-chested men swinging their sledgehammers down upon small nuggets laid atop large stones.  It looked to be brutal work, bent forward at the waist, their heavy hammers coming down again and again in perfect syncopation.  Their foreman seemed oblivious to the noise, sitting nearby reading a newspaper.  It was as close to a vision of slavery as I've ever seen, though I know that there are far worse working conditions out there in the world.  I made my departure after only a few minutes, unable to take any more.  There was a young woman out there, standing in the sun with her crying infant.  She wasn't a beggar per se, and I generally don't give money to beggars anyway, but something in me made me hand her five dollars.  The woman seemed positively thrilled.  I wondered if, in the watchful eyes of the Buddha, my actions deemed me greater merit that affixing small pieces of precious metal to a goddamned statue. 



While Mandalay had served as Burma's final royal capital, three former capitals had existed on the city's outskirts.  The most impressive of these was Inwa,  which like Bagan, was simply a mere collection of ruined stupas spread across a dusty plain.  But there was a more lived-in feeling here, with small villages tucked between the brick towers, and the abundance of swamp and canals bringing more color to the land.  Here too were the obligatory horse-carts, but here they served as traffic of their own, long queues spreading along the narrow lanes that wended their way through the towering brick pyramids.  

Another capital was Sagaing, whose main feature was the temples spreading across the hillside, interconnected by covered staircases.  I was most impressive with Umin Thounzeh, a narrow cave that housed a crescent of thirty Buddhas that was devoid of life but for a sleeping caretaker.  It reminded me somewhat of other similar temples I'd seen on the Indian subcontinent, bringing home yet again just how Indian Burma was, little surprise considering that the British had ruled this country as a province of its larger neighbor to the west.   A very interesting place Myanmar, with people somewhat resembling Thais, with an South Indian culture, and an undefinable Chinese element flowing beneath.   

The third of the former capitals was Amarapura.  The town has essentially been swallowed up by greater Mandalay, with little of the old capital remaining.  Most notable was the U-Bein bridge, a masterpiece of teak stretching across the waters.  I had been exposed to teak before on previous journeys to SE Asia, but it was here in Burma that I truly fell in love with it.  One of the old Mandalay palace buildings had been recycled into a monastery nearby, and the carvings upon its beams and doors were truly magnificent.  Here at the bridge, these carvings seemed brought to life, in the  figures crossing its length, backlit by the sun.  Watching the sun set behind its spans is quite popular here, but I'd already been let down somewhat by sunset the previous night atop Mandalay Hill, as the hazy air diminished its glory,  unable to penetrate this dust globe that is the dry season in Myanmar.

It was far nicer to contemplate the sunset from the pool at my hotel,  and the musicians warming up for that night's show somewhere beyond the swaying palms.  To me, the name of Mandalay are syllables blown upon the wind, a whisper.  And with a similar light touch, a bird suddenly swooped down to drink from the pool, leaving behind a handful of feathers to drift across the surface of time.



On the turntable:  "The Library Of Congress Archive Of Folk Culture: Anglo-American Ballads, Volume One"
On the nighttable:  Rory MacClean, "Under the Dragon"