Thursday 15 November 2012

Psychedelic Microwaves: Japanese tour! Day 18


So its 3:14am, I'm in a Denny's just outside Sengoku station in Tokyo. My hostel is quite a way away. It would probably cost 4 or 5 thousand yen for a taxi, that's about 50 or 60 Australian dollars. I'm waiting here for the trains to start running again. We had dinner somewhere near Nogato, we managed to get to Ikebukuro before we ran out of trains. We decided to walk it, we thought it would probably take about 2 hours. We’ve come about a third of the way. My feet were starting to hurt so I thought I'd give them a rest. My boots were not made for walking. Denny's has a strange charm to it, it's kind of tacky, well it's an American style diner, with very Japanese meals, and really nice desserts, the lighting is easy on the eyes and the light smooth jazz in the background is easy on the ears. The fact that I'm in here, warm, with coffee, about to order pancakes, and not outside walking km after km in bad boots makes it extraordinarily appealing.

It seems like walking endlessly by the side of the road, either due to bad directions/map reading or just being clueless or something, is becoming a bit of a trend on this trip. Apart from one particular roadside trek in Kyoto, we've usually taken it in our stride... please pardon that pun, I couldn't control myself. I mean, I'm clearly a little bit out my mind. You know my current situation, please forgive me...

My fondest memory of roadside meandering with Skye was when we were in Malaysia. We got the bus from Kuala Lumpur to Kuala Selangor. I'd looked at the map and had it imprinted in my mind, and on my phone. We followed the directions exactly, in the pouring tropical rain. We were actually loving it. We had to walk alongside a busy highway on the grass verge. We saw mudskippers. We came to a little fishing town, kids riding motorbikes etc. the roads got smaller, the likelihood of our hotel being where the map said it was diminished quickly. The rain did not. We asked for directions and found we were on the wrong side of the river. The map was totally wrong. Our spirits got low. We saw a couple of monitor lizards. They were magnificent. We pressed on. We had a man in a car try to tell us he was a taxi, as he casually pointed toward a sticker on his door that had the word gladiator on it. Needless to say we did not get in the gladiators car. We made it to the hotel eventually, everything soaking wet, passports included.

It’s situations like that and the one I find myself in now that make travelling that much more interesting. You experience where you are more than you ever could on the subway. Speaking of which, the time has come for me to get into an underground tube to take me home to bed. My coffee has been drunk, my pancakes eaten, my feet well rested. Goodnight.

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