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Tottori
Beautiful. This was literally the view when I scrambled up the hill next to our campsite, wondering where the dunes were. A fair amount has happened since my last post. After a day of recovery, I spent Monday wandering around Kyoto looking at the tourist sights. I figure that once classes really start, I'll have serious problems seeing much of the beautiful place I'm living in. So I picked a corner of the city, strapped on my Pumas, and sojourned into the Golden Week throngs. I discovered a couple of cool out-of-the-way places, got lost in a graveyard on a hillside (in a metaphor of immortality, I decided I would emerge victorious on the other side of the graveyard; unfortunately, the other side was locked and I had to come back out of the graveyard the way I came. Which gives me a very strange metaphor for my future), and got hit on by a bunch of high school girls trying to see if I understood Japanese by throwing lewd phrases at me and seeing if I'd turn around. All good times.
The next day was the day we were to head out to Tottori. Tottori is its own prefecture - but our guidebook to Japan devotes all of two pages to it. Yes,it's really that small and depopulated. Nonetheless, they
had free campsites (and we had camping gear at the center), beaches, sand dunes, and sand dune surfing. All of which sounded enticing, compounded by the fact that I felt like getting out of my host family's hair for a little bit.
Unfortunately, when we got to the Kyoto station, all of the buses out to Tottori were booked until 6:30 p.m or early the next day. None of us wanted to go home, so the four of us - Mike, Han, Sanghoon, and myself - decided to kill time until the bus arrived. This is actually much easier said than done; we had awoken early that day to get a quick start on the journey. We wandered around in a giant circle, sat near yet-another-cool-looking temple for a couple of hours, watched pidgeons do their thing, sat in Japanese fast-food places for way longer than they expected, and napped. A whole lot of nothing.
Anyway, we eventually left, and rode the bus for four or five hours. Han brought his Nano - which, without moving parts unlike my iPod, is impervious to the damaging effects of sand - and intelligently two sets of headphones and a splitter.
The campers
The four of us all wearing as many clothes as we brought with us. So it ended up not being that long and I got a good listen to some great music I hadn't heard before. We realized, though, we had no plan of action in Tottori: if we were not dropped off next to a sand dune, we would have no idea what to do.
Well, of course, we were dropped off in downtown Tottori and while not heavily populated, has enough traffic to preclude the possibility of setting up a tent along their main street. So we wandered around, found some hotels, and yakked until we communicated the idea that we were seeking a campsite. The four of us split a cab fare once we figured out where we needed to go, and somewhat magically managed to arrive at a nicely populated campsite with a few other tents for fairly little per capita cost and stress. We set up a pretty solid looking two-person tent, unrolled our three sleeping bags for four (!) people inside it, and imbibed some alcohol so we could actually get to sleep. Having three sleeping bags for four people is just bad times; don't ever do it. We all woke up with sore backs and cold
More Tottori
Beautiful, wide, vast. bodies.
In the morning, though, we were still curious about where these sand dunes were, so I - tired of uncomfortable sleep - arose and headed out to see what I could see. To my sheer astonishment, we had literally established camp in a small patch of forest completely surrounded by huge sand dunes. And they were beautiful.
We spent the day wandering around the dunes (which are HUGE and VAST; the pictures don't do it justice. We always thought we were close to the water until we realized we had been walking for more than an hour towards it without actually getting to it yet. There are just no discernable features on sand dunes, so they don't seem big), continued walking through the beach nearby, and then headed into the city.
We looked around for an onsen (Japanese bath house) to pass the time at, and finally found a really cheap one (350 yen; most run ten times that amount, easily, and up to thirty times that or more for a real good place). In retrospect, going to the least expensive bath house in a small, nonexpensive city was probably not one of the best ideas
Han and Sang
Han and Sang on top of the biggest dune. Swarms scramble toward us. we've ever had, but we didn't know that yet. It wasn't bad; just small and minimalist. You get the public communal showering and public hot sauna / pool, but that's it. Surprisingly, it wasn't that weird: once you think about the fact that you're talking to your buddies while naked and they're naked, you realize you don't care and they don't either. Who are you trying to impress?
Afterwards, we decided we'd have a barbeque back at the campsite. A good ol' fashioned American (goddamit) barbeque with beer, lots of meat, and burnin' things. But first we needed the equipment. So two of us set out in search of charcoal (without knowing the word: "Umm ... fire-stones ... you know, you cook with them, uh, outdoors; black, roundish") and failed miserably. In any case, though, we ran into a guy we now refer to as Bohemian guy. He smiled and waved at us across the street from inside a convenience store while we were wandering around looking for charcoal (mildly sketchy). He looked French Canadian, though, and we were clearly foreigners in a city that had no other foreigners that we could see for the entire time. He came
Me and the Guys
Mike takes a picture so I can be in one. Woot. over: it turned out he owned a club in Tottori, and gave us a special invite to a massive multiday summer party they have every year on the dunes. We'll see if that materializes. Additionally, he gave us the word for charcoal (sumi), and told us where to buy it (freakin' way far away). Disheartened, we decided to wander for a little more through the city, and popped into a hundred-yen store. And hit the motherload.
We stocked up on sumi, which we found there, a grill, matches, lighter fluid, plates, and chopsticks (yeah, not entirely American). On top of the world, we then headed over to a grocery store, where we bought some Sapporo Draft One (not a bad beer; unfortunately, I hear it may not actually be beer, but instead made from soy or something. Dunno if that one's true, tastes fine), a day-old everything-left-over bag of meats (some serious foodage for twenty bucks, especially when everything is normally in Japanese pricing - pay a lot for a little bit of perfection; the economic market of "paying medium for a lot of perfectionless" doesn't really exist), some pepper, some lettuce, and some kimchi (again, yeah, not entirely
Approaching the Dune
The approaching side of that dune. American). We went back to the campsite and had a real solid barbeque, spoiled only by the fact that the meat was pretty friggin' bad, and practically inedible once the kimchi ran out. Turns out that kimchi is pretty tasty!
Anyways, another discovery we made upon returning to camp was that the site had been invaded by Golden Week-ers. While previously it had been occupied healthily by a few other tents, it was now impossible to walk ten feet in any direction without bumping into something. We were floored by how many people came to Tottori. We "jo-kan-po"ed for sleeping bag shifts, ultimately ignoring them and sleeping (poorly) through them, and then got up in the morning to find out why our neighbors were being so noisy.
These were the people living my dream.
I arose somewhat disoriented and sore and would've been hesitant to approach them given my condition, except that my buddies had already talked to them drawn by the delicious smells and the fact that saying "Wow, that looks delicious" in Japanese yields food at almost 100 percent certainty. They were a group of funny, relaxed, nice people who were motorcycling around Japan.
Camels!
Yes, they really did import campels. Rockin'. They had met last night, pooled resources (as apparently is the norm for such biker confluences) and had established quite a nice tent and food supply. One of the guys cooked me an amazing multicourse breakfast, and exchanged stories with me. I mostly just listened, but I loved these people: traveling around, enjoying life, meeting people, telling stories, and coming to understand themselves. Alas, the time came for them to roll out, and for us as well.
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Killeen
non-member comment
Envy
You make me want to be there with you! Perhaps not the bath house, though. :) Ah! Just reading your journal gives me shivers; I want to leave in an instant and go travel across the world! Thanks for the detail and the vivid pictures - it's so much fun to read about your trip as you take it!