Advertisement
Published: October 14th 2007
Edit Blog Post
"Yeah, sure, that sounds like a good weekend away" I thought when the invite email came around. A weekend with friends (some I hadn't yet met in person, but knew they'd be good company) somewhere I hadn't been before - I'm always up for that. I checked out the place online, the Hattoji International Villa, 20 km from a middle of nowhere train staion. Yep, that's what you call getting away for a quiet weekend.
Hang on...... that's the weekend of the taiko (Japanese drums) festival. B****r, I was going to go to that. Can't be helped, already have my name down for the Okayama trip. (I had recently started going to the group's practises, but was very much still in the beginner department :-)
A month or so later when the taiko practises picked up pace........ 'oh, spose I get to go to next year's festival at least.'
A couple of weeks before........ 'these guys are really good, would've been cool to see them perform.' Was chatting with a couple of them at practise one night saying it was a pity I had promised to go away that weekend, and it was all so simple
- 'Come back from Okayama' they said, 'then go back again. Please come back.......' Ok, I didn't adopt the idea completely, but the conversation was enough to prompt me to send an apologetic plea to one of the organisers of the weekend, asking if it would really upset the apple cart if I only stayed one night.
Fast forward a couple of weeks and after driving an hour or so into one of the neighbouring prefectures I'm on the train heading to Okayama. With most of the day to kill in Okayama because I've arranged to meet a couple of the others early that evening I check out Kurashiki and some of the sights withing walking distance of Okayama station. I then get on another train for a half hour ride to Station In The Middle Of Nowhere (actually that's misleading - there's so many train stations in the 'inaka' middle of nowhere). My friend then gets delayed so I decide to go walkabout to see what if anything there is around this place. Maybe I could just start walking toward the villa and meet them there.
''Hattoji International Villa - 20km'' ....... or maybe I might not. As
it turns out the Lawsons convenience store seems to be the most happening place in town, and I head back to the train station to await my friend.
We decide on getting a taxi out to the villa, partly influenced by the fact that the buses stopped running a couple of hours before we were ready to head up there, but as it turns out we're the first ones to arrive. The place is very well set up and more than spacious enough for the seven of us.
Three of us went on a sunrise walkabout to check out our surrounds, which had actually been the set for Imamura Shohei's 1989 film Kuroi ame (Black Rain). Though that weekend it was more a case of Seven Sleeping Samurai..........
Breakfast done, a ride back down the mountain to the station at nowhere.
I'm off to the taiko :-) *Taiko needs to be seen live to be really appreciated.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.081s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 11; qc: 29; dbt: 0.0296s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb