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| Seriously. | |
On the Yoshino River, to be exact. I think this post was supposed to be about Sports Day, which was charming, and the Japanese school system which, I can't even, but I'm still not clear on whether I can post photos of students on this blog and students are annoyingly hard to avoid at schools. Please stay tuned. In any case, following two weeks of solid, cold-sweat, battery-acid sickness and misery, I got a chance to chill out and be only mildly and sporadically sad! For this I thank my fellow Awaji Island JETs, especially the impossibly sweet and gorgeous Ms. Wendy Yu, who organized a trip for six of us after the larger prefectural JET trip filled up. Although I so far mostly detest where I live and what I do, I feel hugely lucky to have fallen in with such a friendly, varied, and sane(ish) grab bag of adventurers.
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| Note the "ish." Hi, Ryan (right, bringin' the fun in). |
After a good half-day of driving for me - counting bakery detour, gelato detour, small getting-lost detour, and the worst cup of iced coffee ever squeezed from a sad embittered bean - we arrived in Central Shikoku. The landscape is drastically different from Awaji Island, or anyway
more: more vertical, more green, the forest even denser, darker, and mossier.
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| The gelato detour was worth it. Cute interior, and berets! Because when I think ice cream, I think wooly berets! |
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| View from our guesthouse. |
We were trying to figure out what these mountains reminded us of. They were alpine-steep, round-topped and cloud-snagging like the Smokies, with tree cover somewhere between the New Mexico Rockies, Nordic mixed evergreen-deciduous woods, and jungley Taiwan...we finally decided that they looked like Shikoku mountains. Green and purty and unabashedly mountainous. Our guesthouse perched on a slope far above the river, a funky old farmhouse with beams smoke-blackened by the traditional indoor firepit. We barbecued criminal amounts of food and encountered nature in the form of tiny limes and chestnuts, a praying mantis, and a huge
mukade (Japan's dreaded poisonous giant centipede) which the boys enjoyed cremating with a blowtorch.
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| The pleasantly rustic facilities. |
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| Nice, individual futons. Ryan never did get his warmth pile. |
Have I ever mentioned that, when I was a Girl Scout, our troop leader skipped town with every cent of the cookie money that was supposed to take us all to Colorado for white-water rafting? I think that really happened. Gentry was an interesting town. So this trip was not only a fun outing but the
Fulfillment of a Dream Long Denied. (Okay: I have actually achieved rafting once before, in the Canadian Rockies, but it was veeery gentle. I reminded Grant about it. G: Really? Me: Yeah, remember that picture that used to be on our desk? G: Oh. Oh! Yeah, we did do that. I wonder where that picture is? So obviously, a thrilling adventure.) This trip was much better because 1) it actually happened 2) legitimate slight possibility of death 3) bagel sandwich lunch 4,5,6) BAGEL SANDWICH LUNCH 7) jumping off huge tall rocks. The company we used, Happy Raft, was fantastic: boho, warmly hospitable, competent, and did I mention the bagels. The fresh-baked bagels (Japan lacks for bagels).
Also the name provided some justification for my waking everyone up at seven a.m., after a boozy night, with a hearty, "Rise and shiiiine, Happy Rafters!!!" The sadist in me was pleased.
The trip itself is hard to describe. Eating facefuls of spume (heh heh, spume), countless waterfalls tumbling down dark gouges in the vertical slabs of green, trailing my hand in cool blue-green water. Grey, green, blue.
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| Shit gets real. |
These rapids are no joke, though. We didn't get to take cameras with us (though they brought mine to the lunch spot), nor would they have survived the trip, but I will post some of Happy Raft's pictures as soon as I receive them. I'm sure I made a variety of highly entertaining faces. My mental state at the moment sort of precludes heart-racing thrills or deep enjoyment, but I definitely had a nice and relaxing time. Afterwards for some reason we felt the need to document the moment, purikura style, sunkissed cheeks and ruffled hair and all.
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| That's Ryan eating Wendy's head, Anna, and me, with Minatsu and Cain below. |
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| If I could wear these ears around in real life I totally would. |
Then there was Italian food, obviously. Quite a ride.
