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miscellaneous scraps, may p - june q, 2002 (UNPUBLISHED)
the following excerpts are copied from various emails to people that didn't make it into weekly steve's. this was mainly because i was also trying to pack my apartment and have goodbye parties and do as many things as i could before leaving. anyway, i finally had some time to put some of them up. enjoy! (again, these are largely unedited. sorry!)
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high on sulfur
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chris prince is visiting! and to celebrate, we decided to show him around climber style. it just so happened that on the same weekend, my friend morooka-san and one of his old buddies were planning a trip to yatsugatake, the site of japan's highest natural onsen at 2,150m. what beter way to introduce chris to the land than guide him up to a hard to reach onsen where you can sit naked in naturally hot water? exactly! in hindsight, however, we probably should have been a little easier on him, the poor kid. suffering from jet lag and not hiking in a while, he had a nice work out. :)
the weather was incredible, we hiked up and up and poor chris was not used to carrying the weight of him and his pack up big hills. we took our time though, sweating in the cold wind from a cloudless sky. we got to our campsite in after about 3 hours and headed for the onsen (hot spring) that was located on the bank of a small sized mountain river. the onsen was basically a little square tub made out of rocks and gravel on the bottom with a bit of wood around the top side to stand on, filled with naturally hot, naturally sulfurous, naturally dirty, white water pumped in from an underground spring somewhere in the volcanic earth. it is advertised as the highest natural onsen in all of japan.
it's only big enough for about 4 people at a time, and when we arrived, there were three nice old ladies bathing, laughing and talking. we politely waited while an old japanese guy ahead of us (guys love to bath with women) quikly stripped and jumped in next to the old ladies, who laughed and joked and took pictures. after a while, they told us to look the other way so they could get out, so we stared at the gravel, talking and waiting for the babble of the old ladies to pass and apologize for making us wait, to which we apologized for making them hurry, etc, etc. we got naked and jumped in the hot water, just soaking, until a group of seven old japanese guys with beer laughed and stumbled down the slope. they jumped in and told the old guy who jumped in with the old ladies to take a picture of us. he couldn't figure out how to work the camera for the life of him, and chris and i were laughing are asses off at the chorus of instructions and the old guy who kept on getting up naked to run to the man, point at the button, then run back to the pool. back and forth twice. we finally got my japanese friend to take pictures of us all smiling in the white water.
it was awesome. we ate good food that night, drank some simply excellent local concoction of sweet rice wine (of which chris and i both bought a bottle of to take home), laughed, and then went back into the sulfur bath two more times when the wine wore off and we got cold again. the last time chris decided to sleep and my japanese friends and i hiked up to the onsen at around 9 at night, under a completely cold and cloudless night, the light of a full moon so bright our shadows were sharp and clear on the ground. we soaked for about an hour, talking about the meaning of life, death, and human clones and mice with human ears on their backs. no culture here, just people.
anyway, i loved it. the next day we hiked up to the peaks of the mountains, about 2600 meters up, it was cold and chris was dead tired. we got rained on as we were hiking back down the mountain and it felt great. at times it was still sunny as it was raining. all in all it was an excellent trip. unfortunately, when we got back to the car we found that someone had broken the back window of my japanese friend's car and stolen about 150 bucks from his wallet. that put a huge damper on things because we had to go to the police station and fill out paperwork for hours and hours. the stupid cop dindn't have a clue. there was another car that got busted into as well, and that was also at the police station. the dumb cop asked them something like 'do you know the address of the criminal?'. they just sorta stood there and said '....uh....no.'
i think we had to have a good dose of reality because we were all too happy. our collective satisfaction was enough to piss off the little demons hanging around so they decided we needed a healthy reminder of what the world really is like. ah well. it didn't deter us for too long, cause we went to another onsen to wash up and eat excellent food before driving home. :)
more coming! stay tuned...