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"What a hell am I doing here?..." - My own thoughts… Spread over time there are lots of situations when this comes to my mind…
I guess the reasons that take us to do whatever we do can be so diverse as just doing because everybody does or just doing because it makes us feel good disregarding of what others think… The strange thing for me is that although I never take to much time thinking about what lead me to do something, there are lots of situations when I'm already into extreme situations wondering about what took me there… Two months ago, I was in Montesinho Natural Park in the north of Portugal trying to create some fall pictures. Along with the previous this fall wasn't very rainy. This meant that mushrooms where not easy to find and rivers had even less water than they did last year… After my first day along one of my favorite valleys I looked up and saw some hints that there would be a nice color display at sunset, so I drove uphill looking for a nice spot and after finding one I only stopped shooting when there was no longer light in the sky and my hands where freezing to the point I could not feel them anymore…
After packing all my gear and getting back into the car I stayed there in silence for some time wondering what would lead someone to be alone in a dirt road at 1400m with sub zero temperatures with the single purpose of enjoying the sunset… Being in this place at the north east extreme of the country looking down south reminded me that in several months I'll be in this region again, looking to the other extreme, this time not with photography as the main purpose but for starting the Transportugal (1000 km of mountain biking in 8 days, traversing the country from one extreme to the other)...
Again… Why did I get into do this?... Well I did not think much… At 1'st it looked like a good idea... Now I feel that having some kind of impossible mission in the horizon seams to give me energy for doing all sorts of positive things...
Some people ask me if I gave up photography in favor of mountain biking… It's true I'm dedicating less time photographing actively due to the time I spend with physical training… Still whatever I'm doing, I'm breathing the world around me and whatever the outcome may be the passion is certainly the same...
"thank you for your note... yes the ryokan got the key..." - the booking service attendant confirms that the temple in Mt. Koya received the key we forgot to deliver at checkout.
Those who had the patience to read my previous posts, will remember my description of our trip from Mt. Koya to Miyajima as an example on how everything goes according to expectations in Japan. The single small unexpected detail during that day was cased by me when I forgot to deliver the room key at checkout from the Henjoson-in temple…
I noticed I had the key in my pocket during the trip down Koyasan's Cable Car, and when we arrived at the Gokurakubasi station I asked the station manager if he could deliver the key back to the temple. Despite our language differences he understood my request and answered politely that he would… And so it was… And… For some reason I'm not amazed, this was the thing to expect...
Typically I finish one trip focused on the next… Not that there are no plans crossing my mind this time, but for some reason memories from Japan don't let go easily. Many have asked me about the trip, and many received the same kind of answer containing something on the lines of: "Between good and bad things Japan is still a civism lesson for everyone…"
"You know the sound of two hands clapping. What is the sound of one hand?"… - The 1'st "Zen koan" from Alex Kerr's book "Lost Japan"…
Besides travel guides this was the only book I took with me to Japan… The idea was to read it during the trip, but I only started reading on my trip back… Today when I woke up at 5 am due to jet lag reading the rest of the book looked like the thing to do…
While reading I wondered if I should have better read the book before or after the trip as I did. In one hand Alex's personal vision of Japan differs from what's written in travel guides in a way I found by myself to be closer to my own vision. On the other hand if I had started before the trip I would not have enough context to enjoy the book as I did…
One idea from the book is that Japan is fascinated by secrets and the quest is always more important than knowing the final answer… This means that most of my inner questions about Japan probably won't be answered, but at the same time the quest will make me wish to go back there again and again.
Like any other country Japan is far from perfect… Although being a pleasant and safe place, the country is visibly destroying it's natural beauty in trade of progress and there's a clear disconnect between the present and the past as western influences taken to extremes seam to dominate the life of Japanese people…
Kyoto is a good example of a disconnected place as far as I see it… I did not read much about the city, and I just took for granted from the travel guides that Kyoto should be the number one travel destination in Japan. Don't get me wrong, Kyoto is nice, but it's also a place where past seams to be disappearing bellow thick layers of concrete. The temples in Kyoto may be between the most magnificent in Japan, but somehow the silent and calm spirit of being in Japan does not seam to be there.
The proud owner of the Yamatake-Shõten restaurant in Takayma told me that Kyoto was a copy of Takayama, at that point I though he was exaggerating, but after arriving in Kyoto, I found out that he was just wrong… Kyoto may have been similar to Takayama in the past, but not anymore… Being small and isolated, Takayama looks much more genuine and appealing to my senses… I hope Japan will understand this on time for protecting the roots of each place...
As usual, when finishing a trip that we ready to start it… We come back thinking about the next time, but most probably the next time wont exist in the near future as there are other places to discover...
My quest is yet to be unfolded… I came back with more images that ever from any other place, but at first they look as disconnected and superficial as Kyoto was to my eyes… I'll have to give them and myself time to settle and find the way… I'll probably have to go back over and over again, but most probably my images will just show small steps... Secrets and prcecise answers don't look urgent anymore...
"yes we can change your reservation, no problem..." - The attendant at Japan Railways tells us that she can change our reservation so that we don't have to wait one hour for our next train…
In the day before I had one of my last silent meditation moments… I was at the sacred precinct in Koyasan, creating images of the temples at night. Each image took around 4 minutes so I had plenty of silence for myself. During my last couple of images (before exhausting the camera battery completely) I had the company of a monk doing his prays… I don't remember what I though about, only that my spirit was in peace…
(If you did not do so before, take a deep breath now)…On paper, our plans for the next day looked somehow crazy (they would probably be outside Japan): Our day started at 6 am, attending the morning prays in the Henjoson-in temple where we had spent the night (as Sara said in her comment to my previous post this is something someone has to do once in life), at 7 am we had breakfast (a feast to the eye and the belly), at 7:30 we had a Taxi waiting for us to take us to the Koyasan Cable Car Station, we took the cable car at 7:45 and arrived at the Gokurakubasi station by 7:50...
At 7:55 we took the local train on Nankay Koya Line to Hashimoto, arrived at 8:55 and changed to the Nakai Rincan express departing at 9:15 and arriving in Osaka (Nankai Namba Station) at 9:44… Then walked for 6 minutes a caught the Osaka City Subway on Midousuji line (not sure about the departure na arrival for this) to the Shin-Osaka station where we had a coffee and asked our reservation to be changed from the SHINKANSEN HIKARI RailStar 461 departing at 11:19, to the SHINKANSEN HIKARI RailStar 459 departing at 10:59 to Hiroshima, arriving at 12:28…
We then took the local train on JR Sanyo line at 12:49, to Miyagimaguchi, walked for 5 minutes and took the JR Ferry Boat to Miyagima (I'm also not sure about the times for these, but probably nobody's reading this to this point)…
There you go… 437 km… Everything as expected, except for the early arrival due to the reservation change granted as something completely normal… Outside the spiritual side of things this is Japan for you…
I'm writing this in the SHINKANSEN HIKARI 384 departing from Himeji at 17:59 and arriving in Tokyo at 2140 (644 km) the last leg of the trip before heading back to reality tomorrow…
"please take off your shoes..." - The signal precedes the entrance of each temple or Shrine, and without knowing all the reasons for the ritual it just looks rigth…
I can't help thinking about what went on during the 10 years since I 1'st came to Japan. At that time I had no idea that traveling would become an addiction and that photography would also come into the equation…
I've learned through life that there's no purpose in asking why for things that just happen… I'm sure I'm glad I got to go to every place I did, and I'd like to come back from each place with images that fulfill my feeling of being there, but I never seam to accomplish this entirely…
Back to Japan, I'm not a religious person but I have to admit that I like to be around and inside temples and Shrines in Japan… Not just for how they look, but also for the peace they transmit and for the feeling that there's lots of room for improvement in everything we do...
"taxi here tomorrow at 7am… ok..." - The 1'st time I came to Japan, I had some instructions from a fellow colleague, some of them where an almost funny set of topics regarding how to go from the Narita Airport to the hotel, the remaining where some interesting topics about Japan, one of them being the fact that in Japan everything works as expected…
We left our Ryokan in Nikko at 7 am, before any of the owners or servants arrived. In the day before we had asked for a taxi to pick us up at 7 am to take us to the train station… In Portugal there would be a considerable probability that the taxi might not be there, but in this case there it was… As expected…
Japanese people act like precise pieces of a huge machine that was fine tuned to perform according to the expectations (this does not directly mean fast, and sharply, although sometimes it does)… What's amazing in the middle of this is that people keep their kindness and warmth to the maximum...
"no, we don't see many Portuguese people around here, I know a bit of Spanish, but not Portuguese"... - The attendant at one of the Ginza shops was helpful and nice as usual in Japan, he was also fond of Brazilian food and could say some words with Brazilian Portuguese accent.
Japan is different from what I remember from 10 years ago... Probably I'm different too and this adds to the sensation of change. This time I'm seeing a country that is much more open to foreigners than before, old people don't run away from us anymore when we approach them in the street and even those who don't speak English are always willing to help.
Those who know me, know that I'm much more a "middle of nowhere person" than someone that enjoys crowded places... "crowded" could be a 1'st, a single word description for Japan... So some of you might ask "what a hell am I doing here?"...
This was not a trip we planned for a long time and in fact it all started one month before departure when all the other options we where considering did not seam to be viable... Still Japan looked like a good idea for breaking with my usual stile of large and insolated landscape pictures...
Crowded is not really close to the best word for describing Japan and in fact I'm not sure there is one... Even in crowded places there's some kind of silence that brings me back to my own thoughts, there's a sense of order and respect from all those who share the same space with us. Sometimes I wonder if this sensation of silence might come only from the fact that we can't understand the language... But I guess that's not the only reason...
"
Are you alone?... Aren't you afraid?..." - The first thing someone asked me 10 years ago, the 1'st time I came to Japan...
I remembered this today as I walked through the Narita Express train platform... 10 years ago, Japan was my 1'st business trip and also the 1'st time I traveled alone... Coming here on hollydays 10 years after that is olny casual (it hapened) but I can't help thinking about what went through my life since that time...
Japan was the 1'st of many, the start of this addiction for discovering places and was also a lesson on how different other people can be and on how things we take for granted are not always all there is...
"This may look impossible but my car is dirtier than yours..." - A colleague comments that my scratched and beaten up 4x4 looks cleaner than her fancy car…
My answer was somewhere of the lines of "this is probably because I'm not having much fun these days"… I have no explanation for this, but sometimes I feel that my capacity for using the 24 hours of each day to my advantage does not depend only on how crouded my agenda is…
Sometimes there's some kind of rhythm that seams to make everything possible... Sometimes, the simplest task (like updating this blog) seams to take an enormous amount of energy…
Sometimes we need a plan or something in the horizon for helping us keep the focus… And many other times when we get to that point in the horizon we get that empty feeling of "now what?!"… Today I feel like I'm in this same point in several dimensions of my life...
The image you see here is part of my Canadian Rockies portfolio from 2 years ago… Along with others most of these images where still not seen by anyone outside my home office… For now they're just waiting here for the next wave in order to get out in the world...
"ask one of our monitors at the beach what are the good spots to get into the water..." - The lady at the Surfboard Rental shop tells me about the tide at the Juquehy beach…
(image from a previous trip in 2003 at Ilha Grande ~ 200km north of Juquehy)
Back to the bad side, I feel that the worst part of me comes to play whenever I come to this place… I wake up in the morning before work wondering who's going the stab me in the back during the day, I deal with people that see corruption as something normal, companies that use their power to abuse their workers and keep them in fear so that they don't react, people that try to take advantage on anything anyway, you name it… As a result, I always go back home using more slain that what's normal in Portugal… Summing up: two weeks in political hell, T-shirt stock reestablished, one hour of surfing, four waves surfed… Pictures: almost none… Sandy beaches and palm trees: yes… Caipirinhas: I stay far from them after the only real hangover in my life… Worth it? Well…
I guess the reasons that take us to do whatever we do can be so diverse as just doing because everybody does or just doing because it makes us feel good disregarding of what others think… The strange thing for me is that although I never take to much time thinking about what lead me to do something, there are lots of situations when I'm already into extreme situations wondering about what took me there…
