Writing from a net cafe in the middle of Kyoto.  A private room with a recliner, all the internet, comics, and melon soda I can drink until 8:00 am, for the same price as a hostel dormitory. They even have showers.  The warped logic of urban Japan.

I don’t want to go into too much detail about the actual trip at this point. There’s a top 5 reel coming at the end, and since there have already been at least 5 things which could warrant their own post I’m willing to bet the hardest part is going to be choosing.

But I do want to talk a little bit about something I was thinking about after dinner while Dan and I were waiting for the bus, a little about the spirit of winging it, the ups and downs of setting out with literally no plans and seeing what happens.

Winging It

At the outset of this trip, I had the following trip-related documents and pieces of information:

1. Boat ticket from Kikai to Kagoshima
2. Plane ticket from Tokyo to Kikai
3. Fuji Rock tickets, temple visitation permission
4. Lonely Planet: Japan, guidebook, circa 2000
5. And the knowledge that in 30 days (give or take), I’m going to need to be in Tokyo to catch that flight home

(Item 4 was a concession to sane traveling, but it became readily apparent that unless we were also time traveling, item 4 was not particularly useful, which left us properly winging it. No happy little Lonely Planet fallback list of hostels and guest houses. Ultimately though, it was fantastic that the LP guide turned out to be nothing more than a hefty paperweight or emergency bludgeoning tool. We have since picked up the updated one, but with a very different attitude towards its usage)

The entire rest of the trip: where we were staying, eating, what the hell we were going to be doing, and aside from “in Japan” even the question of where was left entirely open at the outset.  To some people this is already sounding crazy, and to the people currently walking around the world for 5 years, not nearly crazy enough, but I’m glad to get the opportunity to test drive this truly odd and wonderful travel philosophy in the shallow end before diving into the Mariana Trench.

The idea is to let the adventure develop as it may. To follow the path as it evolves in front of you, even if that path is steeper, rockier, and has a lot more scary jungle-bits than the one you could have hammered out ahead of yourself.  For me, it took me a while to stop fighting the journey. This is part of why we did 3 cities in 3 days at the outset of our trip (ouch, brain fatigue). When you have a solid plan you can get away with that kind of stuff. Tonight we’re in Hiroshima to see the bomb memorial, tomorrow we’re eating ramen in Fukuoka, and here are the places we’re staying and the exact times the trains depart. When you’re winging it, this kind of stuff just does not work. You will want to die.

I honestly don’t think you can impose that much structure on a trip like this. It resists it.  Adventures are kind of shy, and if you’re stopping into town for 24 hours swinging a stick and calling out for them you’ll probably just end up tired and frustrated and wholly adventureless. Don’t fore-go structuring a trip just to freak out and try to make one enroute. If you feel like you’re moving too fast, you are.

And it’s totally ok to have to learn that lesson en-route.

There is plenty more to say about winging it, about this trip, about Japan. But I’m due for a long nap. We set out towards Fuji Rock tomorrow.