Buckle in bozos. This will be a multi-parter of my word-emanations from the Japan trip.
Thoreaux's pronouncement in The Great Railway Bazaar that travel is both a flight and a pursuit in equal parts was certainly at play when N turned to me a month and a half ago and said, “Do you fancy a trip in June?”
Following in my hallowed footsteps and thanks to the industriousness of the time, she was turning 40 soon. And so, she naturally wanted to flee from the mundanity of her daily standups and pursue (even if achingly briefly) things that truly made her happy.
“Yes,” I said instantly, ‘cause:
I never say no to a trip.
I was subliming in my joblessness.
What happened next was a little surprising, though. N laid the burden of where to go on a trip for her 40th on the cold, generative hands of ChatGPT. Here was N, using a technology before 70-year-olds had started using it! A virtually unheard-of phenomenon.
Her prompt:
“I'm turning 40 in June. I love reading and bookstores (English), long walks in green shaded parks or well-paved streets in good weather, and diverse global cuisines (vegetarian) and desserts. Tell me the top 5 places in the world that I could travel to if I had to do these things for a week in June. Places reputed for the above, with pleasant weather in June, cities or towns, as specific as possible.”
In response, Sam Altman’s global takeover bot swung instantly into action and came up with five rather cliched but perfectly nice cities as options:
Paris
Barcelona
Portland
London
Kyoto
We gravitated to Kyoto rather instantly. The other options were too European or too far. London would have been ideal, but it would have required more time than we had.
So, Kyoto.
Japan for the third time; Kyoto for the second, being pulled by the gravity of the land of the rising sun.
In hindsight, we realized that while Kyoto fulfilled all the criteria, it did not fulfil a key one - English bookstores. It probably didn’t matter, but it once again proved that OpenAI’s stochastic parrot is a bit dumb.
AirAsia X? Rather, AirAsia suX
Unlike many other industries where the bar keeps going up, flying is an area where the bar keeps dropping. Shit meals, cramped seats, annoying security processes and long check-in queues aren’t even worthy complaints anymore. If you weren’t delayed for hours, your baggage wasn’t lost, or your emergency door didn’t fly away at 30,000 ft, you have nothing to complain about.
Unfortunately, our AirAsia X flight to Osaka gave us something to complain about.
When en route to the airport, we received a push notification from Trip.com (not the airline) that our flight was delayed by not an hour, not two hours, but three hours and 20 minutes, and we would now depart at 1.30 PM instead of at 10.10 am as originally scheduled, I was extremely annoyed. I was so annoyed that if I had the power of instant retribution, I’d have wished for an instant bankruptcy and closure for AirAsia. Petty and spoiled. I know.
But honestly, who wouldn’t be annoyed:
Had this been communicated an hour before, we could have stayed home for a few more hours instead of hanging around the airport for several hours.
This was the only delayed flight (nothing to do with weather or other eventualities) in the entire airport.
We received no other information from the airline except a voucher for a lounge, which shooed us away, adding salt to injury.
More importantly, this lobbed a monkey wrench into our already fragile plan to get to our hotel in Kyoto from the airport in Osaka later that evening. We’d booked a train from the Osaka airport at 7 p.m., with razor-sharp margins to the original flight arrival time. But now, our flight would land well past the final train of the night. This meant we’d lose the train ticket, but more importantly, we were left with few options to get to Kyoto at midnight except a taxi (which would be extremely expensive for the 100 km journey).
This was now becoming a pattern with our trips to Japan.
Our last trip to Hokkaido in 2018 was to be a road trip. Since Japan needed IDP to drive, I connected with an ‘agent’ in Bangalore who took me through some alleys of Koramangala and got me an IDP. The entire trip was planned with stops in small villages and towns spread over the island of Hokkaido which didn’t boast great public transportation. And then, the moment we presented the IDP to the car rental guy looked at it like an alien artefact and refused to rent the car.
That night we replanned the entire itinerary. We cancelled a bunch of hotels (some of them, thankfully, in the free cancellation phase) and planned a whole new trip using only public transportation. It was still fantastic! Hokkaido was lovely, and we had time to do multiple onsens thanks to the new, more laidback version of the trip. You can read about it here.
When we eventually landed at the Osaka airport, it was quite late. The immigration, seemingly manned almost entirely by teenagers or old men, took a while to clear. When we cleared baggage and walked out, there was only one viable option to get to the hotel—take a taxi. A snaking taxi line awaited us. We waited in it for about 40 minutes before we got one, and a friendly driver took us to our hotel in Kyoto at around 1.30 am. It cost us about 20x what the train had cost us originally.
“I am never booking a flight with AirAsia again!” I fumed.
It remains to be seen how this resolve holds up when I see flight prices for the next trip.
Kyoto
Kyoto is many things.
Consider the tourist hotspots—the Kiyomizudera temple, the streets of Gion, and the Ninenzaka and Sannenzaka paths. Tourist hell, sure. Yet, here we were, for a second time, walking through choc-a-block crowds and enjoying it thoroughly. Despite the occasional loud Americans, things are surprisingly calm, and the cosy smallness of the cobbled lanes, the wooden shops, and the way it winds down were all very enjoyable. Visit the same spots early in the day before the crowds, and it becomes transcendental.
There’s another Kyoto.
A 20-minute bus ride (it must be said that this is a soothing experience in itself) deposits you at the Daitoku-ji Zen temple complex, which is filled with nearly two dozen temples and more than a dozen zen gardens, practically free of tourists. A whole zen garden for yourself? Feels wrong, somehow. In perfect stillness, with the sun-dappled glow, the manicured shrubs, maple trees, gravel sea and the perfectly placed mossy rocks, your brain lets out a physiological sigh.
There’s another Kyoto.
Along Kawaramachi Dori, with its glitzy shops and department stores. I could have been walking on a shopping thoroughfare in any big city. Fancy, smiling people holding shopping bags walk purposefully on the sidewalks along the shrines to capitalism with their uniquely Japanese twist. Food, drinks and desserts lure you with cute logos and aesthetically pleasing shopfronts. Japan makes the world’s most pleasingly designed food.
There’s another Kyoto.
A 30-minute train ride takes you to Arashiyama, where you emerge amidst the choking crowds. You walk 200 meters, and space opens up dazzlingly at the Togetsu-kyo Bridge. “Wow”, I said reflexively, looking (despite having seen the same view several years back) at the wide Katsura river and the green hills of the Arashiyama mountains behind. I heard another group of tourists say wow as they emerged. We are a generation at a loss for words when we see true spectacles. A five-minute walk along the river, and suddenly, we were the only tourists. A little waterfall tumbled down mossy rocks, and the most fetching riverside view lay before us - as if we were the first to discover it.
There are more Kyotos.
Inside each izakaya, sake bar, dessert house, restaurant, cafe, udon shop, speciality soba place, tonkatsu restaurant, and tea house, Kyotos exist as if part of a whole new compact multiverse.
The universe is a fractal. You can watch the image of an entire galaxy and enjoy its beauty (say “wow”), and in the same breath, watch a video of someone’s cat while giggling. You can be a lone hiker in a dense forest and feel the immensity or be an ant in Shibuya crossing in Tokyo and feel a similar intensity. It’s both a blessing and curse that our brains are incredible zoom lenses that can focus at any level you choose to see. It’s why we enjoy the beauty of a baby’s smile and feel the burden of the world’s ills on us.
Different places leave different marks on you. Kyoto alters your vision to become a macro lens for the micro. The small, the tiny, the mundane, the subtle, and the little come into magnificent focus and become art. You could spend an entire day sitting in a zen garden, witnessing a rock covered in moss that vaguely resembles an elephant or looking at the beauty of the maple leaves when the sun falls on them. Or you can sit in a tiny booth where the only art in front of you is on the Ramen bowl you slurp from.
These wouldn’t have registered in my brain as objects of contemplation elsewhere.
Could be Worse,
Tyag
Coming up in future parts:
The extreme mindfulness of a tea ceremony and how that unfurls your brain.
Beauty in the small—a mindblowing 800-year-old bonsai tree, which made us almost reverential and how my clumsiness and gangliness is a major weakness in compact Japanese places.
The character cast and little moments of fun interactions from the trip— a drunk speakeasy bar cocktail maker, a lone woman who runs a 5-floor restaurant, a Punjabi UK family meeting in front of a gyoza shop queue, being accosted by Japanese school kids in Osaka castle and more.
Extreme optimization under severe constraints - how everything in Japan is aesthetically maximized under clear and unchangeable constraints (a story of Nintendo, bento boxes, small restaurants, zen gardens, bonsai, and animation sequences in Ultraman).
My completely unsubstantiated hypothesis of the deer in Nara being cute af but a little racist.
Dotonbori as a jarring tourist hell and how Osaka had to win us over later.