My Travel Adventures

Our host saved what might have been a disastrous trip by offering to take us around a few sights in Sado on our only morning there; she even brought us a little breakfast, which was as sweet of her as it was embarrassing to us, for it became another reminder of how powerless we were on this remote island without a valid international driving permit. It had rained heavily during the night, which meant that despite the grim weather forecast, the flooded rice fields reflected blue skies and Sado’s snowy peaks as we rode towards our first stop – the Aikawa-Tsurushi gold and silver mine within the greater complex of the Sado island mines.

Despite waking up at six o’clock in the morning for a seven-fifty bus, the last leg of our journey was a nail-biter. Because I had done my laundry on our first night in Kanazawa (which spent the next day drying around our rooms), Brent and Joel had to do theirs on the second and pack it in the morning. It dried faster than mine, as I had tried to complete each stage manually with my knowledge of Chinese characters while Joel simply used the five-hour automatic wash and dry cycle. Still, Brent and Joel had to collect all their clothes in the morning from across the room, which took a fair bit of time, and Joel’s decision to repack his entire bag did not help.

Today was a leisurely day when we did not have to worry about anything because we had booked a tour. We were originally going to visit Shirakawa-go and Gokayama by ourselves, but the logistics were far too convoluted and would have involved a very unreasonable amount of time in transit. The tour was unguided. Instead of being shepherded from one site to another, the itinerary was to be driven to Shirakawa-go, spend two hours walking around, eat lunch, transit to Gokayama, spend one hour there, and return to Kanazawa late in the afternoon.

On my twelfth day of travelling across Japan, Brent, Joel and I visited Tomioka Silk Mill. The factory was established at the dawn of the Meiji restoration in 1872 as part of Japan’s effort to acquire money for industrialisation. Japan had already been producing copious amounts of silk before the Meiji restoration, with raw silk and silkworm cocoons accounting for 86% of its exports in 1862 – a situation greatly aided by the chaos of the Taiping Rebellion in China and a silkworm disease ravaging France and Italy. In the 1870s, however, overproduction and the recovery of Japan’s competitors in the silk market caused a collapse in raw silk prices. Japan then decided to refocus on silk products such as silk thread and silk cloth, enlisting European specialists to help construct Japan’s first silk mill.

We set our alarms to half past four in the hopes of seeing Mount Fuji illuminated by the first rays of sunrise. It was already quite bright, but when we walked outside, we found the clouds had closed in over Lake Yamanakako while we were asleep, and although we could see some of the nearby hills on the lake’s eastern side, Mount Fuji was completely hidden. We stayed outside for around an hour hoping the sky would clear up; being the last person to leave the house, I did not realise the others had all just walked to the beach in front of it, so I hightailed it all the way to the eastern end of the lake and met the gang somewhere in the middle after we figured out what had happened (they assumed I had gone back to bed).

We split up in the morning because each of us had a different idea of what to do with our last few hours in Tokyo. Ciaran wanted to have a nice breakfast at a bakery, while Brent and Joel needed to make a run to pick up Joel’s international driver’s licence from their next hotel in Tokyo (they had forgotten to get one while in the US, so they mailed themselves a copy). In the meantime, I realised I had not yet taken any nice pictures of the Tokyo Skytree, so I made a little trip to the Kameido Tenjin Shrine, where one can see the tower rise majestically above the temple’s old roof and the wisteria frames crisscrossing the gardens in front of it.

Our small group – consisting of Brent, Joel, Ciaran, and me – agreed last night that we would wake up at five thirty in the morning to catch the first express from the train station near the Tokyo Skytree to Nikko. We bought our breakfast at a 7-Eleven, which in my case consisted of one egg onigiri, a few little sweet breads with chocolate nibs, and a banana inexplicably wrapped in plastic. We arrived at the station in good time, but when we clicked through the options on the machine to purchase our tickets for the express, we discovered that the first train of the day had been cancelled and the next few had been booked out.