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.

Brent, Joel, Ciaran, and I began our day at Senso-ji, the oldest temple in Tokyo. Dedicated to the Bodhisattva Kannon, the complex is known for its iconic five-story pagoda and is believed to be the most visited religious site in the world. Compared to the temples we saw on previous days, it has an uncharacteristically steep roof, and photography is allowed inside (though I would say there is not much of a point to it as the interior is not very ornate). Brent and Joel went to one of the wooden stands to buy omikuji: paper sheets with random fortunes written on them. According to tradition, if the fortune on the sheet is bad, the person who bought it can tie it to a nearby rack and it will be burned by a priest.

Today was light on sightseeing, as Ciaran and I had to make the two-and-a-half-hour Shinkansen trip from Kyoto to Tokyo (not including the transportation times to and from hotels) and because we met multiple friends. As soon as we left our bags at our apartment near Tokyo Skytree, we took the metro to the very other end of the city to meet Kevin and Jaya at the Meiji Shrine. The shrine is one of Tokyo’s most famous even though it was completed relatively recently – in 1921 – using materials from every prefecture ruled by Japan, including Karafuto (modern day Sakhalin), Korea, Kwantung, and Taiwan. Although it did not really blow us away, we were impressed by the very roundly pruned trees in its courtyard.

We took the express train from Kyoto to Nara and ate our storebought breakfast on board. Optimising our time this way allowed us to be among the first people through the door when Kofoku Temple opened at nine o’clock. We bought the combined ticket for the whole complex, which encompasses the Central Golden Hall, the Main Hall, and the National Treasure Museum. I remembered that the highlight of this particular part of Nara was supposed to be its five-storied pagoda, but I could not see it anywhere. Only when I opened the map to find our location did I realise that the ugly grey building we had been ignoring next to the Main Hall was scaffolding draped in grey canvas.

The memory that sticks out to me as I sit down to write about our second day in Kyoto is that of our late-afternoon search for dinner somewhere south of the main train station. Ciaran and I were walking towards two ladies when their dog started arching its back to poop. Instead of waiting for the dog to finish and collecting the poop from the ground, one of the ladies held the dog with one hand to stop it from pacing around and used a tissue in her other hand to catch the dog’s poop before it even hit the ground.  

We left Osaka for Kyoto after eating breakfast. We could not find free seats on the train, so we stood behind the driver’s cab and watched the magic of Japan’s railway system happen. There were two men behind the glass separating passengers and crew. The younger of the pair was sitting down and apparently receiving instructions from the older one, who stood by and joked around, occasionally pointing outside the window and explaining things. The young driver had a screen to his right displaying the times the train was supposed to arrive at each station down to the very second, but neither man seemed particularly bothered by the train’s being two minutes late.

On our third day in Japan, Ciaran and I visited Mount Koya, also known as Koyasan. Situated south of Osaka, Mount Koya first became a religious settlement in 819 under the leadership of monk Kukai, who travelled to China to study Tangmi – the Chinese version of Vajrayana Buddhism – and returned to found the esoteric Shingon School in Japan. Followers of the Shingon School believe that Kukai (also referred to as Kobo Daishi) never died but rests in meditation until the arrival of Maitreya, the Buddha of the Future. His mausoleum is found at Okunoin. The cemetery that has arisen around Okunoin contains over 200,000 tombstones and is the largest in Japan.

After eating breakfast close to our hotel, we walked down to the Namba Yasaka Shinto Shrine, a place of worship dedicated to the spirit of the sea and storms, Susanoo. The shrine is famous for a building shaped as a giant lion’s head which holds, in its open jaws, a stage where locals perform rituals memorialising Susanoo’s story. We spent only a few moments at the shrine before walking onwards to Shitenno-ji. We passed by a number of other temples on the way but only entered one that we saw from afar and thought very picturesque for having a blossoming sakura right in front of its entrance gate. There was nothing very notable about the interior (and the bathroom both Ciaran and I wanted to use was closed) except for a stone statue of the cartoon character Doraemon. He had apparently been elevated to the ranks of a venerated spirit. 

My plane arrived in Tokyo on Monday evening some forty minutes earlier than scheduled, which came as a big relief to me because I was afraid the airport shops would all start closing at eleven. I managed to exchange some money and buy a public transport pass. I also bought a SIM card, during which process I realised that I had lost my UK SIM card somewhere in Pakistan and spent much of the train ride from the airport trying to figure out how to block it. While unpacking my bags at the hotel, I also realised that I had lost my adapter. I must have left it in a plug at the airport in Kuala Lumpur.

Originally, my travels this spring were to last only two weeks. After my adventure in Pakistan, I was planning to return either home or to university and focus on my studies. However, I put my studies on hold when I found out my friends Brent and Joel would be travelling to Japan on their yearlong journey around the world, and another friend, Kevin, would overlap with them for his honeymoon. This constellation of events had already convinced our mutual friend Ciaran to plan his own trip to Japan during his few months of ‘funemployment,’ and my fear of missing out grew too great to bury in books.

I counted my cash yesterday evening, so I knew that I was going to begin my last day in Pakistan with 5400 rupees – roughly twenty dollars. I thus judged it would be prudent to pay my final settlement for my laundry and hotel dinners by card, since I still wanted to make two stops before going to the airport. I also made the last-minute decision not to leave my bags at the hotel but to take everything with me. This was not because I thought I wouldn’t be able to afford the trip back (which I wasn’t), but because I greatly overestimated the time I would spend at each attraction.     

I dedicated my penultimate day in Pakistan to exploring Karachi. By sheer coincidence, it was the anniversary of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto – the fourth President and ninth Prime Minister of Pakistan, as well as the founder of the Bhutto dynasty – and Google Maps suggested that the opening times of various places might differ from usual hours. I could not find any concrete information on the internet except that the Province of Sindh (Bhutto’s home province) had declared the day a national holiday and would close “all government offices, autonomous bodies, semi-autonomous bodies, corporations, and local councils.” Hardly knowing what to imagine under the terms “autonomous and semi-autonomous bodies,” I decided to simply go about my day as I had intended.

I was glad I had decided to wait until today to visit Thatta, as it was beautifully sunny all day and the roads were mostly passable again after yesterday’s downpour. Still, we had some trouble finding our way to the Chaukhandi Tombs on the outskirts of Karachi. All the paths leading to them from the N5 were dirt, and we had to drive back against the traffic searching for a passage without too many puddles. Once again, I had asked my hotel to help me find a driver with a car for the day. I was glad of his punctuality – a delay of ten minutes does not even feel worth mentioning anymore – and for what it’s worth, I think he enjoyed the trip as well. He had never been to several of the places on my list and was avidly taking pictures everywhere we went.

On this trip I have mostly been waking up before my alarm, but today only a faint light trickled in through the curtains. I had arranged to continue with my driver who drove me from Sukkur yesterday, as he had shown himself to be very dependable, and in any case my hotel in Hyderabad was not able to arrange another one. Being in the tourist industry, he also knew that he was entitled to accommodation at my hotel, so I did not need to worry about where he would sleep. My choice was vindicated very quickly. Knowing the security protocol, my driver proactively contacted the police, and although they were slow to arrive, I am sure the whole affair would have taken much longer had I tried to do this upon checkout.

To my great surprise, I found my driver waiting for me at exactly eight o’clock in the morning. I had arranged a ride with my hotel two nights before, as I feared my intended route would be too difficult to explain in a last-minute conversation with an InDrive chauffeur: the plan was to stop by the Bhutto Family Mausoleum just outside Larkana before continuing to Mohenjo-Daro and finishing the day in Hyderabad. Perhaps it helped that I checked about the driver twice at the reception: once in the evening when I arrived and again in the morning just before eating breakfast.

When I reached Multan and checked in yesterday evening, I was told at the reception that every time I left the hotel, I would have to have a police escort with me. I had read something to that effect on Google reviews and booking sites, but the posts were so old that I assumed they were outdated. In vain did I try to convince the hotel that I had a local friend who would accompany me at all times, for, as I found out later, this measure was not just intended to ensure my own security, but also to keep me away from Multan’s nuclear facilities in case I was a spy. In any case, there was nothing I could do but accept the dictate from on high. At least the service was free.

One major sight I missed in Lahore yesterday was the Lahore Museum – the oldest museum in Pakistan. While the museum building itself seems intimidatingly large, an average visit by a non-specialist might take about an hour and a half to two hours, as the upper floor space is comparatively small. The exhibition halls are organised very logically. As one walks in, the hall with ancient artefacts from Mohenjo Daro, Harappa, and other sites are on the right. On the left is the hall with Islamic art, which leads into spaces dedicated to Hinduism and Buddhism, and finally to a hall that is nominally dedicated to Chinese art but serves as a catchall for everything that doesn’t fit anywhere else (such as the diary of Queen Victoria).

With a population of over fourteen million, Lahore is the second largest city in Pakistan and one of the largest urban centres in Asia. Although it has been continuously inhabited for millennia, it rose to prominence in the medieval period, when it served as the capital of the Hindu Shahis, the Ghaznavid Empire and the Delhi Sultanate. Lahore’s greatest blossoming took place under the Mughal Empire, when Emperor Akbar ordered that a palace be built in the city and moved his capital there from Fatehpur Sikri. His son Jahangir was buried in Lahore, and his grandson Shah Jahan was born there.

I ordered an InDrive to Lahore on my last evening in Islamabad, and although it was meant to arrive at eight o’clock, my driver only showed up a little before nine. Humza suggested that next time, I better just order an InDrive the moment I am ready to go. I did not take it as a good sign when, after a mere half an hour of driving, we stopped at a gas station for a coffee and cigarette break, but somehow my driver was still able to beat our estimated arrival on Google Maps by a considerable margin.  

On my fourth day in Islamabad, I paid for a driver to take me around Taxila. Founded around the year 1000 BCE, Taxila served for some time as the capital of Gandhara, the region from which Buddhism and a specific aesthetic sensibility around this religion spread to Tibet, China and beyond: the city’s shrines were even visited by the Chinese monk Xuanzang during his famous Journey to the West. In 325 BCE, Taxila surrendered to Alexander the Great without a struggle. It was successively ruled by the Mauryans, Indo-Greeks and Indo-Scythians until the old city was destroyed by the Kushan Empire in the common era. However, it was under the Kushan Empire that Gandhara reached the peak of its cultural and artistic influence, earning fame as a respected centre of learning.  

The day started out quite cloudy, making it a perfect time for my planned museum visits – I prefer to use my sunny days for taking pictures outdoors. My opinion diverged entirely from that of my hosts who, as proper Pakistanis, only refer to a day as good to spend outdoors when it is cloudy and “not too warm.” Fortunately, we found an intersection between our priorities. In the morning, we would use the lower temperatures to visit the Shah Allah Ditta Caves, after which we would drive to the Faisal Mosque and the Islamabad Museum.

My friend Humza recommended a tour of Rawalpindi during my stay in Islamabad. The two cities are right next to each other, forming a metropolitan area of around six million people, many of whom travel back and forth between the two for work and school. While Islamabad serves as the nation’s capital, Rawalpindi is the seat of the Pakistan Army General Headquarters, which is why it was recently targeted by drones claimed by the Taliban. Interestingly, before the partition, Rawalpindi had a Hindu and Sikh majority. The population left a massive hole in the city’s economy and social fabric when it was forced to leave, and many of their old havelis are in a state of disrepair.

Established in 1967, Islamabad was designed by the Greek architect Constantinos Doxiadis during the rule of military dictator Ayub Khan. It was conceived as a giant grid split into square sectors by broad avenues, with each sector having a primary school, two mosques, a few green spaces, and a central square for shops and restaurants. The sectors are lettered from northwest to southeast and numbered from northeast to southwest. Tracing a diagonal line along the map you might, for example, cut through F-6, G-7 and H-8. Each sector also has four subsectors numbered in a clockwise direction from southwest, such as F6/1, F6/2, F6/3 and F6/4. This concept seems so megalomaniacal that it comes as no surprise that it remains far from complete. The letter series essentially runs only from E to I (with only one D-letter sector and some faraway gardens named B-17) and the numbers do not go below 5.    

On the second morning of my two-day layover in Uzbekistan, I rented a car and drove to the mountains. The process was easy: the rental company did not even want to see my international driver’s licence. They did, however, make sure to impress upon me the importance of a twice-stamped document that I was to show the police in case I was pulled over. It seems that stamped documents are an obsessive precaution in this country: when I checked out of my hotel early in the morning on the following day, I was handed another one to show at the airport in case anyone asked for it. No one ever did.

My plane landed in Tashkent at one o’clock in the morning, but fortunately I was not dazed enough to forget to exchange money. A few taxi drivers fought over me in the parking lot, but as a matter of principle I stuck with the first person I approached – the alternative had been a burly man who flung his arm around my shoulder in a manner that would have seemed friendly had it been easier to extricate myself from his embrace. He followed us to the car insisting to my driver that I was to go with him for a higher price, and exchanged some choice words with him – though thankfully no more than that – as I climbed inside.

I arrived in Azerbaijan on the evening of Nowruz. The timing was unintentional; in fact, had I realised my trip was to coincide with the weekend of the New Year, I probably would have arranged things a little differently. My original plan had been to fly to Islamabad via Sharjah on Sunday, but when Iran – in response to the recent US-Israeli offensive – began to launch strikes against its neighbours, my flight was cancelled. I scrambled at the last minute to figure out an alternative route, which eventually yielded the option of flying around the affected zones: From Baku to Tashkent and from Tashkent to Islamabad. Due to the timing of the flights, I ended up having one day to explore Baku and another two days in Tashkent.

On the last day of my long weekend in Spain, I explored Toledo. Since basically every tourist site in the country opens at ten o’clock in the morning, I spent my first hour outside walking the road along the southern edge of the city. While this route does not have too many sights – except, perhaps, for the Old Arab Baths – it offers some pretty views of Toledo that most tourists miss. Since the Alcazar is closed on Mondays, I only visited the gardens at its base and then backtracked to the Museo de Santa Cruz. The museum, which is free of entry, has an impressive collection of art by El Greco, who spent half his life in Toledo and whose tomb can be viewed through a little window in the floor of the Monastery of Saint Dominic of Silos. The upper floor is mostly dedicated to azulejos and temporary exhibitions.

On my second free morning in Madrid, before my friends were up and running, I made a quick tour of the Royal Palace. Since I was not sure when during this extended weekend trip I would visit the palace (if I did visit it at all), I did not buy my tickets online, and they were all sold out by the time I had chosen a date and time. Still, I had read online that I could buy tickets in person if I turned up to the palace and waited in a long queue: I was advised to turn up half an hour before the actual opening time.

I had a free morning in Madrid as my friends wanted to go to the Prado, which I visited last year. Instead of joining them, I made a quick trip to Aranjuez, a town just south Madrid known for its royal palace and gardens – and for inspiring the Concierto de Aranjuez by Joa quín Rodrigo. My journey to the small touristic town was relatively simple: after reaching Villaverde Bajo-Cruce by metro, I boarded bus 423, which had arrived just late enough for me to eat my second chocolate croissant of the day. I had eaten my first upon buying a bag of three at a bakery in Madrid and ate the third once I made it to Aranjuez. Fortunately I still had cash on me, as the bus driver told me his card reader was not working.

I thought I was strangely well rested when I woke up before my alarm, but after a few minutes of lying in bed with my eyes closed, it occurred to me that I forgot to set it. As soon as I saw the time, I darted out of bed. I crammed all my belongings in my backpack and ran out to find a café where I could buy a small pastry to go. Armed with an apple and a slice of banana bread, I then made my way to the Silla de Felipe II, a lookout over the Escorial about thirty to forty minutes from the city centre. That, at any rate, was the time it took me in my frantic state. El Escorial looked small but majestic from the lookout, dwarfed by the mountain on whose slopes the city stands, and snow still capped the even taller mountains on the distant right.  

As soon as I arrived in Madrid on Thursday afternoon, I made a rookie mistake. I turned up at the airport bus station some five minutes after the bus for Alcalá de Henares was scheduled to depart and, after hanging around a little hoping that it was merely late, I went back into the airport to buy a sandwich. The next bus was supposed to arrive forty minutes after the first, but as I waited and waited, and as the forty minutes turned into an hour, it slowly dawned on me that pretty much every bus leaving the airport in that direction was departing with a delay of at least a quarter of an hour. In other words, the bus I thought I had missed left while I was buying an overpriced airport meal.  

On my last morning in Cyprus, I made a quick walking tour of Limassol. The city has a relatively new cathedral dedicated to Agia Napa as well as a very blocky medieval castle, but its most appealing attraction is its long, palm-lined waterfront. Even quite early in the morning, people were walking and jogging beneath the palm trees, and elderly men sat on the pier with fishing lines drooping into the water. Since the waterfront forms a gentle convex curve, one can view the new high-rise buildings of Limassol and the hills behind the city by walking out on one of the jetties.

I began the day at the Tombs of the Kings in Paphos. The site’s name is a bit of a misnomer: no kings are thought to be buried in the necropolis, but the tombs were originally thought too fancy not to have been built – or rather dug out – for royalty. While some are simply niches dug into rocks, several catacombs branch off from proper Greek-style courtyards with columns that would have resembled the living quarters of the buried.

Putting far too much faith in Google Maps, I left my hotel in Kakopetria a little after eight and, after making a quick stop to check the pressure in my tyres, arrived at the Church of Panagia tou Araka at nine o’clock. That was when the church was supposed to open according to Google but there was a sign outside saying that the opening time was actually ten. I probably should have expected this, as Google Maps has the correct opening times for several other churches in the area, including the lunch break between one and two in the afternoon.

I checked out of my hotel at half past eight and drove down to the Larnaca waterfront. The streets were largely empty as people were still waking up from New Year’s Eve, and there were plenty of parking spaces all along the road, but when I parked the car, I realised the ticket machine only accepted coins. Luckily, I quickly found a private parking place that took cards. It was opposite Europe Square, which houses the historical buildings of the district administration, the municipal art gallery, and the archives museum. Incidentally, Europe Square is also where one can find the statue of Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism and perhaps the most famous citizen of Kition, now Larnaca.