Kawaguchiko

I'm back. Friday Tomoe and I left Tokyo on a bus to Kawaguchiko. After a few days there we caught a but to Nagoya to pick up the birds from her parents' place.

No, we weren't going to Kawaguchiko to climb Fuji (Tomoe did that last weekend and vowed never to do it again), instead, we were going there to check out Earth Embassy, an organic farm / cafe run by an environmental architect. They accept some volunteer positions for a week or a month or longer, and I was going to check it out.

As you may have noticed, I have been interested in green growing things lately, and I figure that volunteering there would be a great way to learn a little more. I feel I should clarify a bit exactly why I am interested in volunteering or working there or someplace like it. Some people seem to have the impression that I want to be a farmer all of a sudden. Sorry to disappoint you, but that's not it. While I am certainly open to the idea should I wind up getting deeper and deeper and more and more interested, the reason I want to work on a farm now has more to do with understanding the ecological system I am living in. It's about knowing where my food comes from and learning even a little bit about what is involved in bringing it to me.

While a lot of people, including me, speak of how current big-agriculture practices are destroying the ability to meet our future needs, and having unanticipated and unwanted negative effects on societies right here and now, I admit that I do feel uncomfortable talking about something I know so little about. Although the arguments for organic are logical and backed up by science, I don't like relying soly on what other people say. I want to see for myself what it's all about.

Anyway, what I am trying to say is that my desire to "work the land" is more of an educational experience now. And lucky me, based on my experience in Sweden this summer, I feel that working with living ecosystems is more exhilarating and satisfying -physically, mentally, and morally- than anything I have done before. I am certainly not opposed to "farming" as a career, but I am also a realist. I know that I am much too lazy to seriously consider such an undertaking.

Oh... I forgot about the story.

So anyway, we arrived in Kawaguchiko station just passed noon, and not wanting to spend $6 on a bus ticket to the earth embassy, we decided to walk. We arrived around noon the next day. It was a great walk though. I am thoroughly impressed with the upkeep of the Kawaguchiko/Saiko area. It was not nearly as touristy as I had expected -especially once we passed the tunnel to Saiko. Although the Kawaguchiko station was filled with not only Japanese tourists, but also more foreign tourists than I have seen concentrated anywhere in Japan, once we walked about four-hundred meters away, it was (almost) as if we were in a little out-of-the-way Japanese village. Except this one had a beautiful walking path the whole length of the lake.

Stopping often obviously slowed us down, and by nightfall we had only reached the mountain pass between Kawaguchiko and Saiko (ko is Japanese for "lake"). We decided to pitch our tent in a graveyard there and continue on in the morning.

Despite a sleepless night due to heat and cold (I was sweating to death while Tomoe was freezing to death. She tried to get close to me to warm up, and I tried to get away from her to cool off), I will remember it as a "good" experience, if only because of the strange animal calls I heard through the night (remember, I was awake all night) first getting closer and closer to, and then hanging around our tent. Though I am sure there is nothing that will hurt us, I was worried that they were monkeys looking to steal my bag which did not fit inside the tent. In the morning though the bag was still there and the only thing I know about these creatures is that their call is something like "Ahhh Ahhh AHhhh Ahhhh ohhhhh ohhhh ohhhh ooooo ooooo whoooooo whooooooo".

The next day we awoke early and continued along Saiko which was covered with a beautiful morning fog. At some point we had to turn left to reach our destination and stumbled upon a well-worn trail in the lava-forest. The earth here is made from genuine Fuji lava, filled with caves and crevasses... and signs telling would-be suicidists to give life another chance. Yes, it seems that this area is quite a draw for those wishing to end it all. I suppose this is because it has a romanticism partially due to the fact that in the old days people would disappear without a trace -either swallowed up by some crevasse (in some places you can feel the thermal heat coming from the ground), or simply lost because the lava interferes with the earths magnetic field, rendering a compass useless.

Blah blah bah... It was a beautiful forest.

When we finally reached the earth embassy, we found that it was closed for the weekend, and all the people who worked there, save one new volunteer who started three days earlier, had gone off to the big city to party. Oh well. We had a great walk and I will go back there this month to do a one-week volunteer session and tell you all about it.

These photos are all from the Kawaguchiko / saiko area.