Picking up the Pug

Tomoe and I just got back from a trip to the south of Nagano where we visited some friends and came how with a new one - the pug.

No, the pug is not a real pug dog. It's a light van, but I have always wanted a pug and this van is kinda stubby, so we named it the pug. As for the Pajero, we decided to get rid of it. For one thing, it is much more expensive to own than a "kei" or "light-weight" car because road tax and insurance cost almost double. For another, we won't need two cars in the winter because we wont have to transport any customers around with bikes, and we were debating what to do. On the one hand, the Pajero is powerful and can carry lots of weight - the Pug can only carry up to 350kg. Environmentally speaking, the Pug is much better than a regular car (though without the power), but the Pajero was diesel and there was always the option to start home-brewing our own bio-diesel or start using tempura oil. (Given the pace we move though, it would probably be a year or more before that happened.)

In the end, in the name of the eco-system, we decided to give up the pajero and keep the Pug. It also helped us to decide when we found out that the frame of the Pajero was rusted out and it would cost at least $10,000 to fix it. And, while this car would run for another 10 years in the USA, Japanese law says that cars have to be "like-new" in order to drive in Japan. Bad for Japan, good for majority-world nations where used cars from Japan that run perfectly well but are a bit rusty get shipped to.

We took the train down to Nukuta station in the south of Nagano, worried all the way because the last time I went there was after the July typhoon. I only made it part way before discovering that the railway was closed due to mud-slide. This time we left on Saturday - again a day after an even bigger typhoon hit dead-on. The friend who gave us the car also lives on a steep slope with a history of land-slides and we were worried that the car might even be laying at the bottom of the valley by now.

All went well other than a few minor mistakes on our part - missing the station and having to wait for two hours for the next train back and, after camping in a high-school athletic field, hiking three hours to their house, only to walk right by it and continue on for another forty minutes before realizing our mistake.

Once we arrived though, the Pug was waiting and the BBQ was ready to be fired up. We made a beer & tofu run and spent the rest of the afternoon on into evening drinking and eating with amazing mountain views.

The next day we packed up the Pug and set off North toward Hakuba, taking a detour through a less popular valley that follows the fossa-magma fault line that separates Northern Japan and Southern Japan in terms of geological tectonic plates and crap. It was an amazing area - perfect for a bike trip! Much of the road was under construction due to recent land-slides, so there were many detours on windy logging roads and very few cars. Tomoe was a bit uncomfortable on the narrow windy roads (as was I when I saw just how close we were to falling off a cliff several times!) so I took over despite my not having a licence yet (but that's a different story).

Along the way we stopped to check out an area semi-famous for its villages perched on impossibly steep slopes. Their fields would have been rated as black-diamond ski-slopes. The veggies that usually grow straight up were actually growing almost straight OUT!

We also stopped to check out Oshika-mura. This is an area we had found a house for sale, with land and a mountain included for $20,000 USD. When researching the area we found some sites on the web about hippy cults that eat their babies, so it went in our "only if we are desperate" file, but having visited the area, it is now in our "If Sakae doesn't work out, check here first" file. One great thing about the area is that it is at the end of a long road that ends in the middle of the mountains. This cuts out any through traffic unless they are willing to take winding logging roads to get through. It is also arelatively moderate climate with a much longer growing season than where we will be moving to - yet, within a two days hike from the second highest peak in Japan, so hiking options are abundant.

Anyway, I have more to say, but Tomoe and I are taking the Pug to Sakae today to do some trip research and start cleaning our new house so we can move in by the end of Sept.