Amazing Tales of Travel

by Audubon Dougherty
The sky was always a threatening gray in Manchester. It was hard to believe in heaven there; I could never see the stars and the clouds were so low they were almost on me, they hovered laughing at me. Meteorologically speaking, I started off thinking this was cool, then I came to hate it. It was a test of mental health (can you live without light? Can you live without heat?) and I failed. I quit school, packed my bags and took off after 10 weeks of a wet British autumn.

It wasn’t always terrible. Usually a rain jacket and scarf was necessary, but some days the sun would poke through in holes across the sky. When this happened, everyone’s pace would slow down and in the city center, by the terminal at Piccadilly, you’d see weathered old bus drivers and Indian cooks and distracted retail salespeople and bleached blonde chicks in short skirts and tall fuzzy boots leaning against the walls of cheap department stores, having a smoke.

Downtown Manchester was pretty cool, actually. There was a mess of sculpted concrete buildings all pushed together; there were train tracks slipping through the streets; there was an urban art museum and some posh galleries and a building full of piercing shops for the alternative-punk crowd, where I bought a new nosering for a pound; there was Canal Street, the gay district, where friends would sit in friendly pubs full of overweight drag queens singing into crackling speakers which would clip when they hit a high E; there were many cute pubs, and Kro Bar, a hip restaurant for students and professional techies where the décor was metallic and the hamburgers were so thick I’d be full for weeks. Not everything about Manchester was depressing.

But I’ll tell you what was: the men. And the petty crime. When I’d walk through Whitworth Park in Rusholme, even in the morning, I’d first pass African guys playing futbol on the left, then Irish guys playing futbol on the right, then a series of park benches from which fat townies would hiss or call names, or worse, just stare menacingly. We – my international housemates and I – were encouraged to keep our bedroom doors locked, our computers bolted to tables, and even instructed to take our bags and jackets out of the university classroom if we stepped out to go to the bathroom, because professors wouldn’t be responsible for theft, and theft happened everywhere.

Women were encouraged to walk escorted by male friends, or stay off the street after dark as much as possible, so I took to riding the double-decker bus to and from town in the evenings. There were several bus companies, and each charged a different fare, though all were exorbitant. Residents could buy a weekly pass for $18 which covered the two-mile stretch from campus to downtown, but this required standing around for 20 minutes waiting until the blue bus finally came, edging up behind white and red ones owned by other companies. I’d walk up to the top level and sit in the very front where I could put my feet up on the large square windows and watch everything moving below. The after-work crowd would come onto the bus with their funky haircuts, black pants and metro newspapers in hand, silent and tired looking. What a bunch of sad people we are, I’d think. It certainly seemed that way.

Sometimes, though, you’d hit a pub and meet people over a game of pool, or some British version of it. The balls were often of the red and yellow gumball variety, and the tables were unnaturally small, their size reduced either to accommodate for lack of space or simply because everything in England – food, sunlight, currency – seemed smaller. Manchester United games would play on TV, or popular BBC-1 soap operas, or cheesy outdated American sitcoms. I could talk politics or sports with good-natured bantering local old guys and student friends, and if the cigarette smoke got out of hand, we could leave and walk home in the middle of the road, just under the streetlights so no one would be tempted to jump us. I’d carry a stash of McVitties Dark Chocolate Digestives wherever I went, quite possibly the best cookie to ever come out of Britain, and eat them in place of overpriced meals.

When it rained – and it always rained – I’d stare out the window for hours, trying to see another city under the clouds, trying to hear airplanes and imagine where they were going. I finally gave up and got on one myself, disenchanted with graduate school and tired of everything else. Manchester was a beaten-down little boy who’d taken to hitting others in retribution. It was hard to believe in heaven there.

by Georg Pedersen
Jon calls to tell me there are monkeys in the hills. “They’re supposed to be all over the place. You have to find them.” This is at seven in the evening: after the two hour train ride from Tokyo, after six and a half hours of looking at temples and shrines and pagodas in the rain, surrounded by tour groups and confronted with gift shops trying to sell me on the unique charm of Nikko. Monkeys. This would be the day’s redemption, yes, monkeys. “They’re all supposed to be on this one trail on Mount Nantai. It’s awesome, they just come out and hang with you. You have to be careful, though: if they see any food they will jump your ass.” I am so excited. I tell Jon I’m as good as there, and take out the map that I bought for 200 yen from an old man at the entrance to the park. By my best judgment Mt. Nantai is somewhere between 10,000 and 11,000 meters away, depending on how far up the mountain I have to go to get to the monkeys. That’s about six and a half miles; it would be getting dark soon and I needed to catch the 9pm train back into town. My spirits waver. I still had two temples to go, and I somehow missed the “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” sculpture, which had become my main reason for sticking around so long. There might have been a later train but the idea of hanging with monkeys in the dark was a lot less appealing and a lot more scary. It wasn’t looking good.

I took the day trip to Nikko because everyone told me it was old and beautiful and that the temples would give me a spiritual awakening, or at least be a nice break from the meta-city claustrophobia of Tokyo. Close, but no. From a distance everything is beautiful and stately and dignified; it’s not until I pay the admission fee for whichever temple I want to visit (each one requires a separate ticket) that the reality of the situation hits me with any force. At every turn there is a nicknack shop with replica temples and monkey hand towels– there are monkeys on most everything they sell, a fact that just angers me after I realize how impossible it’ll be to see a real one so late in the day– and cute little cell phone toys that, really, don’t do one thing to add to the majesty of the temples and the forest.

I’m not so naive as to think that it’s any different in the US, I’ve been a tourist visiting tourist attractions before. And I’m more than willing to concede that it hits me a little harder due to A) jet-lag, B) reality vs. my fantasy of what Nikko should be, and C) my general distaste for commercialization of any kind– and let’s not forget D) my generally grumpiness during the whole trip. But this went a little far. The temples themselves seem surprisingly unmaintained: peeling and cracking paint, dust inches thick in places, souvenir stands sometimes built RIGHT INTO the temples and compromising the beauty of the site (which is what really gets me). And yeah, I imagine it’s hard to maintain ALL these big old amazing temples and shrines in what, as I experience it, is an unforgivingly humid part of the country, but goddammit where’s all that damn trinket money going? What are they spending it on and why can’t they spare a couple bucks to buy a duster? This is what’s going through my head as I try to take in as much of Nikko as I can handle.

One of the big problems with traveling alone is that I can easily get myself in a funk and just slowly sink deeper and deeper into it. There’s no one there to put into perspective the fact that, even if a little dusty and crowded, Nikko is pretty damn bitchin’: the temples ARE amazing, and the trees are some of the coolest I’ve ever seen–tall and thick and agile, if a tree can be agile. But without this outside perspective, I’m stuck having a miserable time and transmitting as much ill will and bad karma as I can to every souvenir stand in sight.

My excuse for going to Japan was partly to see my good friend for the first time since he moved there two years ago, and partly just to get away from a life that was not at all going as planned. Goodbye savings account, hello Tokyo. I was hoping to lose myself in the city, in the new surroundings, and to sort out my problems during my twelve-odd days in the country. It wasn’t working that way. Tokyo itself has a weird energy as a city, something that I couldn’t quite place but that definitely got me more wound up and more confused on the whole. I felt myself getting more lost than when I got there, and so when Jon suggested a trip to Nikko (by myself) I jumped at: for nature, for solitude, for contrast. And then to find it so dense with tourists and entrepreneurism made me think the whole trip was a waste.

But monkeys. Monkeys had to be the answer. Again I bust out the map. The national park itself is on a mountain, one with several promising-sounding stops on the way to the top (can you say waterfall? Can you say free and uncrowded shrine?). And at the top, dare I hope, monkeys? It’s a long shot but one I feel I owe myself at this point. I start double-timing it up the road that leads past the attractions and out of the park. It’s only 1500m from where I stand to the waterfall, and maybe a couple hundred more to the shrine. I figure the monkeys can’t be too far after that.

Once I leave the park-proper I start feeling worlds better. I suddenly have a purpose to my day. A plan. An adventure. The hike up to Shiraito Falls is beautiful and exactly what I need; the falls themselves, while small, are all you could ask for from a Japanese waterfall: serene and kind of timeless. Truthfully, I don’t spend much time admiring the falls or the shrine or the scenery. This is not a pleasure hike. This is a mission. I snap a few photos so I can cherish the moment later. I go past them and continue up the mountain. It’s just about twilight now and the path is getting both darker and narrower. It’s a lot less traveled and there’s a good amount of underbrush in the way. Rationally, I know that I should start heading back, but this is just way too close to all of my adolescent adventurer fantasies to stop so soon. I grab a stick and start hacking away. It is great. I travel maybe another quarter mile when I start hearing noises, definite animal noises. In my head all that inhabits the surrounding area are violent and kind of grumpy simians, who have little or no interest in being my friend and possibly mean me some harm. This is when I put down the stick and turn around.

I get back to the park even quicker than I left it, still monkey-less and maybe a little crestfallen. It’s dusk and the crowds are all clearing out. Everything is closing down. On my way out I pass by Rinno-ji Temple, one of the two I had skipped initially. Because it’s so close to closing the ticket guy just lets me in, and I wander along the little path around the temple by myself, through all the rooms. Even at my most touristy moments (i.e., now), I never do all that much research into where I’m going or what I should see (hence why I didn’t even KNOW about the monkeys coming into this). Once in a while it works to my advantage, like right now. I turn the corner into the main room and see these three huge (gold?) statues of Buddha. I’m taken completely by surprise, and I get to stand there– by myself– and just appreciate them. And be alone and think, and have my spiritual moment.