I'm going on a trip. I don't have one goal, but I want to go to remote rural areas and places rich in nature. I've become so used to the routine and everyday scenery I've built up over the past four or five years that I've become like a frog sinking to the bottom of a well. Although I find small moving moments in my daily life, I've lost the freshness of each one of them. No matter how good something is, if it continues every day, I no longer know if it's really good. In order to keep creating something new, I want to destroy, wash away, and clean up what I have now. Civilization and myself must grow by repeating the process of scrapping and building.
I thought a lot about where to go, but then took into account the weak yen and airfare prices and my budget, and decided to go with my intuition and decide who to ask, rather than where to go.
This time, it's not just a trip.
Travel and trips are the same in that you go somewhere, but the quality is completely different. Traveling means going to a resort and having a luxurious experience, or enjoying the hospitality of a hot spring inn. On the other hand, traveling means stepping out of your everyday life, going to an unfamiliar place, meeting people whose daily lives are surrounded by scenery completely different from your own, and sometimes prioritizing cheap and interesting accommodation over comfort, while seeking new discoveries and experiencing the feeling of adventuring on the planet. The ratio of planning and moving forward with it and the unplanned part that you think about on the spot after you get there is about half and half. You only arrange a one-way ticket, and decide when and where you will fly back from when you get there.
Last year, I made friends with an Indian man named Rishi at an event. He came to serve food. I still vividly remember the shock I felt the moment I tasted his spicy food. The spices were lively and matched well with the ingredients, incomparable to the Japanese-Indian food I had eaten up until then. However, he told me that he had quit his job as a restaurant chef and was focusing on producing stores while also starting a mushroom farm in the mountains of South India. It sounds interesting. I love mushrooms. I go mushroom hunting in the mountains in Takigahara, and have been cultivating log-grown shiitake and log-grown nameko mushrooms for several years. I contacted Rishi and asked if I could visit his farm, and he readily agreed.
Okay, let's go to India. I've always wanted to go there since I was in my early 20s. I always thought the timing would come someday, so I decided to go now.
I immediately looked up tickets to India and found that many of them went through Thailand, so I decided to stop by Thailand on the way. If I were to go, I wanted to go somewhere that wasn't a resort. I'm not very good at beach resorts with lots of people dressed in revealing clothes. So, Bangkok and Phuket were rejected, and Chiang Mai was the only option left. I thought I'd head to Chiang Mai first, and then go further into the countryside from there.
A few days later, I received a call from a friend who happened to be traveling in Thailand, and she told me that she was in a place called Pai. It was a three-hour bus ride from Chiang Mai, and the rural scenery and the moderately touristy atmosphere of the town looked nice. Chiang Mai is a city, so two days would be enough. I'll go to Pai for the rest of the day and think about what to do next. I've decided on the date to meet Rishi, so I've decided to stay in Thailand for 10 days. I'll leave the country for Thailand in early June and return home from India by early August.
Before traveling abroad, I wanted to travel to Japan, and then I received the good news that my Russian friend Iggy, who lives in Austria, was coming back to Japan. At first, I thought I would go to Italy in May to join him in some way because he was going to open a pop-up restaurant in the countryside of southern Italy from May, but one day he suddenly said, "I'm going to Japan after all!" We decided to scrap our plans and travel together, making Japan our reunion. We met near Kobe Airport, drove to Shikoku, then took a boat to Kyushu, and headed for Minami Satsuma in Kagoshima. Before I knew it, we had made a plan for a 10-day road trip from Ishikawa Prefecture to the southernmost tip of Kyushu.
The total budget for the trip was about 400,000 yen. It was quite tight for a two and a half month trip, but I don't mind traveling on a budget. I don't mind being unhappy with inconveniences and I like to experience something out of the ordinary.
As the departure date drew nearer, I started to get nervous and started packing about four days before. First, I chose my favorite summer clothes that I absolutely wanted to take with me. However, I rarely buy or throw away clothes, and I love clothes, so even though I carefully selected, it was impossible to reduce it to less than 10 top items. As for bottoms, I imagined various scenes, such as shorts, swim trunks, long pants, and skirts, and the minimum number of items was also quite high, but I couldn't reduce it any more, so I shoved everything into compression bags and put it in my suitcase.
Next, Japanese food and tea. Miso is essential. 5kg of dried log-grown shiitake mushrooms that I grew myself to make miso soup stock, and 1kg of Noto kelp. I also needed ochazuke seasoning and powdered soy sauce. It was hard to choose my favorite tea. I like almost everything I own, so I decided to bring almost everything, including a lidded bowl, teacup, and tea stand, but the food and tea took up a third of my suitcase. I can't forget my favorite instruments. Kalimba, mouth harp, nose flute, harmonica. I need them all. I also gathered everything I need to survive away from home for two and a half months, including my computer, iPad mini, mobile battery, first aid kit, hair care kit, and my favorite incense, and my suitcase was full to the brim. I pushed it in with my body weight and managed to close the zipper.
For a while, I say goodbye to my comfortable home and futon, and this heavy suitcase becomes a simplified version of my home. The journey finally begins. My first solo trip abroad since 2015. Starting tomorrow, I will be carrying a large amount of luggage and setting off on a long journey with no clear future. The night before I depart, my heart was pounding in my futon, and I couldn't fall asleep, so I waited for the morning.
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