What a quirk of human nature that we dream of faraway places yet fail to go out and take in parts of the world closest to us. I'm from New Jersey. Not a big place in relative terms. Yet in the course of traveling a good bit of the world there remains plenty for me to explore in my own home state.
I'm similarly guilty regarding my eight years in Washington, DC and my subsequent five years in Colorado. Not that I didn't get out. It was just that when it came time to leave I felt like I still had unfinished business.
Things changed in 2001. I signed up for a charity bike ride in Alaska and, remembering I had no bike, bought one. At the end of the ride I shipped that bike to Fukushima, Japan. I met up with it a few weeks later in this brand new home of mine and immediately set out to see every town, mountain and river on the map of Japan hanging on the western wall of my shoebox apartment.
Fast forward to 2015: in a fortuitous turn of events I snagged a side gig as a tour guide, leading groups of Slovenians by train and bus from Nagasaki to Tokyo and a dozen cities in between. The next year, in a sleepy bed and breakfast at the bottom of the Izu Peninsula I picked up a local magazine and muddled through an article about a guy in the area who ran a cycling tour operation. Back home I spent an hour and a half pecking out an email in Japanese, asking him if he was looking for extra hands.
He was.
Since then I've had opportunity to go on a dozen cycling tours through the beautiful, scarcely-traveled Japanese countryside and on some of the archipelago's furthest-flung islands, including the one called Yakushima.
Luck comes in the course of the choices we make.
In 2004 I was considering spending my two-week winter vacation cycling to Yakushima from my place in Osaka. The trip would have involved several ferries and, now that I think about it, considerably more than two weeks. For better or for worse, I opted instead to go back to Fukushima and ask my girlfriend's father for his permission to marry his daughter.
She would, a few years later, introduce me to a Slovenian guy who owned a tour guide company.
Guiding with that gent brought me to Yakushima in two ways. The experience I gained with him got me the cycling tour gig, through which I've been able to go to Yakushima three times on two different tours. Tasked with booking hotels for our Slovenian guests, I became friends with some hotel owners who invited me to spend this past winter break working at their recently-acquired hotel on Yakushima.
Cycling tours, I have to say, are infinitely more fun than working in a hotel.
I'm sure I'd still be dreaming of Yakushima if it weren't for the work that fell into my lap. Same with Rishiri Island way up north, part of a cycling tour of Hokkaido. Most visitors to Japan don't make it to the far ends of the country. Heck, most Japanese never see these places.
Moving to Japan back in 2001 was a conscious decision. But even that was helped along by my luck in finding, quite accidentally, an Internet ad for a job teaching English in Japan - a discovery I would not have made if the poor customer service rep on the other end of the line hadn't given into my pleadings for one more free trial month of dial-up AOL.
Not knowing what life in Japan would bring only added to the allure of the place. Not knowing how long I'd be sticking around, I hit the road as soon as I'd put my bike back together.
We make our choices. Then we do our best with what they bring.
The picture at the top of this post was taken from the lobby of the Yakushima hotel where I worked. The picture below shows the incongruous snows of sub-tropical Yakushima and 60-meter Senpiro Falls. Note that sixty meters is about two hundred feet, the approximate height of a 20-story building.
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