It was lovely to see them. As we have so often done before, the Mulrys, my mother and myself made a little day trip to that lovely North Yorkshire seaside town Whitby… Click through to the individual pictures on flickr if you would like a little more information.

And finally Saltburn with Mr. Potter… Here’s Mike Potter and his girlfriend Lisa who I met for the first time.And a charming lady she is too.

This is the place we had lunch at, Virgo’s in Saltburn. Saltburn is a lovely old Victorian seaside town on the wild north-east coast and Virgo’s is a very nice bistro/cafe with a great menu that includes several vegetarian dishes.

I had pasta with pesto and pine nuts. All the ps.

These two had some other stuff… We were all really satisfied anyway.

It was too cold and windy for walking so we retreated to the Ship – an old smugglers pub for pints and pirate impressions.

It’s always good to see Mr. Potter. Here’s a little Teesside moon from the journey back…

We had been there last three years ago on Xmas Eve, and enjoyed the stalls and the mulled wine, but it has increased in popularity since then, the crowds have gotten bigger and the mulled wine somehow wasn’t as good… To escape the crowds we wandered through the Umeda Sky Building and its garden instead. This is ourselves reflected in a window looking out on an illuminated waterfall.

Later we had dinner at Santa Lucia near Utsubo Park (thanks to Eric J. for that tip!). It was pretty good… Though a bit odd that we were seated in a greenhouse.

And the food was a little too salty. Back in Kyoto we went to Kisui and Miu needed four glasses of orange juice in quick succession to quench her thirst. Before heading back though we also took in the Yodogawa illuminations:

On the Sunday, (18th December) we visited Arashiyama Hanatouro (lantern light-up). It was crowded and very cold but well worth the visit.

After that we really needed a hot nabe to heat us up! I was positively dreaming of this on the train back.

This one from Soba no Mi Yoshimura was just the job!

To follow ~ Chrimbly pictures from jolly old England!

After the restaurant, our thirsts still unquenched we popped in at Kisui. Every year Setchan makes a big point of celebrating Halloween and having all her customers dress up. Setchan really loves Halloween. Anyway the place was full of lively characters, all in costume and all in high spirits who immediately burst into a rousing “Happy Birthday to you…!”  as soon as we walked through the door. Setchan and Risae’s costumes were particularly impressive:

And though we didn’t come in costume, Setchan has her own stash of wigs and accoutrements on hand and so we were encouraged to dress accordingly:

Then home for cake and candles – and as it was Halloween it seemed appropriate somehow that Mewby wear my AC/DC devil horns…

Plunging from the open grassy plain into primeval forest, we came upon a stream and Stephen Gill carefully placed some stones for the ladies to cross over.

Hesitant poets
cross the beck
on freshly-placed stones

Here in the woods we also encountered a stag who had somehow managed to avoid getting his antlers removed this year. The deer in Nara are quite unafraid of humans, and so to avoid having them injuring people their antlers are removed. This fellow is obviously faster or sneakier than most.

Here we are under a massive oak, descendant of oaks that have been here for thousands of years.

At Shinyakushiji we viewed 12 ancient statues of heavenly guardians, a big fat Buddha, and in the garden flowers like these:

Shinyakushiji -
a boy admires a girl
admiring Budhha

The persimmon trees in Nara were hung with luminous fruit… But I couldn’t help noticing the metal fencing and forsaken machinery – that was painted the same colour!

rusty ripe persimmon -
In the long grass
abandoned metal fences

Finally we returned to a cafe, where we had tea and delicious apple cake – and shared our haiku.

Finally something decent on the TV.

I was delighted that my own two offerings met with the others’ approval. And even more so that one of them made it onto the Hailstone website report. You can read some haiku by the other members and Stephen’s report there.

On the first day ten of us were driven in three cars (all praise to David McCullough, Hisashi Miyazaki and Stephen Gill for driving us) up to Toyama. After a lengthy journey we transferred to a cable car, and then a bus that drove us through a lovely national park, forested to begin with and then up into and beyond the clouds. Along the way, the bus slowed down so that we could see the Shomyo falls – the highest falls in Japan! I took a quick fuzzy pic out of the window with my i-phone:

Beyond the treeline we were treated to spectacular views of misty mountain slopes swooping down into a beautiful sea of clouds. Everybody on the bus was oohing and aahing at it but you’ll have to take my word for that as I failed to get a decent snap-shot.

And then we were off the bus and hiking up to our hostel. In the picture above you can see the road ahead of us, and if you notice Mewby (on the right) feeling inspired is scribbling a haiku in my notebook. The notebook incidentally was a gift from Stephen Gill which he bestowed, along with oranges, before our ascent. Here are some more pictures I took along the way. The path is beautifully cobbled and as Stephen said, looks very much like an old Roman road.

All of those pictures were taken with my i-phone as we were on the move. Once we reached the hostel though I whipped out my proper camera. The views were lovely and got lovelier as the sun went down.

After we’d had a good feed and some of the men had opened up the bottles of spirits they had brought along to loosen up our tongues, the haiku sharing session commenced. I’m pretty sure that Stephen will be posting the best of them on the Hailstone site in the near future. There were a couple of really nice ones from David as I remember and Miki and Atsushi had some good ones too. As for me well, I’d scribbled something along the way, but I wasn’t satisfied with it so I kept working on it, and working on it until…

…I still wasn’t satisfied with it. Anyway, my poems won’t get better if I don’t open them up to scrutiny I thought, so I opened my mouth to deliver my gentle poem on soft clouds and mountain tops – and at that moment two rather silly women came in from outside, sat down behind me, and started shrieking noisily about the cold. And they continued shrieking quite happily for some time about whatever other topic entered their heads. And wouldn’t stop. SHRIEKING. At the top of their piercing voices. So I found myself shouting rather than reciting the following words in an oddly inaproppriate tone of intense irritation:

gently on green slopes
cloud scraps drifting
into a hollow milk mist sea

Stephen wasn’t happy with the word “hollow”, but though I’m not so happy with the poem as a whole, I can’t think of a better word to describe the insubstantial quality of a sea of clouds so I’m (stubbornly) reluctant to let that “hollow” go. Anyway, some of the Japanese poets present put their heads together to translate it and it actually sounds much better in Japanese:

ゆるやかな緑の坂を
千切れ雲が漂う
空の乳海

Mewby also wrote a haiku, which she has given me permission to post here:

車窓から
色濃く流れる
季節かな

And here is Stephen’s translation:

From the carriage window
ah, the season of deepening colours
flowing by

That was Mewby’s very first haiku! Further challenges however, still lay ahead!

This is the mountain we had to climb the next morning.

It didn’t look like the top was that far away. But actually it was, and it took a good hour and a bit and a hard slog to get up there. Tateyama is actually considered one of the “three holy mountains” of Japan. So we made a point of getting a blessing at the summit shrine. Directly under heaven, we sat on loose cobbles as the shrine priest prayed over us. We learned later that those cobbles (some of them immense) had been brought there by pilgrims. It was a lovely ceremony. You’ll notice from the second picture in this next set that from the top you can actually see Mount Fuji (another holy mountain).

That wasn’t the end of our journey though. The tricky part was getting back down. Poor Mewby had a very hard time of it. But she kept going and eventually she got there and I think she felt a great sense of achievement having done so.
Here we all are at the bottom.

Finally though in tribute to brave Mewby, as my own haiku skills aren’t sufficient, I shall cheat and borrow the words of Mitsuo Aida instead.

only human
after all

it’s ok to stumble, isn’t it?
we are humans after all

I made these with the help of this neat little app that I’ve got on my i-phone. Good, aren’t they?

Bravo Mewby! And many thanks to Stephen, Atsushi, and Hisashi for organizing such an enjoyable and stimulating trip!

in Japanese,
to be filled with emotion is
written as “to feel and to move”

Update! The official report of the trip with more pictures and some very nice haiku is up on the Hailstone Haiku Circle site now! Click here: Autumn Haiku Hike to the Summit of Mt. Tateyama.

The Minka

Some time ago I was given the option to stay at one of a number of houses owned by a French tourist business in the Kyoto area. “Why not have a little holiday in Kyoto?” I was asked. However, instead of choosing one of the nice, clean houses in Kyoto proper I chose to stay in a run-down minka way out in the sticks. It seemed like a good opportunity to get away from it all, and I do like a bit of fresh country air, so I dragged poor Mewby out on a two hour bus ride into the heart of inaka.

We set off around 5pm, so when we got there the place was pitch black. Fortunately, I had thought to bring some torches (that’s flashlights for my American bretheren, not flaming brands from an Indiana Jones movie). We managed to find the house, find our way into the house and then find the fuse box so we could turn on the lights. Mewby wasn’t very happy about the enormous amount of creepy crawlies that inhabited the place though. This fellow was one of the prettier ones.

I didn’t take any pictures of the spiders though. Too terrifying.

Mewby made a simple dinner while I cleaned the place up a bit. As the minka is unused most of the time and shut up, the damp gets to the tatami and it gets musty so I had to give it a bit of hoovering. Once we’d had dinner and relaxed a bit we kind of got used to constantly batting fluttery scampery things away from us.

And Mewby cheered up once we went outside and had a little fireworks party. She really likes fireworks.

Fortunately, I had also brought a 蚊帳 or mosquito net so we could sleep in peace undisturbed by all the little beasties around us.

Or at least Mewby could. Foolishly I had watched this scary movie trailer about a girl and her father staying in a run-down old house out in the middle of nowhere… and images from the trailer started popping up in my head as soon as I closed my eyes. “Really!” I thought as I listened to the sound of mice skittering through the woodwork. “There’s enough living things around me. Do I have to start worrying about dead things too?” Eventually, though I could sleep and early in the morning I went outside to explore.

You can basically open up the whole front of the house, just by removing the wooden panels. It’s a nice view to have as you eat your meals.

But the weather is very changeable in the mountains and though it had been sunny, it was suddenly raining very hard.

There’s nothing better sitting indoors listening to the summer rain – and we had a perfect view too.

The company that owns this building, plan to do it up and have it ready for rental by the spring. It could be really nice as the location is lovely. But I think someone should make a horror movie there first, while it’s still nice and creepy.

Taken (wonkily) on the street in Bangkok

Here are some more pictures, this time from Wat Chalong, Phuket’s major temple. After visiting there we went to the Jungceylon shopping center, so the last couple of pictures are (fairly typically) of us eating. The restaurant was Spoon Cafe. Probably one of the better meals we had in Phuket.

During our time in Phuket, even though it was the rainy season we were very lucky with the weather. It didn’t rain at all until the moment we got on the plane to Bangkok. Bangkok was rainy on the first day but we spent the first few hours indulging ourselves with another Thai massage at our hotel before Chris Rowthorn came to meet us and took us out for dinner with his family. It was a lovely dinner, and interesting to meet up with a friend from Kyoto in an entirely different location. The next day we did a tour of the most famous Bangkok temples. Chris had forewarned us about the guys outside Wat Phra Kaew who try to tell you it’s closed so they can scam you, so we told them where to go. Haggling with taxi drivers about prices was kind of a pain in the neck though… The following pictures are from Wat Phra Kaew. The scenes painted in the galleries are from Ramakien, depicting the war waged by Rama to rescue his wife Sita – basically the same story we saw enacted in Bali last year as a kechak dance.

The following pictures are of Wat Po, a short tuk-tuk drive, a ferry ride & Wat Arun.

Again the weather was perfect all day, until we went back to our hotel when it began to rain again. After that we were into a taxi and on our way back home. It was a perfect trip but after almost two weeks away we were ready to get back home.

One last drink in the hotel bar.

An altar in the Twin Towers hotel dedicated to... wait a minute isn't that -?

It is! It's Father Christmas!

See also: Thailand #1, #2, #3 & #4.

Here are some pictures (actually quite a lot of pictures) from our Sea Canoe Adventure (organized by HIS). Sailing from Phuket, we took in the islands of Phang-Nga bay and explored the sea caves of Phanak, Hong and Ko Tapu. Ko Tapu is now known as James Bond Island because The Man with the Golden Gun (probably the most abysmal film in the Bond canon) was partly shot there. It was a great day out, and the sunbronzed wild boys on the boats who were our guides were funny, friendly and showed us a great time.

Watch out for a “walking fish” and a rock that looks like a baby elephant in this bunch:

And heeeeeerez JamesBondIsland!

And on we sailed. The wild boys whistled down some sea eagles for us. We went to another island and paddled around a bit, sometimes in a canoe and sometimes in the water. And then we went home and had dinner served by a man in a skirt, and big plate of shrimp crackers so amazingly huge I couldn’t hold the camera straight for awhile.

More pictures to come, but in the meantime just look at Lulu singing The Man With the Golden Gun! Look at her! Isn’t she AWFUL? £5 if you can sit through the whole thing.

See also: Thailand #1, #2, & #3.

We had to pay for it though with a massive hike up the hill every time we went back to our hotel. The hotel itself was a bit odd. in that it consisted of a number of different buildings connected by an elaborate and labyrinthine system of walkways, steps and stairways. No matter where we wanted to go, we always seemed to be climbing. I guess it made our legs stronger…

On this day, (by which time I had lost track of dates, days and any sense of time) we went down to Karon Beach, a slightly longer walk away than Kata beach but well worth it. You see that little speck of humanity in the sea?

That chubby little fellow with the bodyboard?

That would be me.

We had a lovely time here and lots of fun riding the crashing waves.

More pictures to follow of our Sea Canoe Adventure & “James Bond Island”!

See also: Thailand #1 & #2