welcome(-ish)

“Tak-see!”

“Nyet. Spaseeba, nyet.”*

“You von’t tak-see?”

“Nyet. I have a ride.”

“You khev a ride? Hvear is zis ‘ride’? Khee is not kheer.”

“He’ll be here.”

“Okay. Mebbi later, if your ‘ride’ not kheer, you vill von't tak-see.”

“Okay.”

Moving right al –

“Tak-see! You von’t tak-see, no?"

“Nyet. Spaseeba, nyet. I have a ride."

“No, you khev NO ride. I geev you good price" …

And so on, ad infinitum.

Welcome to the Russian Federation, otherwise known as the Commonwealth of Independent Taxi Drivers.

You may (or may not) be interested to know that none of the half a dozen shady-looking characters who approached me upon my arrival at Sheremetyevo airport wore a uniform or, in all probability, drove an actual taxi. They were all dressed in jeans and polo shirts, their shirts just a little too small so as to emphasise their burliness.

The explanation for this is that, according to reputable sources, every car in Moscow is a taxi. So: got nothing better to do on a Sunday afternoon and in need of some spare cash? Muscovite custom says you should put on your smallest polo shirt, head out to the arrivals lounge at Sheremetyevo and harangue silly foreigners into letting you give them a lift somewhere – at a pre-arranged price.

Of course, as a visitor to Russia, you don’t get to experience this part of the local culture without first having to queue for an arbitrarily long period. Your passage through Russian passport control is best measured in geological terms; comparisons to, say, the total number of eons contained within in the Precambrian era are more useful than the expressions of time we use in everyday conversation.

Fortunately, my lift did eventually turn up, assuring me that it was only ten minutes from Sheremetyevo to the centre of town. A harrowing one-hour drive then ensued, as we passed through the tsyentr (city centre) and kept right on going. Across endless freeways; past endless huge, rectangular apartment towers; around endless industrial estates and building sites. Across, in short, what seemed like an insane amount of distance, until finally we reached my new residence. Where the hell had they put me? Were we technically even still in Moscow? Would I have to commute by air?

All these questions flashed through my head, but I was too timid to ask them. It had been a long day, beginning with a 6am start in Tokyo and encompassing a nine-hour flight. I hadn’t the energy left to remonstrate or the presence of mind to absorb much new information. And I had, at least, arrived.



Now, if we could just work out how to get in to the damn flat …



(*"No, thank you, no.")

Almost Zenned

Hello. The climate on this little group of islands is truly intense. It's ridiculously hot and humid right now; replacing lost fluids is more or less a continual process. And I've been badly sunburned, especially today. Meanwhile, the newspapers are warning that a typhoon is headed for Kanto (the eastern part of Honshu island, which includes Tokyo). So at any moment, things could go from "Pass me your parasol, I'm beginning to resemble a sun-dried tomato" to "All flights to Moscow cancelled due to extreme weather". Scary.

But to progress to the actual point of this ramble: I've mentioned to a few people that I'd read about a town south of Tokyo called Kamakura, which is reputedly the birthplace of Zen Buddhism. The travel guides said you could go there for a day and take instruction from Zen Masters. Well, I got up at 5am today (presuming, for some reason, that monks would rise early) and I went.

Let’s see ... how can I best convey the results of this to you, gentle reader? Hmmm. I guess what it boils down to is this: I got less Zen instruction than, oh say, any at all!

That’s right. The travel guides failed to mention a few things (surprise!). Like the fact that Engaku-ji Temple (one of two places where it's theoretically possible to do what the guides claim) commences its sessions at 5:30pm, and they continue until 10:30am the next day. That isn't a succession of times, by the way ... it’s a single 17-hour session. And it’s in Japanese only. The Lonely Planet didn't mention that part, either.

Needless to say, after such a build-up I'm a little disappointed about the lack of enlightenment.

That said, I had a brilliant day, nirvana-related issues notwithstanding. For a start, Kamakura proved to be quite a charming town, with numerous poky little streets to explore and some eye-opening sights (although not all of these were good – the pet shop I visited where a macaw was tethered to the counter was a worry). The township is wedged in between a low mountain range and the shore of the Pacific Ocean. I’d never seen a Japanese surfing beach before, so I figured “Why not?” and, after schlepping round the town for a little while, I wandered down to the sandy shores. As a bonus, it was kind of intriguing to see the ‘other side of the ocean’, so to speak.
[Warning: duration of novelty value <15 seconds.]

But much better than this was the fact that, by a series of dumb coincidences, I did get to meet someone who seems to qualify as a celebrity in the world of Zen – possibly even the celebrity. More specifically, by getting lost and accidentally ending up in his backyard, I briefly met the abbot (for want of a better word) of Engaku-ji. This is a big deal as I understand it. From what I could gather, he's more or less the Steven Hawking of Zen monks.

I then scored a private behind-the-scenes tour of Engaku-ji, conducted impromptu by an Austrian guy called Mannfred who's the Zen guru's brother-in-law. I met Mannfred at the house he’d been staying in, and he gave me a tour of that as well. Said house formerly belonged to a famous Nihonga painter who was declared a 'living national treasure' by the Emperor while he was alive. There are plans to turn it into a museum (it's more or less Japan's equivalent of Shakespeare's birthplace or the Goethehaus in Weimar, Mannfred said), but I'm the first member of the public to have seen it. It was absolutely incredible – a sublime little corner of Old World Japan, untouched by modern hands (except those of a few plumbers ... which can only be a good thing!)

In the main temple complex, I bowed to the buddha, threw money into his Holy Trough and asked him to grant me a wish before being shown around various meditation rooms and other places of interest. At the abbott’s insistence, Mannfred then dragged me up an extremely long and winding staircase set into the side of a small cliff, to look at … wait for it … a bell.

Yep, a bell. Big metal thing that rings. Not ordinarily the kind of thing I’d fly for nine hours to see.

Fortunately, this particular big metal thing shared its elevated corner of the Engaku-ji complex with a great view and a beautiful Shinto shrine, where I clapped my hands to summon the kami (divine nature/ancestral spirits) and was once again allowed to make a wish.

I’m not too clear on why it is that the buddha charges for wish-granting while the kami offer their services for free, but I do like the fact that both are here. I noticed the harmonious relationship between Buddhism and Shinto the first time I visited Japan, and it impressed me then as it does now. (Let’s see ... I wonder are there are any other ‘multi-faith’ regions of the world where the people could draw a lesson from this kind of mature co-habitation. Hmmmm …)

Anyway, Mannfred took me to an adjacent gift shop where teenagers sat eating shaved ice with green tea syrup, and where I discovered there are numerous ways to improve your chances of finding favour with the kami. I particularly liked oma-mori, rather attractive little belt-hanging things that increase your fortune in different areas of life, depending on which kind you wear. You can go for the usual stuff like career advancement, finding love etc., but there are also some charmingly offbeat oma-mori as well ... like the one which asks the kami to keep you safe in heavy traffic.

Also thanks to my Austrian guide, I got to witness something I’d never even heard about before: Zen archery. I’m told that relatively few Westerners have had the chance to see it, so this was evidently quite a privilege. It required some negotiation between my guide and the master archer, but after a minute or two of rapid talk and hand-gesturing, I was in.

The archers stood inside a wooden temple house that opened out at one end like a barn. They fired across a range that was ringed with dense greenery – though the “firing” part didn’t seem to be a big feature of what was going on. The impression I got was that, in Zen archery, you had more or less the principles of Tai Chi applied to bowmanship. The real point was not to score a hit on the target, but (as Mannfred explained) to meditate deeply on the long and rigorously precise series of movements that prepared the bow and its holder for a strike.

I watched a girl of about 12 or 13 years go through the archer’s motions a few times. The tiny movements of her head, the slow extension and folding of her limbs, were fluid and balletic. She knelt, bowed, stood, sighted the target and so on, while keeping her rather sizeable apparatus from touching the ground by manipulating it at different angles around her body. As she performed this meditative dance, the bow-string began to tighten very, very slowly. And throughout this, her facial expression suggested such a degree of single-minded concentration that I thought “Wow, if that look was directed at me right now, I’d probably run.” It was all rather majestic.

Anyway, once I’d done the rounds of Engaku-ji, I farewelled Mannfred and moved on to Kensho-ji temple complex. This place, I have to say, is possibly the most evocative and beautiful 'spiritual' location I've ever visited.

Zen instruction was meant to be available here too, but again it was only in Japanese and not until the evening, when I had to be back in Tokyo. But it didn’t matter, really; just walking around Kensho-ji and seeing the temples and their surrounds made the trip out to Kamakura worthwhile. There was definitely a satisfying air of harmony and a numinous spiritual quality to this space; I so wanted to get down on the tatami mats, enjoy the silence, and just drink in as much of the energy here as I could. It was amazing.

Conclusion: I think I may have a further date with Zen Buddhism in the future. I’ll see if I can work on some mono-dextrous applause techniques in the meantime :-)

day one: boy meets world, ponders happiness, gets rained on

Okay, so here’s the thing:

As most people who read this will already know, I’ve decided it’d be fun to capture certain aspects of my upcoming travels in words, pictures and (hopefully) sounds.

The odyssey kicks off in Japan, where I’m stopping over for just four (i.e. way too few) days in transit to Russia. As I write this, I’m sitting in a Ryokan – semi-traditional guest house/hotel type thingie – on the outskirts of Tokyo, on a chair with no legs in front of a desk that’s about 15” high, just breathing in the straw odour of the tatami floor and enjoying the way the light falls through the rice paper windows. (Actually, I imagine it’s probably mock rice paper, but I’m too much of an ignorant western tourist to know for sure, and it’s pretty cool either way.) As if to intensify the general rockingness of this place, here I am in a city of 20 million people – or some insane number like that – all of 100 metres from the nearest railway station and ten metres from a busy suburban shopping street, and yet all I can hear are raindrops, crickets and the rustle of palm-fronds.

I just read back that last paragraph. Reads as though I’m embellishing a little towards the end, doesn’t it? Well … I’m not. No, really; it’s crickets-ahoy here as Tokyo wades through the tail end of the monsoon.

Hmmm. There’s a sentence I’ll never write again.

Anyway, the title of this message is sort of a joke. I don’t plan to annoy people by ‘diarising’ every single damn thing that happens &/or every day that passes. But that said, I knew there’d be an entry today, and there’ll probably be one tomorrow and one the day after that. Yeah, sure, that’s how it always goes with journals and the like: out of the blocks at a frantic pace, slowing to an eventual standstill. But in this case there’s a specific reason for the initial outpouring, which is this: within an hour or two of arriving in Tokyo, I’d concluded beyond all doubt that this city is an utter marvel.

More about this soon, no doubt. Meanwhile, let’s cut to a flashback:

About five days before I left Sydney, I vacated my house in Camperdown to move in briefly with Maya* before heading out into The World (as I like to call the bits that aren’t Australia). I was fairly stressed by the preparations and in need of some ‘downtime’, which was how I found myself lying face-up in Camperdown Park, just smoking (choose your preferred meaning of the verb) and looking at clouds, listening to a bee, thinking nothing in particular. I don’t know how long I’d been there when an Airbus suddenly appeared on the horizon, roared overhead and interrupted my reverie – as I s’pose a multi-thousand tonne jetliner will tend to do. But it brought on one of those moments when you realise some aspect of your future that you’ve been talking about in an abstract, hypothetical way for a while is actually about to happen. It was my “hang on a second, this is all starting to get a bit real” moment.

I had a few more of those in the ensuing days, and they were scary. But in some cases, they were scary because they were good. Like this one: the day after the Airbus incident, I went with Maya to see the Hitchhiker movie at Govinda’s cinema/restaurant in King’s Cross. What an experience! I love that movie. Maya and I had seen it once before, and both of us had had our brains suitably pummelled by it, as by a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick. (Sorry for the gratuitous Douglas Adams reference there, but it was more or less inevitable.) Having the chance to see it again before I left was thoroughly marvellous, but also sad. It was another item crossed off the mental list of things to do in the lead-up to my (possibly permanent) departure, and it brought all kinds of emotions with it.

I’m not sure I have any great point here, but in case there is one let me tentatively label it Quasi-insightful Observation #1.

Q.I.O.#1 basically states that emotions are usually not parcelled up into discrete packages; you don’t often get to open the Scented Envelope of Happiness and sniff it euphorically until the perfume runs out and it’s suddenly your turn to have your head iserted into the Excrement-lined Bag of Blinding Fear for an hour. More often, you get the warm brown bag and the scented envelope together. They’re tied to one another; almost inextricably, it sometimes appears.

Suddenly I feel as though the above observation should lead to a moral of some kind, like “So, folks, don’t be holding out for that moment when the Pure Scent of Happiness comes along and fills your sinuses, without even the tiniest hint of reeky fear lingering in the background. Seize the Happiness, whatever else it’s wrapped in”. Or something equally trite and silly. I don’t know – is that a fair point, do you think? I’m not sure. Maybe the things I’ve related to you here add up to nothing more than a bunch of stuff that happened. Besides which, I know there are such things as moments of undiluted happiness that drown out all the emotional background noise. They’re not even all that rare, in fact, if you have great friends and you know what you like. Which I do, and which I do.

So I really don’t know. But I think I am saying that the happy/sad, comforting/scary, frustrating/funny moments have been up there with some of my most memorable recently. That should prepare me for Russia. And for a lot of things, actually. I hope so.

Blah. I promise that most of this blog will bear absolutely no stylistic resemblance to the aimless rambling you’ve just been reading (assuming you’ve made it this far). Maybe all the tatami and green tea herbs are just making me feel too Zen for my own good.

Hopefully I’ll find out the answer this weekend. I’m visiting Kamakura, the reputed birthplace of Zen Buddhism, on Saturday. I’ll let you know how it goes.

One hand gesturing obscenely,
Anthony.



(* So, er, who's this "Maya" person? Short answer: until a couple of days ago, my partner. Now ... my 'ex'. More about this in a later entry.)

(And about the dolphins: they're on the wallpaper in my bathroom - yet another reminder of how Douglas will always follow me wherever I go! Fellow 'Hitch Hiker' fans will be pleased to know that I'm teaching them how to sing 'So Long And Thanks For All The Fish'. They're getting quite good ... )