(no subject)
The adventure continues!
The guy at the 8th-station hut invited us in. This place was a lot cleaner and newer-looking than the other huts we'd seen, with only a small number of bunks mounted against the back wall, each with its own thick curtain to block out hte light from the main part of the cabin. I can't help but think that during the high season, that whole tatami floor must also be carpeted in futons packed with people sleeping. He spread out a tarp for us to sit on, because we were wet, and we all spent a few minutes huddled around the gas stove he had on one side of the room. Then we all sat with a cup of hot chocolate and started chatting with this guy. He was wearing warm clothes, even inside, and a red toque -- in the light, I noticed abstractly that he had no body hair. No eyebrows, no eyelashes, and of course nothing on his head or face. He didn't shave it -- it just didn't grow. It made it very, very difficult to determine his age, his hairlessness making him seem generally quite young. My guess is that he was in his upper 20s or lower 30s, but if he'd said he was anything between 25 and 40, I would have believed him.
As it turns out, this guy (I can't remember if he told us his name -- and if he did, I can't remember what it is) is a grad student at Tokyo University. He stays in the hut all summer, and has done so every summer for several years; he has a computer up there that he uses to work. At the moment, though, he was doing some translation for his supervisor -- translating a 36-page international relations document from Chinese to Japanese. He's travelled literally all over the world, including living in Shanghai for awhile, and also living somewhere in North America (I can't remember where). We asked him where his favourite place was, and he said, Tibet, and offered to show us some pictures. Of course, we asked to see them, so he brought his computer over to the table around which we were huddled and put up a slideshow of his photos from Tibet, which was mixed in with some of his photos from Cambodia and one from India.
I don't really know how else to put this, so I'll just say it as it first came to mind (and as Lindsay accurately put it at the time): the guy could have been a photographer for National Geographic. Most people, when we travel, end up taking a lot of pictures of places and of stuff, or maybe pictures of our friends or ourselves standing in places and next to stuff. But this guy took incredible photos of local people -- toothless old men grinning gummily at the camera, scruffy Tibetan children warily eyeing his camera from under a pile of worn clothes, a woman standing in front of some kind of tall pole with a thick fall of ropes of white and brightly-coloured cloth pouring from its top -- all in a landscape more desolate, and more beautiful, than the side of Fuji itself. When we got through the show, we asked him if he had any photos from his other travels that we could see; he obliged us with another slideshow, which included everything from photos of Angkor Wat at sunset, the horizon viewed from Fuji's summit at sunrise, a crowd of men in India bathing in (what must have been) the Ganges in the early morning; women with weathered faces smiling indulgently at him, children eyeing him with expressions that ranged from the slightly withdrawn to the curious and even to the outright playful. Even if we hadn't made it further -- even if we'd decided to throw in the towel at that hut and to start walking down, I think those photos would have made the hike worthwhile. It's mind-boggling, sometimes, the kind of people that can be stumbled across at these most unexpected places.
Well, I suppose that it's not THAT unexpected that we'd find someone really interesting among the people who choose to spend their entire summers in the small, bare, electricity-free, commodity-free huts on the side of the mountain. But most of the "locals" we encountered all seemed to err on the side of grouchy, quick to grunt at us when we said we only wanted to rest, not to sleep, and quick to ask us to leave whenever we'd finished whatever food or drink we'd bought. This guy broke the rules to let us in (something that Japanese people tend to be reluctant to do -- their devotion to The Roolz [(c) Dave Barry] is astounding at times) , and then was happy to let us sit there while he showed us these incredible pictures of these places that, in many cases, only a handful of people apart from the locals had ever been (there were photos from the regions of Tibet, for example, where foreigners are not permitted). it's strange -- I was in the man's company for a total of about half an hour, maybe, and I know that I'll remember him for the rest of my life. The irony is that in all the time we spent talking to him and looking at his pictures, it didn't occur to me at the time to take a picture of him.
Eventually, another group of hikers came up along the path, and he had to ask us to leave then, because we weren't supposed to be there just to rest, and he couldn't let anyone else in unless they wanted to stay to sleep. That group stopped by the hut to get their walking sticks stamped (you can buy walking sticks at the 5th station and then have them stamped with a wood-burn at every station on the way up, to have proof and a souvenir of the climb up the mountain -- I didn't get one, but I wish I had). As we were leaving, the guy asked us, semi-straight-faced, if we'd slept well, and we answered, semi-straight-faced, that we had, thank you. Before we set off, he told us that that hut marked the end of the rock-climbing; from there on up it would be trails again, in switchbacks. Relieved to hear it, we set out into the rain again.
To Be Continued again. . . time to head off to work.