The Last Climb

It comes at such a bad time. So long, like a training hill — long and even, about ten degrees this climb. Muscles hard, filled with blood, starting to tire. How inconvenient it is right now. The last one. It suddenly flashed through my mind. The last one, I remembered the first one in Hokkaido, and this is the last, my leg thrust down so hard that the loaded bike rolled uphill another two meters. I raised my head to the horizon, from where night was coming after sunset. Another push.

— AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!! — the very last climb. Not the hardest — like the mountain near Matsumoto, not the longest — like the mountains near Noboribetsu on the way to Lake Toya, not the steepest — like from Nara to Osaka. The climb to Kumamoto Airport — The Very Last.

I got on my bike in Fukuoka in a bad mood. Didn't want to ride. The blues hit me. The prospect of going anywhere, sleeping in a tent, going to bed without a shower was depressing — basically everything I'd been doing throughout all these precious days.

— Well, if you don't want to, don't go. Why bother? — Tanya told me, the girl I was staying with in Fukuoka. So simple, don't want to — don't go. These girls are so wise, until it comes to choosing which dress to wear, and they understand nothing about male ambitions.

Try explaining that it would be cool to take an earring from Wakkanai, solder it to an earring from Kagoshima and wear it in your ear, like an old sailor after a round-the-world voyage. Two days on a busy highway and I dip my foot in the southern seas with bananas around my neck, take a cool photo, write a caption and upload it to my cozy little blog...

Or no, even better — I arrive in Kagoshima, to the sea and palm trees, park my bike, walk into a bar and say to them

— A beer and a Jack Daniel's chaser.

The bartender, let's say tanned (from the southern seas), pours me a drink to Bob Marley, and I tell him — pour one for yourself too.

He silently pours, I pull out my phone with my route showing "S" in Wakkanai and "E" in Kagoshima, every turn on it — a separate story.

— Here — I'll tell him — from here to here.

— Ooo!! Sugoi ne!! — we'll down the first, then the second, then another round for everyone, and then I'll teach them to dance on the table to Down in Mexico.

Giving up a bright finale on one side and all the tiresome deprivations on the other were pressing me, squeezing out the last drops of mood, of brain. A hungry boy stole two apples, and an eager stupid guard caught him and is knocking them out of his hands.

— I want to eat.

— I'll teach you to steal. — an off-topic comparison, but somehow it conveys that disgusting feeling.

I bought a ticket to Kumamoto, moving my flight to Tokyo up by two days, but that didn't make things better. Leaving the city, I was left alone with my thoughts. Plans for the next year, studies, work — no matter how high a shuttle flies, soon it has to land on wet ground.

Hoisting myself, heavy with thoughts, onto the bike... Did I write this already? Yeah, up there... Anyway, I decided to go slowly, pedal by pedal, until the day after the day after tomorrow comes, and about plans, work, etc. — I remembered that I'm doing great and everything will work out.

In this StandBy mode, I rolled into the Yame district. Halfway to Kumamoto, I stopped in the darkness next to some village house to eat some nuts.

A gray-haired old man in work clothes came up to me and asked something. I offered him the bag of peanuts:

— Want some? — he took the bag, folded it and put it in his pocket, though that's not what I meant.

— Thank you, thank you. — the old man nodded, then gestured for me to come inside.

Once again I step over the high threshold of a Japanese house, but for the first time in a village... The entrance leads straight to the kitchen, up on the left wall there's a small cabinet with a figurine inside — there an elderly woman, hunched at ninety degrees, suddenly straightened up and placed a small bowl of rice — feeding the Shinto spirits.

I never did learn Japanese — you can mark that against me, I know that "doko" is a question of direction and location, usually I recognize this word in the questions "Where are you from" and "where are you going." I tell the old man I'm going to Aso and live in Israel.

On the road... You can see flower fields in the background. Dark frogs, grasshoppers and other hopping-crawling creatures jump across the soft soil.

I might not have noticed it if I hadn't had to raise my head at the traffic light. Showing the scale of a structure is always a big problem. I don't know if you can see it in the picture, but it's huge and seems like it doesn't belong here. So much so that it seems to have fallen here from a giants' chess board.

I found a globe on which half of Sakhalin is colored as part of Japan.

— Where are you from? — I heard this "doko" again, started going through my head what other question it could be, but it was the same one. I repeated, showed on the globe.

— O-o-oh! — He looked at the globe a second time. This repeated about fifteen or twenty times and while my mouth was busy with rice garnished with tiny centimeter-long shrimp, I just silently tapped on the plastic of the globe with my untrimmed fingernail. The country name wasn't listed, but the old man read the inscription Jerusalem — when Sakhalin was Japanese, Israel didn't exist yet. So many events within living memory.

They made a bed for me on the floor of a room with paper walls. A calm aroma of incense came from the floor mat. In the spacious room the light was dimmed. Outside it was raining. I fell asleep.

Rice is the main dish, but there are many toppings of different flavors, you add them on top with the other end of the chopsticks and eat.

Paper walls on that side :) Another cabinet with a deity that they feed.

In the morning, it was still raining. It started yesterday and stopped exactly when I said goodbye to my hosts. Nature has been on my side all three months: the typhoon season in September passed by except for a tired one in Kyoto, the cold didn't want to come for a long time and in Japan they were talking about a record warm autumn — five degrees warmer than usual. Same today.

For the last time I turned from the main road onto a narrow prefectural road. Silence lives here. (in the morning)

In the evening I found an onsen. Three pools, one with a big bag of green tea. I checked — there's a sauna, an ice water bath too, everything like in Hokkaido, I hadn't encountered such ones in Honshu. I soaked for about two hours.

From the onsen there's an exit to a porch with a view of Mount Aso — which I was heading to but then gave up on, but I did go out naked on the porch to admire the view. It emanates the coolness of mountains or maybe it's just a late October evening.

Every moment is imprinted in consciousness at the thought that it's happening for the last time. Same with this camping on a field. In the morning, some athletes were running around the perimeter of the field around me, watching with surprise.

It was a day of packing up and having the last southern sushi. How to live on, when sushi from a Japanese supermarket is tastier than what they make in the best Israeli sushi bars? :)

This is what the last rice field looks like, on the way to the airport. The flight was tomorrow, but I decided to spend the night at the airport.

Kumamoto Airport closes for the night. An elderly Japanese man from the information desk told me this. By that point I had already changed from my worn shorts and t-shirt into pants and a shirt.

It was half past nine.

— You can take a taxi to the city and get a hotel. — The taxi is free, funded by the prefecture, but I have nothing to do in the city just like here, and a hotel doesn't fit the budget.

— It's fine, I'll wait here.

— Here? By the airport until morning? It opens at 6:35.

— Yes, yes, no problem.

— But... — he couldn't wrap his head around me being outside. I didn't tell him about my adventures.

He persisted for about half an hour, offering me various options, then said he had to go home and left. He's been working at this airport for 43 years.

Off on the last journey :)

Behind me are almost 4000 kilometers on the roads of Japan. A journey that turned out to be not just a journey, but a whole season from the series called Life (forgive the pathos — feelings! :)) An adventure full of impressions, encounters, incidents both funny and sad, scary, and all against the backdrop of mountains, sea, sunsets and sunrises of Japan. Tomorrow I fly to Tokyo to catch a few more moments of that city, and then back to Israel. Articles will periodically appear on the blog (with lots of photos) as I sort through the photographs, a video from "Rain" if it gets edited will appear here (still uncertain), announcements. I propose to have a Q&A day — if anyone's interested. You can find me at my permanent address (in case I cook up something else). Thanks for your attention and GOOD LUCK!

Special huge thanks to my friend Nikolai Durov, who corrected errors in my writing from start to finish :)