The first things I noticed in Steph’s apartment were two Vermont bumper stickers on her desk and a Settlers of Catan game on the bottom shelf. It sure brought me back to the golden years of college! And oddly enough there are a lot (comparatively) of Vermonters in Kanazawa due to a kind of exchange program between Kanazawa Institute of Technology, where Steph teaches in English, and St. Michael’s College in Vermont, where she and many of the other English teachers got their graduate degrees in ESL (English as a Second Language). It was wild to walk around and meet people from South Burlington and Essex Vermont.

Steph was super generous; her apartment has a spare bedroom with a double-thick futon on the floor, she fed me fruit and green smoothies for breakfast (YUM), and let me borrow some clothes so I could wash ALL of mine (so I didn’t have to choose which of my two pairs of pants were less dirty).

My first day there we toured the downtown sights. First was the beautiful but underwhelming Kanazawa Castle, and then the adjacent Shenroku-en Gardens, which were awesome. The gardens were built as strolling gardens for the residents of the castle before and during the Edo period, and are now considered one of the top three gardens in Japan.

After the gardens we wandered around the Higashi-Chayamachi geisha/teahouse district and had the best handmade soba noodles in a small lunch shop, complete with a slice of citron in the broth and gold leaf flakes floating on top. Next was the Nagamachi Samurai district and some delicious soy sauce ice cream (other flavors included miso, bean curd and black sesame).

Knowing how badly I was craving vegetables after Mongolia, Steph brought me and a friend to a “shabu-shabu” restaurant for dinner. Another example of cook-your-own which is very fun but would never fly in the US, shabu-shabu is an onomatopoeia for the “swish-swish” sound when you take raw meat and cook it by swishing it back and forth with chopsticks in your personal pot of boiling broth. You can also cook veggies in the broth, and cool them by dunking in small bowls of various sauces. This shabu-shabu place also had a salad buffet, which I gorged on.


The next day we took a drive with a few other people up to the Noto Peninsula north of Kanazawa. We went to a foot onsen (hot spring) and relaxed in the cool sea air with our feet in the steaming hot water. It was amazing to see the Pacific again (although it was technically the Sea of Japan. In a way I feel like I have already gone all the world since Hawaii in February. I feel much closer to home.


I had a great time with Steph in Kanazawa, and even made some new friends who gave me recommendations for Taiwan (next week!) I feel so lucky to have friends in Japan; Luke (and Hannah) in Tokyo and now Steph have in some ways started to bring me around to assimilating back to the US. They go to work, they plan their slim vacation times, they rent apartments. But mostly I felt spoiled 🙂

Now that the typhoon had passed I headed to Takayama to get to the mountains from the other side. I left early in the morning on the bus to Kamikochi, the famous gateway to the northern Japan Alps. It was raining but I wouldn’t be discouraged again. I hiked from Kamikochi up to the Tokusawa lodges, only about two hours time, but as soon as my boots started to get wet inside I knew my sunny attitude would deteriorate quickly. I paid about $55 for a bed in the dormitory; the prices up there are ridiculous (this was the cheapest by far) but I packed in ramen for dinner, oatmeal for breakfast and peanut butter and crackers for lunch and saved myself another $40 for half-board. The lodge was beautiful and clean and had a fire going in the stove and a soak tub in the public bathroom so I was happy relaxing, napping, and reading all afternoon.

The next morning I started out at sunrise, keeping a careful eye out for monkeys and bears. I hiked about 3 hours up onto the face between Mae-hotaka-dake (3090 m) and Kita-hotaka-dake (3106 m) and was awestruck. The fall foliage added just a bit more:

On my map I saw another path down marked, but it was a dotted line instead of a solid and looked steep. When I got to the lodge at Karasawa I asked two people: Is that way safe? And they both said, “Dangerous.” One made motions of tiptoeing across a ledge holding on to a rope. I really wanted to go-I prefer loops instead of backtracking and there is a small shrine on the ridgeline-but with regrets and thoughts of all of you who have told me to “be safe,” I turned back down the way I had come. If I had a hiking buddy, or if it hadn’t been raining the last 24 hours, or if I didn’t have my pack on (which was comforting but shifts my center backwards), I would have gone. But I still got beautiful views.

My hike was 8.5 hours and I felt good. Having my pack on and my old system brought back many Camino memories and made me think about the next one…

I returned to Takayama on the last bus and an now hunkered in a private room, all my wet gear exploding from my pack, looking at flight tickets to Bangkok and Bali. And I am happy with life.