Japow delivers--like FedEx!!

January 9, 2015, aboard Finnair flight 72

I’m somewhere over the Russian Far North, almost too far north to be called Siberia, on my way home from an enormously entertaining two and a half weeks in Japan, skiing and visiting old friends.  It’s been a whirlwind, but I will try to summarize as best I can.  (For those of you looking for more succinct practical information, it’s at the very bottom of the post.)

The Plan

After living and working in Japan five separate times between 1995 and 2006 for a total of three and a half years, between long stretches of travel, I had only been back to Japan once since then, for a ski trip in 2008/9.  Whenever I left Japan, I always said that it was the last time that I would be back, but somehow it never was.  This time, after telling my friends and fellow skiers in Leysin for the past 4 seasons about the sheer quantity of snow that I was used to in Japan (and which was so rare in the Alps!), my friends Sion, Steve and Finn decided in early September that this was the year to find out whether I was telling the truth or not.  They bought tickets to visit the northern island of Hokkaido for 9 days starting on New Year’s Day, and I decided to head over earlier to visit my friends Miklos and Greg on the main island, Honshu, before joining the other Leysinouds.  The fall went by in the usual blur of (over)work, and the cast evolved slightly, with Finn breaking his ankle a month before the trip, ruling him out, and our former colleague Joe joining the trip as an escape from rainy London. 

On Honshu

By December 20^th, LAS had let its teachers out to play for three weeks, and I was on the way to Tokyo and on to Oyama, Tochigi Prefecture (a prefecture about 70 km north of Tokyo, where I spent three stints of work between 1999 and 2003).  There I spent a few days catching up with my friend Miklos (now into his 15^th year in Japan). 

Miklos and the wonder-camper

We played Scrabble, reminisced a lot and headed up into the lower mountains ringing the Kanto Plain (the vast, flat conurbation of 35 million people centred on Tokyo that may be the densest collection of closely-packed people in the world.  Miklos has a beautifully equipped camper van that we drove up to a tiny, out-of-the-way village in the hills called Nanmoku to camp and hike for two days. 

The lovely onsen that we had entirely to ourselves

Japanese stone temple monuments, always picturesque

The hiking was challenging, to say the least, with snow and ice lingering on the steep rocky ridges, and we had to turn back on one of the two routes, but it was still great to get into the middle of rural Japan, soak in a beautiful, remote hot spring (in which we were the only bathers) and catch up on the last six years, since our trip together to Niseko over Christmas, 2008.

The snowless lower mountains bordering the Kanto Plain

Fun with late-afternoon shadows

Greg and I on the lift

I headed from there to Nagano prefecture, another of my former hangouts (1995-96 and 2006), where my friend Greg lives in a ski lodge that he bought in Minenohara, a small ski area near Ueda.  On the drive up from Ueda station to Minenohara, the surrounding countryside changed from snowless and drab to a winter wonderland as we climbed from 400 to 1400 metres’ elevation.  We drove the last few kilometres in a blinding blizzard, and awoke the next day to a brilliant sunny but cold morning that we spent flying through the light fluffy snow, carving turns through the woods and down ungroomed pistes, whooping with glee.

Trying to snowboard at Minenohara, with Neko-dake looming behind

 

On the way up Neko-dake

The next five days were equally enjoyable, a mix of skiing, snowboarding (I rarely snowboard, but I try to get out once a year at least), cooking, playing hockey and indulging in long sessions of speed chess beside the roaring wood stove.

Greg tellies the pow on the way down Neko-dake

It was great fun, with a skin up Neko-dake and a fun powder descent a particular highlight on a rare bluebird day. 

Magical Asahi-dake:  The Deepest, Lightest Powder

The Shirakabaso YHA hostel, our home for three nights at Asahi-dake

On Jan. 1^st I said goodbye to Greg and had a planes, trains and automobiles trip up to Hokkaido.  I met Steve, Joe and Sion in the Sapporo airport, picked up our rental van and headed north, through empty, snowy desolation to Asahi-dake Onsen, a hot spring hamlet in the middle of nowhere, at the foot of Hokkaido’s tallest mountain, Asahi-dake.  We stayed in a wonderful hotel/youth hostel that was very Japanese, from the tatami-mat rooms where we slept on futons on the floor, through the hot spring baths to the delicious Japanese breakfasts and dinners that were served up.

Breakfast fare

The meals might have been too genuinely Japanese for Sion and Steve, who found the prospect of fish, fish roe and pickles a bit much to face first thing in the morning.

Din-dins

What made Asahi-dake special, though, was the snow.  There was a prodigious amount of it on the ground, continually topped up by fresh snow falling despite the minus 18 degree temperatures.  The powder was everywhere:  deep on the ground, mantling the trees, clinging to our hair and our clothes as we skied. 

Asahi-dake is a strange place, with a single cable car leading halfway to the summit the only lift.  There are two cat tracks pisted down to the base, but the pistes are not what draws the skiers.  Instead it’s the almost infinite possibilities for off-piste descents, through the trees and down the rare steep pitches near the top.  It’s not a perfect ski area:  the overall pitch is not terribly steep, the cable car only runs every 20 minutes, and there are long runouts to the base that would be tedious on a snowboard and required a fair bit of poling to get through the deep snow, and the wind and cold at the top are pretty extreme, but the quality of the snow more than makes up for it. 

Steve amidst the copious snow

The sheer beauty of the snow-covered trees was probably the scenic highlight of the entire trip.  The wonderful descents that we scouted out on the second day on the skier’s left of the mountain were truly breathtaking.  Even the long runouts through the forest along old tracks were tremendously fun, like a snowy rollercoaster ride.  It would clearly be an amazing place to tour, given better visibility, but it was great even in a continual blizzard.  It was also neat to be at a spot where everyone was on fat powder skis and huge powder snowboards, carrying backcountry gear and skiing serious terrain.

Red-faced after a day of cold and windy fun

At the end of another fun descent with a couple of Scandinavian powderhounds

Kamui and Tokachi-dake:  A Blue Sky Interlude

The back bowl run that was my favourite run of the day

After two days, we headed away from the magical mountain Asahi-dake and back towards civilization.  On the outskirts of the city of Asahikawa we spent a bluebird day exploring Kamui Ski Links, a little resort that I had been told about by an Aussie man while we waited for luggage at the airport.  It was a great tip.  Despite the huge Sunday crowds thronging the parking lot, we quickly found our way into the side-country powder descents that ring the resort. 

Looking for fresh lines in the forest

Unlike many Japanese resorts, Kamui positively encourages people to get into the trees and the back bowls, marking the return traverse tracks with flagging tape and not giving anyone any grief for riding out of bounds.  In fact, on our first trip up the mountain, it was a veteran ski instructor who eyed up our powder skis and gave us directions on how to find the best powder.  A brief skin led to perhaps the nicest descent of the day, off the summit, through magical snow-shrouded birch trees.  We left the resort fully satisfied with our day’s work and with the steep terrain available for skiing.

Brilliant bluebird skies

Trudging off the summit in search of fresh powder

After a night in Asahikawa, we drove the next morning to another onsen (hot spring) high in the mountains, about an hour and a half south of Asahikawa.  I had heard about Tokachi-dake on a ski blog about Hokkaido, where it was described as the Rogers Pass of the island. 

We drove high up to 1270 metres, into a magical landscape of steep ridges and volcanic peaks.  After consulting maps and looking at the slightly dubious weather, we drove down to 1000 metres and what looked like the right trailhead.  

Part of our unscheduled early detour

 We overcame a long false start that cost us an hour before getting onto the right path and skinned up a long ridge to near the summit of Sandanyama.  On the way up we passed a Japanese skier who had stopped for lunch who said that the snow wasn’t very good this year:  not enough of it, and not soft and fluffy enough.  Clearly he had higher standards than we did! 

Skinning our way up the ridge

The weather wasn’t quite as bluebird as the day before, and as we neared the summit, the wind began to howl and the visibility disappeared as cloud blanketed the summit ridge. 

Freezing on the summit ridge

Feeling pretty satisfied, with our peak behind

We quickly took off our skins and started our descent.  We were already becoming Hokkaido powder snobs, as we all noted that the snow below the wind-scoured summit wasn’t quite perfect, although our fat skis rode over top of it just fine.  Partway down we were more sheltered from the wind and the snow was once again vintage champagne, and we hooted and hollered our way down through the delicious snow and the birches and pines. 

The last hundred vertical metres was a bit of a rodeo obstacle course, what Sion would call “James Bond combat skiing”, but soon enough we were back at the car and driving back uphill to the Ryounkaku onsen, where we relaxed our tired legs in possibly the most perfectly-situated outdoor hot pool in all of Japan.  We stretched out in the rust-red steaming water and stared out at the vista of volcanic peaks, all begging to be climbed and skied.  The next time I come to Hokkaido, when I spot a two-day window of clear weather in the forecast, I will be back at Ryounkaku for full days of touring and skiing some of the most beautiful mountains in the world, and soaking in the onsens. 

Relaxing in the rust-red water at Ryounkaku

Rusutsu:  Riders on the Storm

That night we drove to Niseko, a long slog through the dark.  When we got to Niseko, it was a shock to the system.  After four days of being immersed in Japan and in wilderness, we were suddenly in a cross between Chamonix and Kuta Beach.  In the six years since I was last in Niseko, Aussie tourism and property development have absolutely exploded.  There’s barely a Japanese face to be seen in the town, with even the staff in the ski shops and the waitresses in the restaurants being mostly Aussie.  We stayed in the Niseko youth hostel, an old elementary school, and it was definitely the low point of the accommodation for our trip, with very thin futons making for poor sleep, slightly down-at-heel facilities and a room that was either freezing or broiling.  As well, the rooms seemed to aggravate allergies for both Sion and Steve

We woke up the next day to……rain.  Suddenly all that beautiful, glistening crystalline snow was being transformed into slush.  We drove over to Rusutsu, about a 40-minute drive from Niseko, and decided against skiing in the rain (“like a bunch of Belgian tourists”, as my friend Bill Hanson would say).  After wandering open-mouthed through the crazy Disneyesque Las Vegas atmosphere of the resort hotel, we took the day off, reading and lunching in a comically tiny restaurant called Kobito (the Dwarf) before meeting up with my friend Jason, whom I knew from Tochigi days, for pizza that could have been anywhere on earth where tourists gather in hordes.  It was strangely unsettling to encourage that bland sameness that mass tourism seems to impose all over the world, and we decided to get out of town the next day.

The indoor Disneyland-like silliness at the foot of Rusutsu

Overnight the frustrating warmth gave way to much colder air, the winds picked up to gale force and the rain turned into fluffy fat white flakes.  After a frustrating wait to see what lifts were going to open in which resort given the hurricane conditions, we headed back to Rusutsu for one of the best days of the trip.

Despite the crazy conditions, almost all the lifts were operating (except for the gondolas) all the way to the top of two of the three mountains making up the resort.  We spent the day riding the chairlifts (we were thankful that they were enclosed with bubbles, since otherwise we might have died of exposure on the chairs) through the screaming blizzard, scouting out fresh lines and then diving into the trees to enjoy them.  

Riding the cold chair through the blizzard

 Every line seemed to be better than the previous one, as we mastered the art of the gentle diagonal lines that maximized the length of each tree run.  At the top we could barely see, let alone talk to each other, as the storm got more and more intense.  Yet once we dropped off the summit and into the trees, the powder transported there by the wind was some of the finest and deepest of the entire trip.  Joe, Sion and Steve by now had gotten the hang of skiing trees, and we were taking the descents at a pretty decent pace, slaloming among the birches with barely a hiccup.  It was sad to be chased off the mountain early as the resort shut down Isola and East mountains by 3 pm to get skiers safely off the mountain.

Joe buried in powder and further entombed by slough

Rusutsu was a real find, and I can see that between the huge amount of terrain accessed by the lifts, the relaxed attitude of the resort to riding in the trees and the constant snowfall, you could easily spend four or five days there without getting bored in the slightest.  It basically has the Niseko snow and terrain without the crowds, and gets my vote for the best resort skiing of the trip (since Asahi-dake isn’t really a resort by any stretch of the imagination).  Isola Mountain was where we focused our efforts, but East Mountain must have an equal quantity of great off-piste terrain, and we didn’t even look at West Mountain except on our very last run of the day.  I will be back to explore further!

Kiroro:  A brief taste

The drive that night to Kiroro, our final ski spot of the trip, was white-knuckle stuff, with the blizzard building in intensity as Joe drove.  The direct route to Kiroro was closed by the storm as we were on our way, but luckily our trusty sat nav system knew immediately and rerouted us.  The snow on the road piled up deeper and deeper, the icy ruts got bumpier and bumpier and we barely made it past a police roadblock before they closed the road we were on.  It was a relief to make it to Kiroro and check into the most luxurious room of the trip, one that cost less than our grotty youth hostel in Niseko.  The resort gets its money back on food, with no competing restaurants nearby, so we ate a large proportion of our own bodyweight at the expensive all-you-can-eat buffet that night.  I spent some time up on the roof that night, soaking in the onsen and watching the wind and snow continue to pound the hotel. 

The next morning the wind had dropped somewhat but the snow continued to accumulate.  Our car was completely drifted in in the parking lot, with the job completed by a passing snowplow.  We went down and grazed our way through the buffet again and then hit the slopes.  It was strange to see that despite the conditions being far less extreme than in Rusutsu the day before, only half the mountain was open, with the best steep lines at the top tantalizingly out of reach.

Playing in the Kiroro trees

We were kind of bummed about this, but after a few exploratory runs, we started to find better lines.  The snow wasn’t as purely champagne as we had gotten used to (that Hokkaido powder snobbery again!) but it was eminently skiable and we got longer and longer runs through the trees as the day wore on. 

Steve rocking his big Black Crows at Kiroro

The one downer was the attitude of the mountain’s management: the ski patrol chased us off one off-piste run (we were just unlucky that they passed by while we were eyeing up our line) while a lift operator scolded us for skiing off-piste. 

Joe racing through the woods of Kiroro

Kiroro seems to have a more traditionally Japanese attitude to off-piste skiing, but the plethora of Western and Japanese skiers on big fat boards and skis suggests that it’s not too uniformly enforced.  Our last run was wonderful, a completely untracked run into the unknown that had some of the best snow Kiroro had to offer.  It was a bit sad to pole back onto the piste, ski to the bottom and walk off the mountain, knowing that Japow 2015 was at an end.

Of course, being Japan, the snow was still falling and we still had to rescue the car from the snowdrift.  Fifteen minutes of hard work with our avvy shovels and we were good to go. 

How's that for overnight snow?

Our drive to the airport town of Chitose took far longer than expected, with the snowplows having been overwhelmed by the storm and the expressway almost as snowed under as the road to Kiroro the day before.  We eventually found our airport hotel, unloaded our mountain of ski gear, returned the car to the airport and went out for a final feast of gyoza (dumplings), ramen and beer.  I had one last soak in the hotel’s public bath (I certainly got my fix of soaking in the baths this trip; to me it’s one of the best feelings in the world to sit in steaming hot water watching the snow fall), packed my ski bag and went to sleep with snow still falling steadily.

It was still snowing heavily as we left this morning, and our flight was delayed almost an hour as we waited for the plane to be de-iced and the runway to be plowed.  In our eight days on Hokkaido, only one of them was fully clear, and another one had no snow falling although it was clouding up for a big storm.  The bad weather and lack of visibility, though, is a small price to pay for the perfect snow and winter wonderland scenery.  Sion, Steve and Joe are already talking about “the next time”; I think I’ve helped create powder snobs who will rarely be satisfied by the Alps again (especially not this year in the vicinity of Leysin).

So now it’s back to Leysin for a final five months there before hitting the road again.  I hope the dire snow situation improves, and that we can have some days in the Alps that are as memorable as this trip to Japan has been.

Some practical information

Car rental:  There are a bunch of outfits at New Chitose airport, but book early if you’re looking over the busy New Year period.  Car rental is relatively pricey but well worth it for the flexibility it gives you to chase the best snow and the best weather.  We used Toyota Suzuran and were very pleased with our 4WD van’s performance in some pretty challenging conditions.

Accommodation:  We stayed at the YHA Shirakaba-so in Asahi-dake, which gets two thumbs up for price, location, food (great Japanese fare, so bring your adventurous tastebuds!) and hot springs (although when it’s bitterly cold, the outdoor bath is far too cool).  We stayed at the Asahikawa Toyo Hotel in Asahikawa which was cheap and cheerful.  We didn’t stay at Ryounkaku at Tokachi-dake, but rather wished we had; look on Booking.com for good deals there.  The YHA Fujiyama Karimpani in Niseko was about as cheap as accommodation gets in Niseko but wasn’t very good value for money.  Rusutsu seems not to have much cheap accommodation at all.  I think if we did it again, it would be best to stay in somewhere between Rusutsu and Niseko (such as Kutchan) to give better value for money and more flexibility about where to ski every day.  Niseko didn’t really appeal to me in its current mass-tourism state.  And Kiroro Mountain Hotel is pretty good value for accommodation, although the dinner options are pretty expensive (breakfast is included).

Skiing:  Everywhere we skied was really good (everywhere is great on a powder day!), but Rusutsu, Asahi-dake and Tokachi-dake stand out for me.  We didn’t ski in Niseko despite being there for two nights; I’m sure the terrain and snow are as great as I remember, but I imagine that you would be competing far more vigorously for fresh snow there than elsewhere, given the crowds of powder-hungry Aussies in town.  I feel as though we just scratched the surface, and that there are tons of great spots to ski lifts and to tour scattered all around the island.  I definitely plan to go back again, maybe for longer and after the New Year’s holiday rush, with Terri, who wanted to go this time but was prevented by forces beyond her control.

Costs:  When I first went to Japan in 1995, the yen was at 79 to the US dollar and prices were eye-popping.  Since then most prices in yen have either stayed the same or dropped, while the yen has dropped to 120 to the US dollar and prices in the rest of the world, especially for accommodation and skiing, have gone up significantly.  The net result is that Japan is now, relative to other industrialized countries, somewhat of a bargain.  The most we paid for a lift ticket was 5100 yen (about CHF 42), and at Kamui it was a bargain 3100 yen (about CHF 26).  Accommodation was cheaper than Switzerland; we seemed to average about 7000-8000 yen per person for accommodation, breakfast and dinner.  Even on a ski hill, you can have a pretty filling, tasty lunch for 900-1000 yen (CHF 7-8); try doing that in Switzerland!  Skiing is expensive everywhere, but I think that for lift tickets, food and accommodation, Japan is no longer expensive, and is cheaper than much of North America or Europe.

Look at those big powder-eating grins!!!

Three weeks of beaches and diving

Sunday, July 6, Lipah Beach, Bali (edited and pictures added in October, 2015)

It’s been a good three weeks since I last posted on my blog, and that has not been due to a lack of travels about which to blog.  Instead, I have barely seen an internet connection worthy of the name, and haven’t had access to a computer until I got back here a few days ago.

When last I wrote, I was in Dili, East Timor.  Some of my faithful readers (take a bow, Hans Westbroek) thought that there was too much existential angst/burnout/mid-life crisis in the last post.  I’m glad to report that three weeks of beaches, diving and relaxation have put me in a much more positive (and, for me, more usual) frame of mind.  I am about as relaxed and happy state of mind as I have been for the past 10 months.

Michael and Pyae Pyae

When I left Dili, on June 13th, I flew to Bali to meet Terri.  I had hours to wait until her flight arrived (she was in New Zealand, visiting her family), so I arranged to meet up with a former colleague from my Yangon days, Michael, who has just finished 4 years of working at the Bali International School.  It was great to see him and his Burmese wife Pyae Pyae again, and to meet his young son Kevin for the first time. He is off to work in Shenzhen, China; international school teaching is so itinerant that I always seem to be meeting former colleagues in new and exotic locales.

The view from Terri's place in Lipah.

When Terri arrived, we took a taxi up to her place here in Lipah Beach, in the Amed area in the northeast corner of Bali.  She bought her house here four years ago, and has visited it numerous times, but this was the first time for me to visit it.  I was a bit skeptical of how much I would like the area (I have not been the biggest fan of Bali in the past), but it has proved to be an amazing location.  This corner of the island is a bit of a backwater, off the main road and not disfigured by huge hotels and masses of foreigners.  It’s a dryer bit of the island, and not suited for rice growing, so it’s not what we think of as typically Balinese (stepped rice terraces glinting green in the sunshine).  The tallest mountain on the island, Mount Agung, towers malevolently over this area (its last eruption, in 1963, killed over a thousand people), although it’s usually shrouded in clouds by mid-morning.  The coastline is a series of tiny horseshoe bays of black volcanic sand with steep hills rising behind.  The beaches are covered in the small outrigger sailboats, jukungs, so typical of Bali, with their colourful sails furled along their bamboo spars.

Terri’s house sits up a hill maybe 25 vertical metres above the ocean, but so close that I can hear the roar of the incoming surf and hear the local boys playing soccer on the beach.  There are a number of smaller hotels scattered along the road, but much of the village consists of Balinese villagers’ houses, many of them in the process of being improved with the proceeds of working in tourism.  Every morning a small armada of fishermen set out in their jukungs to fish with hand-held longlines for tuna, barracuda and mahi-mahi.  It’s tourist season now, and there is a steady increase in the number of white faces on the beach and in the shops and restaurants, but it’s far from being the crazed frenzy of Kuta Beach.  Instead this area seems to cater to a quieter crowd, including a number of long-term Bali residents who have built houses straight out of the pages of Architectural Digest on the headlands between the bays.  The water is warm and good for swimming, and parts of the bay have coral in excellent condition.

Colourful sailboat off Lipah Beach

An added attraction is that about 20 kilometres up the coast is the diving mecca of Tulamben, where one of the most famous shipwreck dive sites in the world, the USAT Liberty, is located.  On our second day here, Terri and I went diving there, exploring parts of the huge WWII transport ship that was torpedoed by the Japanese in 1942.  It’s a very intricate dive area, full of holds and holes and rusted-out floors to explore for both big and small sea life.  It was our first dive in over a year, since our Maldives trip, and so it was a little bit of a readjustment, but great fun.  I would like to go back and do some more exploration someday.

Relaxing over breakfast on the terrace at Lipah

Mostly, though, for the three days we were in Lipah we swam, ran, walked into the hills to visit Terri’s teak trees and the village houses of the family with whom she works here in Lipah, and ate well.  The views from the terrace looking out over the bay, where I am sitting now in the late afternoon light typing this blog, are spectacular and lend themselves to lots of lazing about with a Kindle, or sipping a nocturnal whiskey before bed while watching the stars dance over the ocean.

Terri, teak tree owner

Terri with her housekeeper Luh, Luh's husband and son

On Tuesday the 17th of June we finally tore ourselves away from this paradisiacal existence and headed back along the three-hour drive to the airport.  We caught a flight to Makassar, the main city on the island of Sulawesi, and then another turboprop flight to Luwuk, an island on the eastern peninsula of this starfish-shaped island.  We got in at sunset and decided to make one long day of it and hired a minivan to drive us seven excruciating, bone-crunching hours to Ampana, the ferry terminus for the Togean Islands.  It was a hellacious experience, with our driver living out his Paris-Dakar fantasies as he squealed tires around curves, slalomed between huge potholes and hammered over frequent gravel sections, accompanied by a horrible soundtrack of Indonesian techno music that got louder as time wore on.  We got to Ampana at 1:30 in the morning and fell into bed instantly.

Kadidiri's pier

The horrorshow on the road did save us a full day of travel, though, as we caught a ferry at 10 am the next morning to take us to the Togeans, an almost mythical backpacker favourite that had been on my to-visit list for the past 18 years, since my first visit to Indonesia.  By 2 pm we were disembarking in Wakai, the unappealing main city of the archipelago, and hopping on a speedboat to take us to Kadidiri Island, our home for the next five days.  We checked into the Kadidiri Paradise and settled in for some fun, relaxation and diving.

Terri on the pier at Kadidiri

Paradise has a great location, looking out over the Gulf of Tomini, surrounded by extensive coral reefs and good diving sites, and blessed with spectacular sunsets seen from the long pier.  We did some good diving there over three days, first in the immediate vicinity (lovely coral walls but distressingly little big fish life and no turtles), then around the nearby volcanic island of Una Una (much better, with a big school of barracuda, although still no turtles, sharks or mantas), and then the highlight, the wreck of a B-24 bomber from World War Two that made an emergency landing on the sea back in 1945.  It was a spectacular dive, with the aluminum of the plane not rusting and allowing all the features of the plane to be easily spotted.  The machine guns on the upper turret looked almost ready to fire, while the instrumentation in the cockpit was still intact.  Even the propeller on one of the four huge engines was still in place, as were the huge vertical tabs on the enormous tail.  Lots of fish life, lots of history and atmosphere.  On the way back we stopped and did a muck dive, looking for interesting critters, and saw robust ghost pipefish, a baby frogfish, a mantis shrimp, a snake eel and a plethora of nudibranchs.

Knobbed hornbill

On land, I was happy to see lots of interesting tropical birds, including a pair of knobbed hornbills who put on a great morning display for Terri on her birthday, and lots of colourful lorikeets.  The snorkeling was excellent, and our sunset viewing was second-to-none.

Kadidiri sunset

Although the dive shop was well run by Emmi, an irrepressible Finnish dive instructor, the same could not be said for the hotel, which lacked a manager on-site, was woefully understaffed and ran a bit like Fawlty Towers. The restaurant, in particular, was pretty mediocre.  After we had finished our days of diving, Terri and I decided to head to another island, Fadhila, to have a change of scene.  We chartered a boat and on the way we stopped off to snorkel with stingless jellyfish in a small salt-water lake.  I had done something similar in Palau back in 2007, and really enjoyed the spooky experience of being surrounded by literally thousands of pulsing orange jellyfish.  Terri was less taken, however, and was convinced that her subsequent ear infection was thanks  to the murky, stagnant water of the jellyfish lake.

Heading off from Kadidiri to Fadhila

Fadhila

Fadhila was a breath of fresh air, literally, after the windless, mouldy sweatbox of Kadidiri Paradise.  Set on a breezy peninsula, the rooms were clean, cool and perfect for sleeping, with hammocks for reading in the constant sea breeze.  The snorkeling was great, and there was an outrigger canoe that we could borrow to paddle around the island, flying over the extensive coral gardens that fringed the island.  The food was excellent, and there were interesting fellow guests to talk with at dinner.

Terri swimming at Fadhila

The excellence of the hotel, however, was offset for us by the incredibly painful ear infection that afflicted Terri right from our arrival on the island.  By the end of our four days, she was crying with pain and her ear, along with the entire side of her face, was a swollen, red, angry mass.  She was in such pain that we worried that her eardrum might rupture.  She lived on a steady stream of painkillers and somehow managed to hold on until we could get to the city of Gorontalo on a night ferry and get to a hospital.  The hospital was a positive experience, as it was efficiently run, incredibly inexpensive (about 11 US dollars for a consultation with an ear, nose and throat specialist and three different sets of pills).  The pills took almost immediate effect, and Terri was reassured that as it was an infection of the outer ear, neither flying nor diving should have any adverse effects.

Relieved both physically and psychologically, we flew off the next day, Saturday, June 28th, for our next diving destination, the Derawan Archipelago.  We caught three successive Lion Air flights (back to Makassar, over to Balikpapan and then a turboprop to tiny Berau), although my backpack didn’t make the last flight and we had to wait for its arrival while feasting on an excellent lunch in Berau.  Then came a two-hour drive past a monstrous coal mine (the reason for the existence of the airport), lots of slash-and-burn agriculture and plenty of palm oil plantations, before a boat ride took us out to Derawan Island and the Derawan Dive Lodge, our home for the next four nights.

I had first heard of the diving in this area back in 2005 when I was doing a divemaster course on Bunaken Island, north Sulawesi.  Some of the customers of the dive shop had dived on Sangalaki a few months before and had raved about the turtles and manta rays.  I had kept it in mind over the years, and when Terri and I decided to travel through Indonesia this summer, I looked into diving.  Sangalaki’s one resort closed some years ago, but dive operations on Derawan and on Maratua islands still visit it regularly.

Looking pretty happy with the diving!!

The three days of diving we had while staying at DDL were some of the best of my entire diving career.  Amazingly Terri’s ear was back to normal by the time we got to Derawan We started with a day on Kakaban island, drifting along amazing vertical coral walls in search of pygmy seahorses, of which we saw two, tiny creatures a few millimetres long hidden in huge gorgonian sea fans.  We also managed to see a black-tip shark and a large leopard shark resting on the bottom, along with a couple of turtles.  Between dives we also visited another jellyfish lake (Terri lasted a few minutes, but then retreated to the ocean to snorkel).

The second day the diving only got better at Maratua Island, with tons of turtles, a couple of big eagle rays and an incredible blizzard of barracuda hanging out in the crazy currents of a channel that drained Maratua Lagoon.  It was Terri’s most exhilarating dive ever, flying at the end of a tether attached to a reef hook, surrounded by huge masses of barracuda.

Coming home from our manta encounter

It was all just a prelude to the third day, when we finally dived legendary Sangalaki.  The day started perfectly as I saw no fewer than 13 big turtles from the bow of the boat as we passed over seagrass beds near Derawan.  The day was all about manta rays, and when after two dives we had only seen one, I was a bit downcast.  While we were eating lunch on the boat, though, Terri spotted fins breaking the surface not far away, and we realized that mantas were circling right at the surface of the water.  The dive that followed was absolutely incredible, with us sitting on the sandy bottom and watching as massive manta rays flew past and over us in all directions.  At times it was impossible to know where to look, as there were mantas coming in from three different directions.  At least six individuals (and probably several more) made between 30 and 40 passes, leaving us utterly awestruck.  Even at the end of the dive, as we hung on reefhooks in a channel doing a safety stop, a manta ray appeared beside me, hung motionless in the current for a while and then suddenly vanished as another manta flashed aggressively past him.  We came up grinning from ear to ear, completely blown away by the experience.  Finally, to cap it off, we encountered a big school of dolphins as we motored back to Derawan.

I was utterly impressed by the marine life on display around Derawan.  Even though it’s expensive to get to, expensive to dive and expensive to stay, I think Derawan was worth every penny.  I have never seen so many big, old green turtles in one place as I did just off the beach of the dive lodge.  The mantas and barracuda were incredible, and the general diversity and quantity of big fish was impressive.  I would rate it up there with Sipadan, Palau, the Maldives, Bunaken and Lembeh Strait as one of the premier dive sites in all of Asia (and hence the world).

Sean and I reunited again in Lipah

Then, sadly, it was time to tear ourselves away, backtrack to Bali and spend another four idyllic days here in Lipah, two of them in the company of my friend and fellow nomad Sean.  Indonesia is the sixth country in which we have crossed paths over the years (France, Switzerland, Japan, Egypt and the UK being the others) and as always it was great to bounce ideas off his hyperactive mind.  He arrived here expecting a small shack in a teak forest and was utterly seduced by the beach, the views and the house.

Wandering the rice fields around Ubud

And now it’s time to end this narrative, go find dinner and pack for a couple of days in Ubud before I head east, far east, to the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea.  Life is good, and travel is having its usual therapeutic effects on my until-recently-overstressed mind.

Ubud Jazz Cafe

Peace and Tailwinds

Graydon

Seminyak Beach and its pounding surf

PS  (October 2015) Terri and I did go to Ubud, where we spent a very relaxing day wandering the rice fields outside town, and a great evening listening to jazz in the Jazz Cafe.  The next day Terri flew back to Switzerland, and I spent a day in the mass-tourism ugliness of Seminyak (redeemed only by its pretty surf-pounded beach) before flying off to the Solomon Islands.  I've added a couple of pictures from Ubud and Seminyak.

Dili Detox

 

 

Dili, East Timor, June 12, 2014

Sporting my new $5 Dili haircut at Cristo Rei

 

It's a pleasant tropical evening here in the courtyard of East Timor Backpackers, a slightly down-at-heel hostel here in the capital of one of the world's most recent countries, only gaining its independence in 2002 after a quarter century of blood-soaked warfare.

 

I have been here for about 48 hours, and tomorrow after lunch I will fly back to Bali.  I had hoped and planned to see more of this tiny country, but a combination of sloth on my part and high prices/inconvenience on the part of East Timor has reduced me to having done very little so far.  I am going to blame it all on the idea of the Great Year-end Detox.

 

The Cristo Rei statue just east of Dili

 

There are those people who take a chunk of time periodically and starve themselves for a week, drinking cranberry juice and letting their intestines purge themselves of accumulated toxins.  Others, such as a bartender with whom I worked in London a quarter century ago, stop drinking alcohol every other month to avoid developing a dependency on the stuff.  Celebrities addicted to a variety of intoxicants check into Betty Ford to purge their systems.

 

Dili town seen from Cristo Rei
 

 

I feel as though teaching has a similar deleterious effect on my well-being and requires a similar mental and physical purge.  There are those people who feel that my existence, teaching in the Swiss Alps, skiing and cycling and playing tennis throughout the ski year, and then travelling during my ludicrously lengthy summer vacations, is some sort of perfect dream existence.  To a certain extent this is true; every morning when I wake up and gaze out on the morning light glinting on the Dents du Midi, and every afternoon that I spend schussing down the slopes of Leysin, I am acutely aware of how fortunate I am.  However, as the years slide by in some sort of existential merry-go-round, the day-to-day grind of teaching starts to wear on my soul.  Things that I can stand for a few months or a year start to drain my soul dry as the laps of the sun start to pile up.  It's definitely a first-world sort of problem, but I find myself starting to have a longer and longer psychological hangover every June as the school year stutters to a close. 

 

This year was definitely the hardest year I've had since my dismal 4 months in Cairo in 2004.  As those of you who either follow me on Facebook or read my year-end letter know, I had a nervous breakdown in early November, was completely out of action for a couple of months, and then worked only 60% for the rest of the school year.  It was miserable, and despite my reduced school load, I was absolutely exhausted and mentally fried again by the end of the year.  I sank so low as to have a few sessions with a well-meaning psychiatrist.  We never really hit it off, but he did say something that stuck with me.  I said that I felt as though I had been poisoned by work, and that it was a bit like someone who has a horrible night drinking tequila and who won't touch the stuff again afterwards.  He said that he understood the analogy, but not to forget that it wasn't so much the tequila as the sheer volume consumed in a short amount of town that poisoned the body.  This is a good way of visualizing working in a boarding school:  far too much work that, taken in moderation, might not be harmful, but which, taken in excess for years and years, leaves you feeling like Keith Richards circa 1976.

 

So what I'm doing here in East Timor, I realize, is a psychological cleanse.  I sleep prodigiously, wake up, go for a run along the seafront, do some yoga, have breakfast around 1 pm, go for a bike ride, read for a few hours to cleanse my mind of the nonsense of teaching mathematics and physics, do some sudokus, juggle a bit, read some more, have supper and go to bed early. 

 

I remember, back in 2003-4 when I was taking that black hole of human effort known as the Ontario Bachelor of Education, being asked to write an essay on the whole experience of teacher's college.  I fired up the computer and wrote a scathing review of the mind-numbing, soul-sapping, time-wasting rubbish that constituted eight months of my life that I would never have back again.  One of the lines that stuck in my mind was something to the effect that "if I wanted to become a better teacher, it would have been a better use of 8 months for me to go be a ski instructor in the Rockies, take a dive instructor course down on Utila, or spend 8 months riding my bicycle from Tierra del Fuego to Point Barrow; these eight months did nothing but dull my senses, destroy my enthusiasm, rob me of sleep, stultify me and make me a less happy, less creative and less effective teacher."  The sad truth is that the day-to-day grind of trying to teach teenagers, particularly rich ones with outsized senses of their own intellectual gigantism and senses of entitlement the size of their trust funds, is just as abrasive to one's intellectual powers as sitting through the horror-show of my BEd.  This is why I need such a long summer vacation; if I had only 4 weeks off every year, I wouldn't make it through my first year of teaching.

 

The ancient Israelites had the idea of a sabbatical every seven years.  I think we all have an inbuilt sabbatical clock; mine runs about 2 years before I need to get away, not think a single school-related thought, travel, get my body into shape, experience something new and completely unplug from the formal education system.  I am in awe of people like my friend Charlie who has taught every single year for 43 years; I could no more do something like that than I could flap my arms and fly across the ocean.  In retrospect, trying to force myself to teach at one place for 5 years (as it will be at the end of this upcoming school year) was a mistake, an attempt to force myself to do something absolutely antithetical to my well-being, a twentieth shot of employment tequila that left me sprinting for the toilets and has left me (as the Chileans say) "achazado" (with a hatchet in my skull). 

 

I hope that the next 2 months of diving, snorkelling, hiking, reading and birdwatching will repair my mind and body (did I mention that I finished this year with a beer gut, no discernible aerobic capacity and nothing positive other than a pretty decent first serve in tennis?) and let me survive another year of teaching in Leysin?  I will keep everyone posted.

 

 



Sunset over the Timor Sea