Kyushu Backpacking Trip Day 2 - Summer of 2005
Stepping off the Yamakawa station, we were met with a distant, consistent lapping sound and the stinging scent of densely saline water from the bay across the highway from the train station. The night was pitch dark and we could only see patches of the road from where lamps shone on tall electric posts. The whole day spent traveling and jumping on and off one train after another took its toll on us “backpackers” and all we wanted was to find a place to rest and sleep.
We started walking along the highway, looking for flat beds of soil where we could set up our tent. For some reason, we were in the middle of bloody nowhere and yet there was no place where we could set camp. We weren’t being choosy, all we wanted was a piece of land off the highway (we did consider setting our tent at the bank of the concrete road but figured it was too dangerous). We kept on walking and walking and every step made us more and more frustrated and tired. After a while, the three of us resembled crabby old men with knee problems who just wanted to be left alone.
Finally, we took an unpaved road branching off from the main highway. It was incredibly dark and we couldn’t see anything. We saw a house in the distance illuminated by one of those electric light posts. We heard a dog barking from somewhere in the yard. It wasn’t our first choice, but a yard meant a patch of land to set camp on. Ninon gingerly approached the house and called out to the owner. There was a light on inside the house but no one answered our call, maybe they thought we were something unsavory like thieves or ghosts or foreigners asking for a place to build a tent on.
After our unsuccessful attempt at begging for shelter like the Holy Couple of the Nativity (Ninon is Mary, Asen is Joseph and I’m the mule), we were almost at the breaking point from tiredness. We crossed the road from the house and found a wide space covered in gravel. Sleeping on gravel was not the most comfortable thing in the world, but we couldn’t care anymore. We started unrolling our tent and in less than ten minutes, the tent was set-up, we were inside, our towels were used to cushion our bodies against the sharp stones underneath and we didn’t speak a word to each other until one by one, we settled into the bliss of sleep.
It felt like I had barely closed my eyes for more than 10 minutes when I was woken up by the sound of gravel crunching. I opened my eyes wide and laid still. I could hear footsteps and 2 men talking in heavily accented Japanese, typical of country folk. After a while, I heard the sound of a car door open and close followed by the rythmic humming of an engine and the louder crunch of tires on gravel. I waited a couple of minutes until everything was quiet before I sat up in the tent. Slowly, I unzipped the window cover of the tent. I peeked outside and what I saw surprised me so much I didn’t know whether to laugh or scream.
All this time, we have been sleeping beside a graveyard. Our tent was standing at the edge of the cemetery and the gravel-lined parking lot. I stared at the vertical marble tombstones with the Japanese characters carved deep into the stone and filled in with black ink.
I started laughing and turned to wake Asen and Ninon up.
“Oy! We’re sleeping in a haka (Japanese for graveyard)!” I was giggling as I shook Ninon and Asen awake. They got up groggily and stared out the window. Asen stepped out of the tent and looked at the graveyard, his expression changing in the dawn from surprise to mirth. We looked at each other and just started laughing.
In the light of the morning, everything looked crisp, new and friendly. Even the discovery of sleeping beside the dead didn’t faze or scare us. We went on this trip for an adventure of a lifetime and, as we rolled our tent back, stuffed our towels into our bags and got ready for the new day, it seemed that the best is yet to come.
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