Karaoke

When the proprietor of the unagi shop brought me the telephone with someone on the other end, I was surprised. I hadn’t anticipated hearing from the pharmacists who had given me directions and his own testimonial about the place.

A hand drawn map to unagi.

Hamamatsu is known for unagi (freshwater eel) and gyoza and so of course I was on a mission for both during my stay. I found the famous, gyoza shop that afternoon (I’m ruined for life!) and searched out the unagi spot (on the advisement of my server at an izakya spot the night before). So after eating gyoza and then gazing at the Nakatajima Sand Dunes and the Pacific Ocean, I headed back toward my hostel in search of the unagi restaurant.

Only all of the signs are written in Japanese and I didn’t know the exact name of the restaurant to do a search. When I ducked into a pharmacy on the main road, I had already typed out the question and I was a little surprised when the pharmacist repeated the question to me in English. Once he was clear on what I was asking, his eyes lit up, “that is a wonderful place, I eat there,” he told me. He explained where it was and then, uncertain I understood, he sketched me a little map, complete with landmarks to help me along my way.

While he sketched he asked me the most common question I get asked while traveling, “where are you from?” and when I replied the United States, once again his eyes lit up and he began to tell of his trip, with his family, to California and Arizona years ago. How beautiful the drive… He even showed me a pine cone collection – one from Hamamatsu, one from Yosemite, and the last one from somewhere in Canada.

The meal really was picture worthy.

Friendly as he was, I didn't anticipate he’d want to chat any further after I set out in search of dinner. But there his voice was on the other side of the line asking if I could stop by the pharmacy on my way home.

The last light was fading from the day when I finished dinner, but it wasn’t dark yet. Why the hell not?

I ducked into his store on my way home, pleasantly full from my dinner (bless the women who served me, they pantomimed my choices, pointing to pictures for clarity and brought out bills from the register to show me how much it would cost).

We chatted for a bit and then, as it approached 8pm, time for the pharmacy to close, he asked if I would like to go for karaoke.

Karaoke? In Japan? Hell yes I want to go.

Ever been your own band at karaoke?

So he locked up the store and then offered to show me his home...upstairs. No thank you, even at 70ish with kids my age, I still wasn’t going there. So instead, we headed to the mall - where everything seems to happen throughout Asia.

Karaoke in Japan is nothing like I've ever experienced in America. The room was spacious, there were two large screens blinking neon colors at us, there were two touch screens for us to make our selections, standard enough but there were instruments. I stared, lounging on the couch in my slippered feet (no shoes in the room) in awe of the setup.

The song options and our selections were varied: Garth Brooks, Nat King Cole, New Edition, Elvis Presley, Bill Withers, and something in Spanish. We were all over the place, getting more into it, moving from sitting to standing so we could really emote.

Screens everywhere!

And then it was nearing ten, the time I'd said I wanted to head back, I prepared for my last song and as I did, this 70 or 80 year old man began rubbing my thigh. I ignored it for a moment and then realizing he wasn’t going to stop on his own volition, moved my legs out of reach. A moment later and I felt his hand rubbing up and down my back – an odd thing since we hadn’t touched in any way at all prior to this moment. There was no subtle way to make him stop so I simply moved from where I'd been sitting so that I was no longer in reach.

My last song was belted out with contingency plans scrolling through my brain in case I needed them, what I would say, how I’d get home. But I didn’t need them. He didn't seem upset as we put on our shoes and prepared to leave. He did reach for a hug, and I immediately recalled the old man who discussed his kids and public health job with me at a night market in Laos and how as he hugged me he slapped my ass.

Sigh.

Thankfully he didn’t do anything inappropriate...until he looked me up and down and said, as he walked down the hall, “you have a nice body.”

Sigh.

So many songs...

I could have avoided the whole thing. The awkward conversation and uncertain motives; but to avoid all of that means I avoid so many interactions...people who see me as a person, as someone in need of help or someone who has an interesting story to tell as a friend. And so instead of saying “no” I take a deep breath and do a gut check, and sing Garth Brooks at the top of my lungs.

Travel Hiccups

 I don't even know I've messed up yet.

I can’t tell you how it ends yet. I'm still in the middle. I'm still in the flux of this leg of my journey. And good or frustrating, this is the part I like. The part that doesn’t have a pat ending and has potential to unfurl amazing things or simply quiet time by the ocean.

I spent a few days in Hakone. No particular plan other than to search out local cuisine and soak my body in the hot springs.

I was ambivalent to people’s excitement about the Hakone Open Air Museum. I’m not sure what changed my mind. But on my last full day in the city, after a second person mentioned it and I google some images and was taken by the beauty of some of the work, I decided to navigate the bus and search out beauty.

It was an amazing day and unexpected in the best way.

At first, I balked at the price...$16...but I'd braved the bus walked the meandering road into the mountains, so paid my admission and began to wander anew.

The gray sky threatened rain but held itself at bay, save a few drops here and there. And I marveled at what people create when they have time and intention.

That was a plan-less day. A day without an itinerary or even expectations that ended with me at an onsen and an amazing dinner. A day that went according to the of plan I didn’t have.

Then there was another day.

My sister is a voracious reader and she sends me articles of interest as I journey. One about ways to meet people when you travel, stories from women who travel alone (like me), and most recently – one about a noodle shop that is opening in New York but whose original store is in Japan. I was intrigued and so I checked a map and realized that Kamakura (the site of the original shop) fell on my trajectory to Tokyo. So little distance between Hakone and Tokyo in fact (especially with express trains whizzing by every few minutes) I planned (Planned! A word I use so infrequently my parents have stopped asking me.) to leave Hakone in the morning, have lunch in Kamakura, and then head on to Tokyo.

Mistake number one wouldn’t become evident until after mistake number two.

Not the best presentation but delicious!

I arrived at Hanon at 12:30pm. According to google, it opened at 11am and didn’t close until 5pm so I had plenty of time to eat and be on my way. But when I walked through the narrow alley flanked on both sides by fish and vegetable vendors, my heart sank.

The sign read Hanon but the rest of it read Korean cooking class and deli. Who knew there was more than one Hanon...clearly not google maps because I had to do a separate more intentional google search to identify my mistake.

The view from my mistakes was delightful.

Now the question of the day...”do I call it a wash an head to Tokyo or do I stay overnight (which had been my original thought when I didn’t know how close the cities are to each other)?” My onsen glow had dissipated by then. I hadn’t eaten, in giddy anticipation of special noodles, so food was the only thing on my mind (even more than usual).

After a surprisingly delicious bowl of soup and a promising looking hostel (something I had yet to secure in Tokyo) I decided to stay. I made my way to my hostel and that is when I discovered mistake number one…

I left my passport in my bed at the my last hostel.

Sigh.

Anywhere other country I might have worried rather than simply being irritated, but Japan has a lovely way of restoring my faith in humanity. A friend lived here a few years ago and he recounted to me a time when he left his phone on a train and somehow it was returned to him.

My passport arrived the next day. It cost me 500 yen, a lowly $5 dollars – less than it would have cost to take the train back.

Yes! I made it to the noodles and they were wonderful!

My lack of discrete plans made this hiccup relatively inconsequential. I didn’t have reservations...anywhere...not hotel or train, not food or cooking class.

All I had was anticipation...anticipation of my passport’s arrival, of noodles I only knew about because my sister was the original Google in our family, and for whatever awaited me when I made it to Tokyo.

My tomorrows are full of uncertainty, and in my travel life, I like it that way.

No Translation

Places that offer an English menu, though helpful when ordering, are often places that non-Japanese people frequent. I don’t want to eat at places where foreigners outnumber Japanese. Of course the food can still be delicious, but I'm looking to experience Japan not the myriad of countries us tourists hail from.

The challenge, when I am able to find a restaurant nestled into one of the narrow alley streets that pepper Kyoto and Osaka, is that if there aren’t many foreign patrons there is a strong possibility that no one inside speaks English and I can’t read a menu written in Japanese. In Vietnam this wasn’t an issue because Vietnamese uses the Latin alphabet. It has way more punctuation, but plug it into a translator and a word pops up. Or, if the food can’t be translated, searching it out online provides at least a picture to decide if that was what I want to eat for lunch.

Hiragana, katakana, and kanji don't offer that luxury. And although things are sometimes translated into the Latin alphabet (Romaji) that isn’t the most common thing ESPECIALLY if there is no reason to expect a non-Japanese person to use your services.

 

Ordering by picture

Some restaurants have pictures. The whole menu is seldom represented in photos but another desperate lunch search in Osaka (the restaurant I was looking for didn’t open until dinner) brought me to a random spot upstairs. Yakiniku was pictured on the menu pages and so I pointed and the server brought it out to me (oh my GODDESS, the best beef I have ever had in my life).

I also rely on patient wait staff when they present themselves. Not every place has patience on the menu...and I get it, tourists can be cumbersome.

For dinner one night, I passed a restaurant that had a sign outside by the menu that said no English that, in the way it was written, felt less like an announcement and more like a proclamation for me to keep moving.

I did.

The menu Google couldn't translate

That evening I did stumble into what looked like an after-work spot for drinks and small eats. The waiter looked over the menu with me and tried to describe items to me. She smiled and occasionally conferred with another waiter for clarification or amusement and I offered up my GoogleTranslate although it wasn’t of much use. Dinner was hodgepodge but I was delighted by the experience- especially as someone from the table that was sitting behind me stopped on his way out to wish me a good evening – in what sounded like practiced English. It was a kindness that was not lost on me.

Sometimes I play food roulette. Hanging with a friend in Osaka, we simply pointed at line on the menu. That turned out to be a plate of very flavorful extremely chewy cartilage. I chewed for about 10 minutes, like meat flavored gum, before finally giving up. Japan is an expensive country, especially compared to Southeast Asia, so food roulette is a much more expensive approach to dinner than it was in Thailand or Vietnam (where I routinely ate three dinners each night).

One night I was desperate and tired and ended up in a tiny little shop run by a husband and wife. She spoke enough English to explain that one thing on the menu was a set menu. I ordered that. It wasn’t my favorite meal, but the hamburg steak (something I'd been avoiding in Osaka because it looks like salisbury steak) turned out to be flavorful and moist in ways I hadn’t anticipated.

The surprise, the not knowing, is part of the journey. For certainty I could stay at home. I could cook all of my own food or read a menu in a language I understand. But if I did that I might never learn how amazing wagyu beef is when perfectly marbled.

Busses in the Night

It started off with such promise. The merrily blinking lights, the shadow of night, and the memory of Vietnamese buses allowed me to believe this ride from Pakse to Vientiane (both in Laos) would be a comfortable ride.

Eleven hours into a 10 hour drive and the truth had long shown itself.

When the journey started I walked upstairs, barefoot as all buses in Southeast Asia seem to demand, cheerfully eyeing the wide fully reclined cubbies. More spacious than Vietnam's, I was as excited as you can get about a 10 hour ride as I approached my seat.

Our bus stopped on the side of the bus

A man sat comfortably in my space. That is when I noticed that every “spacious” seat housed two people which led me to ask the obvious question. The Dutch Duo in the cubby across from mine replied, “of course we share, welcome to Asia.”

My bed mate smiled cordially and offered me potato chips as we settled in.

The cool air that fooled me into the expectation that we had air conditioning, dissipated almost immediately, transitioning from chilled air, which I'd anticipated and prepared for- my fleece already wrapped around my arms- to clammy feverish heat. Suddenly, I was peeling the gray material off of my and praying for a breeze.

Hours into the drive, the bumpy road amplified the discomfort of the mattress, it grew harder and harder. I tried to to be mindful of the space I occupied even as I fidgeting in my utter wakefulness; meanwhile my bed-mate slept blissfully and occasionally batted me in the head or rolled over into my space.

I inhabited a space where darkness was pierced with fleeting bursts of light from headlights as we barreled down a the road headed for Laos’ capital.

Periodically we stopped on a seemingly random stretch of highway, the engine still running. Sometimes it would be a few moments, others times the minutes would stretch and we’d idle indefinitely. Then, without warning we’d amble off into the darkness again. At one such stop, six hours into the journey, my bed-mate quietly gathered his things and exited the bus.

FREEDOM!

With all of the space and no stranger beside me I set out to conquer sleep. All around me people were dreaming, escaping the bumpy road that would occasionally thrust me into the air or wrench me sideways toward the aisle and out of my seat.

Flexible as I am, I could not find comfort. Not flailed out int the middle of the bed face up, not face down. Not on my side, not at an angle. It was a veritable “Green Eggs and Ham story without the happy ending.

At some point exhaustion took me. It was one of those sleeps where consciousness just ends. Like walking off a cliff.

The first time I woke up it was more of a stirring, my eyes opened just enough to see the sky had transformed into a pale purple. Something was happening and in the distance I could hear muffled sounds...but sleep beckoned and I followed. The next time I awoke the sun was hanging low in the sky and casting orange light against the mountain in the distance. That sound I'd hear earlier calcified in my head, the sound of tools clanking. It was a familiar sound, the sound of a problem. The drivers were beating on some part of the bus I never saw.

At some point they called a replacement bus, and as it arrived we all scurried t collect our bags and secured a new seat. This bus was older, grosser, smaller. But in its favor, cold air blew through the vents.

At 7 am I wondered how long we still had, how far we were from a meal and a proper bed. Maps.me revealed we were more than 3 hours out. Four hours past our expected arrival.

This is not new. A week ago as I crossed over the border from Cambodia to Laos (the borer crossing where the bus operator scammed us all out of $15 and forced us to walk the kilometer from Cambodia through no-(wo)man’s land into Laos) I carried with me the fresh memory of the bus blowing a tire that was impressive in that it had not popped hundreds of miles back- so bald and frayed it was.

We four passengers climbed off, following the driver, and the men formed some kind of unspoken team (there wasn't a shared language between the three of them) and began unscrewing and pulling on the tire. They pulled and pushed and tugged for at least half an hour, maybe more. And when they finally made peace with the truth that it wasn’t coming off, they pushed the tire back into place- hole and all-screwed the lug-nuts back into place and we all scrambled back onto the bus and drove on as if nothing had happened.

Buses and roads in disrepair are often a companion of travel on a budget, providing a novel though not essential ingredient for interesting stories about the places I've been and the things I’ve seen.

A 10 hour drive turned 15, where I traded in one rock hard mattress for another, is not a particularly exciting story to tell, but I tell it anyway because not all travel is sexy but that’s ok.

David

I wasn’t homesick, or even lonely, not really. But I was something. Solo travel for all of its benefits, has its own challenges. Loneliness or whatever I was feeling, is one of them.

David shares this philosophy

It isn’t that I hadn’t talked to anyone, I have a penchant for talking to strangers even when I'm in the US and have easy access to friends. But meaningful conversation is different from the small talk strangers often exchange when they travel.

“How long are you traveling?”

“Where have you been?”

“Do you have a favorite thing you’ve done?”

Even when they manage to move beyond those basics, like when a Dutch duo shared an alternative boat route from Luang Prabang to Chaing Rai, or the Irish couple that shared tales of travel wonder and woe, the time is often short, the circumstances tenuous.

Pakse, for all that it lacked, provided me with something I needed more than the giant Buddha or the probably trickling waterfall on offer (it is the dry season...and dry season is not hyperbole).

I met David the first day I arrived. He greeted me heartily, told me about the happy hour upstairs, and left a friendly open-ended invitation that I had every intention of accepting. But travel days are scattered, meal times are disrupted, and in this case, the thing I was craving the most – connection – manifested itself in the form of calls from home.

But calls are just calls. Lovely but fleeting. A few minutes after I hang up, I’m left in the quiet of my room. It is the reason I am so obnoxious about friends being on the phone when we are hanging out. “I'm a real person in real time,” I always say.

David was a real person in real time.

Two days into my stay and David and I overlapped at breakfast. Chatty as I am he struck up a conversation and I invited him to join me. Six hours later he had errands to run so we arranged to meet up later.

Conversations with veritable strangers can be challenging. Out of any p;articular context of a job or an event, there is nothing to suggest shared interests or philosophies. And while searching out people that are the same as you can be limiting and problematic, I the current state of political affairs, discussions with strangers who are decidedly different in their social or political views have their own challenges.

the Buddha we didn't see

That didn’t prove to a problem for us. If nothing else we had travel in common, so we started there. Started with where we've been and where we are going. We moved to how long we've been traveling to what brought us here. And by the time we hit that note, we were all over the place. Even politics.

The politics of America, our president, the likelihood that he’ll get re-elected. The politics of England, the likelihood of a chaotic Brexit, Cameron’s place in the blame.

We laughed about the prices and wondered how the city justified tour prices that exceeded those for Angkor Watt. We found a trendy night spot filled with places to drink and eat and wondered how we managed to be the only foreigners in the place.

I left Pakse before David. He let me store my bag in his room since the hotel demanded more money to extend my checkout by 6 hours then I had paid to stay there. He wandered the city with and when my bus was late, he sat beside me and kept me company.

On a trip that is at once amazingly fulfilling and at times lonely- David was a welcome respite from small talk and books. And even now, both of us far from the place where we met, we are still in touch. His texts from Vietnam swirled in with the ones from America…and I appreciate it. Appreciate the gift of a stranger I now call friend.

Don Det

 

tire with no tread and a huge hole

Confusion from the start. I bought a bus ticket to head to Laos on Wednesday so I could leave Friday.

“7 am, the bus leaves, be here.”

Clear enough instructions so I folded my ticket and thought nothing of it until meandered down the hotel steps at 6:30 am, ready to catch a free tuk tuk ride to the station. But the woman at he desk was not the same person from two days before when we’d concocted the plan for my departure.

As she asked me clarifying questions about my bus trip that I couldn’t now clarify, my heart began to sink, I’d already booked my hotel and was ready to leave Kratie. I handed her my ticket hoping that would clarify things and after she had a quick conversation on the phone she assured me they'd pick me up at around 7:30.

So it began.

Some travel experiences are amazing as soon as they happen. They are cemented in my brain and revisited immediately. Others...others I know they will be a story I tell with a chuckle and a grin but in the moment they are irritating and painful.

The ride to Don Det was the sadly not the former.

The easiness of transportation in Vietnam, at least between major cities, is that it is highly organized, accustomed to tourists, and someone usually speaks at least a few words of English. Please don’t misunderstand me, it is no one’s job to learn the language I speak so that I can get along in THEIR country. Quite the contrary, it is my responsibility as a visitor to adapt. Still, I'd be lying if I pretended Vietnam hadn’t spoiled me.

At any rate, no one spoke English on my minivan, not until we stopped the already packed van with four people squashed into each row of seats only meant to accommodate three (reminiscent of a khumbi, my most common form of transportation in South Africa). She was the fourth on my row and as soon as she saw me she asked me where I was from- in English.

We chatted for a bit and then, just bore she disembarked, my panic rising that I’d somehow missed the border, I asked her if I’d missed my stop. She chatted briefly with the driver, assured me he’d take me where I needed to go, and then she was gone.

trying to change the tire (no success)

He dropped me off at a storefront in what appeared to be a random neighborhood. Two other foreigners, backpacks leaning against the wall, calmed my nerves that I was heading in the wrong direction.

Time passed...hours...and then suddenly, we were hurried into a bus far too large for our small party.

Finally on a bus heading for the border , each of us sprawled across seats in varying poses of attempted comfort. The cinnamon colored dust rose in the air like smoke, settling on the foliage hugging the side of the road as we ambled on.

An hour in, maybe more, I heard a deafening pop and flinched, as I am prone to do since my car accident. We slowed to a stop and the four of us plus driver wandered from the dusty inside of the bus to the dusty outside of the street. We all peered down at the blown tire- well worn to the point of miracle. Miracle that it had managed any part of our trip before the fatal puncture.

The men gathered tools and began to remove the tire-and after 45 minutes they realized it wasn’t coming off-stuck somehow on who knows what. They replaced the lug-nuts and we resumed our sprawling positions on the bus and journey toward the border...with an agonizing lack of speed.

We were dropped off just short of the border, exchanging places with the twenty or thirty travelers following our path in reverse, popped tire and all.

My breathing still labored from the previous day when asthmatic symptoms crept in to my chest, I sat waiting for our what next. Eventually it appeared, a man sitting at a tiny wooden desk with a formidable looking stamp and a pile of official forms for us to fill out.

red bus with a flat tire

This was the con.

It was a new one for me and the well-traveled Irish couple I'd been chatting with.

We filled out our forms and then the price was announced- much more expensive (relatively) to what I'd looked up previously.

Thrity-five dollars was the price online, $45 was quoted to us at the border ($48 for me since I didn’t have a passport sized photo). We checked our phones and pushed back on the amount quoted but ultimately, tired and frustrated, we paid, took back our forms and passports and began the walk to the actual border.

On the way from the scene of the con to the Cambodian customs we discussed how we knew we’d been conned but also how helpless you are in such situations. Making a fuss is seldom helpful. In retrospect we could have walked ourselves to customs on our own, but these were the people responsible for our ongoing travel so...not really. Who wants to be left at the dusty cusp of Cambodia with no way to get to your destination in Laos.

So we ate it. Laughed even. What else can you do?

River Dolphins

I caught a glimpse of the sleek back of a dolphin arching out of the water, a split second of beauty that despite it being my reason for being in Kratie, Cambodia, was still somehow unexpected.

If you listened, ignoring the wedding music blasting from the opposite shore, you can hear the small splash as the dolphins break the water. It is the cross between a tinkle and a shush, and then the shiny back arcs briefly across the water and is gone. Disappeared into the tranquil water, a dream or a whisper. Gone in a breath only to reemerge meters away or not at all, swimming beneath the water beyond my view.

I sat for hours in the small boat, water collecting at the bottom leaving me to wonder if we’d be joining the dolphins in the murky water. But the boat held us afloat, bobbing soundlessly until we watched the water break at a distance and revved the small motor slicing the calm in pursuit of the majesty of an endangered river dolphin.

Forty-five minutes. Forty-five minutes of the music of the river in the waning hours of the day.

And despite the pronounced absence of palate wowing food in Kratie, I watched dolphins and was enchanted.