Holiday Haiku

Our travel journal has been called “Revisiting Japan”. Our first visit here was in January 1982 at the end of two-years living in Hong Kong and our return to “serious life” in Australia. At the time we were at the beginning of our 30s and had just completed our first big overseas adventure, which was to cycle “across” Europe. We did start our cycle trip in England, and we did finish it in Greece, having substantially covered the whole distance by bike (by day) and sleeping in our tent (by night). Following our cycle trip and over-wintering in England, whilst working on contract jobs for a pittance (Clive in Reading and Cheryl in Oxford), we scored a posting for two years in Hong Kong.Coming to Japan now is therefore to revisit the very beginning of our adult travel odyssey. Our individual childhood travel odysseys are another thing.We can remember at the end of our Hong Kong posting thinking “Well, love, we’ve done our “big trip”, now it’s back to Oz to settle down and do all the things responsible adults do – get a mortgage, have a family …" that version of history never happened and within a few years we had recoiled from the predictabilities of a life “in your own country”, whichever that may be, and ventured back out into the unknown. All that is a very long-winded way of saying that coming back to Japan now has a certain poignance, in that, much as we have tried, there are not a lot of places left that we want to visit that we have not already been to. That’s not saying we have been everywhere, we definitely have not. There are whole continents we have never visited – and don’t want to. There are also vast swathes of the World we never want to visit again as they are just too damn hot (ie. anywhere within 30 degrees of the Equator - sorry Brisbane, you’re 27 degrees South). And of course, with Global warming that area is just going to grow.So why not go back to the beginning and start again.

I can confidently predict that this is the last time Cheryl will ask me to write an introduction.So, let’s get on with it, and we’ll start with a little travel haiku.

After a long trip

Melbourne Hong Kong Osaka

Hokkaido at last