However, before setting out I wanted to do some laundry. On the map of the hotel was a little space marked “Coin Laundry” and it’s not for washing coins. The confusingly divided each floor in two without explaining where they joined up.
I followed the map but seemed to cross an invisible threshold from hotel into house. There were ornaments and trinkets, piles of laundry on the floor. I found a washer, and a drier, but neither had any kind of coin slot, just towels and men’s shirts. I crept out again feeling like an accidental intruder.
It was baking outside at around 33 degrees and there I was making my way to a desert.
The bus from Tottori station to the sand dunes is 20 minutes of glorious air-conditioning before you get out, climb some steps and the view opens up to this
Sand and the bluest sea I had seen for a long a time. This might sound like just a beach but the difference is the sand dunes: they are enormous, like hills.
Everyone was climbing the largest dune and I followed suit.
The view was stunning. The sea was calm like an enormous mirror lying flat across the earth and. A small island poked out from the sea to make the view even more idyllic.
A man was sitting under a blue and white striped parasol. He was alone among sea and sand, the rest of us were just passing through.
I thought he would be meditating or composing Haiku but no, he was listening to horse racing on a radio.
The sand dunes feature strange horizontal lines made by the wind.
On the way back to the road a Japanese woman walking in the opposite direction called me over. “Sumimasen,” I forget what she said next because I didn’t understand a word. She pointed at the sand. Ahh, I twigged. “This pattern?” I asked pointing to the lines in the sand. She nodded. “Over there, there are lots,” I tried to say. She bowed and dutifully walked in the direction I had pointed.
I was pretty surprised that she would even think I could understand such a specific question, I mean I was expecting her to ask about toilets, not something that I’d find hard to describe in my own language. Maybe I looked Japanese to her from a distance; I must have got the walk right.
There was a sand museum, and doesn’t that sound boring. They should have called it, “The Giant Sand Reconstructions of Famous Places Museum” but I guess the sign would have been too expensive.
The ticket was just 300 yen (£1.50) which is pretty cheap, even though it is just sand.
It was a collection of about 13 sand recreations of ancient world heritage sights, mostly from Asia and the Middle East. It was pretty good and I only partly wanted to jump over the rope and destroy the Great Wall of China like a giant in shorts.
After the museum I got the bus back to Tottori and had a shower at my hotel. This was my usual habit, then I would fall asleep and wake up too late to do anything else. This happened today too. By the time I got out again at 4:50PM the gardens and French Villa were shut and they were all I wanted to see.
There is a 100yen loop bus which drives around Tottori, a red line one and a blue. I got on a red one for no particular reason. I was looking through the Tottori information booklet, which reads more like a Geography textbook: “Tottori is the 10th biggest agricultural centre in the whole San’in region and eighth biggest industrial…” yawn. But it did mention a park near a forest with no closing time so I got off at that stop.
It was a beautiful spot with lakes of gaping carp and well trodden paths endlessly curving into the forest where herds of joggers run wild and free. Herd is the wrong word for joggers; they are naturally solitary creatures. Sure they all get together for a marathon but after 10 minutes they’re trying to get away from each other. The joggers in the park were from a school sports team with their coach.
So there was me, joggers and then retired people. This latter group kept walking in the opposite direction and saying hello, which is something I’m not used to. In the small village I live in back home people do the same, and it freaks me out there too. I know people are just being friendly but sometimes they sound like they’re trying to prove something, like “I’ve got a dog and you haven’t, that’s why I’m so much better than you.”On my walk I took time to think about my trip so far: 18 days old. I had to admit that I was getting lonely and exhausted by moving around so much. Thoughts of home made me excited to be returning so soon, but at the same time miserable that it was all ending. After all the reunions are over, my rucksack empty and the pictures shown I can imagine myself sitting, looking sadly at the walls I left for adventure a year and a half earlier.
Travelling, I decided, is just an invitation for things to miss. It may be places or people, or the things you lost on the way.
Yet hey, this is life and it is not without effort. It took effort to get here and find those things to miss. It will take a lot of effort to restart my old life and make it seem fresh again. But in the interim between Japan and the rest I will squeeze all of the names of the places and people I have met into one breath – a sigh.
This was what I thought whilst walking through the forests of Tottori on the 18th day of my journey. Only lost men do not look ahead.
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