Category: travel

When I hit upon the idea of an annual summer walkabout, some years ago, I came up with a List.  I mostly travel off of Lists, after all — such as the challenge to visit all 50 states, or all 63 national parks, or all 30 Major League baseball stadiums, with an added bonus round of a NPBL and Koshien game in Japan. A good list brings you places you might not otherwise go, which can be the best of wandering. And it gives you a launch point for planning; don’t know where to go?  Just look up all the places on your list right now and see where you catch a deal.

Therefore I had a summer walkabout list — places with good hiking and nature and terrible cell reception — brought me to the Maritimes and Gaspésie a few years ago, the Pacific Northwest, the Canadian Rockies, and finally to Alaska.  But this summer, my list ran out.  I hadn’t done much to think beyond it, either.  I tossed around something further afield — Scotland!  Scandinavia?  But eventually costs and narrow planning times made me think I should stay closer.  I landed on knocking off another Canadian province, which would put me at 7 out of the 10. And so I went up to Newfoundland.

I knew half of nothing about the place going in. It was remote and “way up there” which are usually pluses in my book. The pictures seemed pretty, and it had a pair of national parks on each side of the island. There’s a funny leftover bit of France just off the southeastern end, too. That seemed enough to occupy me for a journey, so off I went.

YOU CAN’T GET THERE

The classic Mainer like is “You can’t get there from here.”  The unspoken coda justifies it: “If you don’t know where you’re goin’, you don’t belong where you are.”  A nomadic New Englander is nearly a self-contradiction; we were the people presented with 400 years of free land and open opportunity to the west, and decided “Nah.” New Englanders with wanderlust became Oregonians a while ago. And that means we don’t share the Western impulse to just jump in the car and drive ten hours to go on vacation someplace.  We end up going to the same snippet of shoreline over and over, throughout our childhoods.

So I’m always a bit surprised when I try to go to someplace I think of as foreign and distant, and it only takes me half a day to arrive.  It wasn’t actually all that tough for me to get there. Flying was pricey, and renting a car was pricier still.  But I could drive to the ferry launch in North Sydney, Nova Scotia, in either one very long day or two shorter ones. I divided it in two, staying at Saint John, NB at the midpoint.  I’d been to Saint John before, and there were a couple good restaurants worth hitting up again.

There’s a short ferry and a long one; the short one is 7 hours to Port aux Basques, on the nearest southwestern tip of Newfoundland. The long ferry runs 14 hours, bringing you overnight to Argentia, a few hours drive from St John’s and most of the population on the southeast part of the island. The correct way to do my trip would be to take the long ferry on one leg, and then drive around the island and end up at the other one for the return. Since I’m an idiot and didn’t know much about Newfoundland, I booked things on the wrong dates to make that happen, and ended up doing a long unnecessary backtrack drive.  And I have to say, as much as I usually love driving through breathtaking remote locations — the Richardson Highway last summer in Alaska was the bomb — the interior drive through Newfoundland ain’t it. This island is a place of stunning coasts, and for the most part the drive misses them. I caught up on audiobooks.

The ferryboat was a bit dated but comfy.  You can reserve a cabin, or sit out in a reserved section of seating — a waste of time if you’re not overnight, I think. The unreserved seating was wide open.  There’s a restaurant on board, and a little cafe — both have limited choices because you’re on a boat, but they weren’t half bad.  The bar was fully stocked. And on the way back, the weather was glorious, so I sat on the roof sundeck and read.  I love boat rides; if this one took off nearer to me, I might just book it round trip and get work done by a window.  There’s no wifi; for me a plus.  Unfortunately, I did get decent cell signal most of the way.

TERRAIN and Terroir

Much of the Northeast looks superficially the same; big forests with maple, birch, pine and so on spread everywhere, while the coastlines tend to rock and cold water. Driving through Massachusetts sometimes makes you feel you’re in deserted territory; we grow our woods right up to the highways, and so conceal our population centers.  You sometimes can only tell you’re in a rather densely populated part of the country by the number of cars, not the city spread around you. And so when you go to the sparser bits, in Maine or New Brunswick, the difference doesn’t immediately register.

But you know you’ve tripped over a border when you arrive on Newfoundland. We’re now far enough north that there aren’t many leafy trees left. Huge areas are the open plains and meadows of the subarctic.  In Vermont, a tree will grow just about anywhere; here they have to be more choosy about their spots. The weather here is too cold, and the geology often too forbidding. Newfoundland is essentially a big fist of rock that was scoured and sanded by glaciers an eyeblink of geologic time ago.  Therefore, the topsoil that lays atop that rock is often far too thin for tree roots.

What you end up with is grasses and mosses and low plants for miles. In these areas, telephone poles are held up by boxes filled with stones, because even humans can’t dig far enough. The water betrays it too. Rivers haven’t had enough time to dig channels here, and the rock resists them more than soil would. Because it cannot easily flow, the water stays put where it falls, in local hollows that form thousands of tiny ponds and lakes that fill the horizon as punctuation amid the green. There’s some amazing fishing to be had here.

And there’s some amazing fish to be had when eating. The trouble is, there’s not much else to be had, either. The thin population combined with limited land based growth and a whole lot of Irish heritage mean the menus tend to be predictable. Would you like to try the fish and chips? We’re also offering a special today, which is fish and chips. You can also get a side of fish, or a side of chips, if you would like?

I exaggerate somewhat, but there was a sameness to the cuisine, especially outside of St John’s population center. I can’t blame them; the people here spread thin, and the island is very far from the source of most ingredients.  Food is therefore expensive here, unless it’s very local, where it then turns startlingly cheap. A lobster rolls can be had for about twenty bucks, but even a New Englander eventually gets sick of them. I found myself willing to pay a hundred dollars for an order of pad thai.

But sometimes the food selection was suddenly, violently not ordinary. One restaurant served me a pastry full of moose, which I tried and enjoyed. Another’s menu apologized  in both English and Mi’kmawi’simk that they were fresh out of pulled bear that day, but would I like to try the rabbit stew?  I sent a silent prayer of thanks to my very-distant Mik’maq ancestors that it wasn’t more fish & chips, and ordered it.  It was great.

Newfoundland would not be a great place to be a vegetarian.  As much as endless fish and chips can be tough, I can’t imagine three weeks eating mostly “and chips”.

NAMING THINGS

Newfoundland is amazing at naming.  One of the first spots you encounter after leaving Port aux Basques is the Wreck House, a stretch of highway on an open plain between the ocean and the enclosing mountains that produces incredible winds, capable of sending a cargo truck or an RV sailing off the road.  In these parts, street and traffic signs are backed with thick plywood to prevent the wind from ripping them off their poles.

There’s also Fogo Island, named by Portuguese fishermen for their word for fire, shared with the Brazilian restaurant chain. Fogo Island contains the towns of Seldom, Little Seldom, Tilting, and Joe Batt’s Arm. I’m not sure where the rest of Joe Batt ended up. Its shores are slashed with tickles, which are very narrow channels of water between two rocks. You get to Fogo with a little ferry, where you only pay on the way out; they give you the return trip for free. It also has an artist in residence program, where the artists live for a time in these little white Scandinavian austere structures plopped in dramatic places, far from roads or others. They have an inn and gallery; the inn is absurdly expensive, but also fills up, so they’re doing something right.

South of Fogo Island you find Happy Adventure; at first I thought it just the name of the touring company that brought me out to see whales & puffins, but no, the tour was named after the town itself.   I also drove through towns called Heart’s Content, Come By Chance, Witless Bay, and Conception Bay.  I stopped by Blow Me Down Provincial Park on a day that wasn’t at all windy.  The North Arm features Cow Head, and the place with a self-defeating label: Nameless Cove.

Roads and streets showed less effort; they were often enough just named for whoever owned the house on that road.  “Conner’s Road” next to “Miles’ Road” next to “Patrick’s Lane” and so on.  I did hike the Damnable Trail; it was quite lovely.  Apparently that name is a corruption; some pirates were trying to sneak past the British, but someone aboard accidentally hit the ship’s bell, which told the Brits where they were. The pirate captain’s cry of “Damn that bell!” was shortened to name the area, and the trail; or so the tale goes.

This is Canada, which means we must also pay homage to Francophones even if we’re thousands of miles from the nearest native French speakers. As most of my ancestry comes from those priggish French speakers, I say: damn right you will. But the Francophonie is actually there, too. There’s a whole dialect of French local to the Burin peninsula, which stems more from Breton and Norman French than Paris-proper. St Pierre et Miquelon are still part of France proper, just off Burin’s coast. And a smattering of Acadians ended up on the western coast after the British expelled them from Nova Scotia; their names for things remain everywhere there.

The Acadians get into the naming action first from hilarious mandatory translations of national park features in a half-assed way.  Dick’s Brook became “Ruisseau Dick’s.”  It’s not as good as French Lake in Cape Breton that gets stunning rendered as Lac French, as if the French language does not have a word for… “French.”  The west coast is dotted with barachoises, little coastal lagoons cut off from the ocean by a sandbar.  But the real French home run is that more famous of the national parks is named in French.  Gros Morne was named after its largest mountain, the last outpost of the Long Range and the northern terminus of the same range as the ancient Appalachians. The park’s guidebooks render Gros Morne in English as “the Great Solemn One.” I prefer my translation: “Big Fat Grouchy.”

But even Fat Grouchy is not the champion.  The island’s unquestioned nomenclature superstar is the town of Dildo. Yes, Dildo. And they really lean in: the coffee shop and the brewery both do a brisk business on shirts and mugs. People stop and take pictures in front of the Welcome to Dildo sign on the road in.  There’s even a copy of the Hollywood sign perched in the hills across the harbor, which was donated by Jimmy Kimmel after he joked about the name on his show.  Apparently the town’s name derives from the small pegs carved into a dory boat to hold the oars in place, not from the other device.

YOU WILL CHAT

One of the many ways Americans can puzzle Parisians is chit-chat; we’re liable to just talk to strangers about nothing, without any intention or expectation of a lasting connection. However, depending on time and place and context, there’s usually some friction. You don’t chit chat at somber occasions. Or if there’s a big age gap; high schoolers or college age people will almost never talk to older folks unless addressed first, and end it as fast as they can. It varies with geography too; there’s more in the Midwest, and less in the Northeast. We mostly don’t think about it, but there’s rules, and a little bit of a decision to be made whether you’ll chat with a stranger or not.

Newfoundland has no such rules. The friction factor for chit-chat is permanently set to zero there. If you are in someone’s presence, no matter the context, you will have a conversation with them. It will be pleasant, friendly and often interesting. They will learn where you are from, what brings you to Newfoundland, and oh if you like hiking there’s a truly great trail just over a ways. And if the person is older and female, you will be addressed as Darling, Luv, or Dear. Drivers and pedestrians even wave to each other as they pass.

I often maintain a quiet bubble; I’ll chat with people if they start it, but I won’t often start it myself. I do go out of my way to be nice to service people, who get a lot of crap from others and don’t deserve it.  But overall, I prefer to people watch, or reflect. But on Newfoundland, these people turned me into a raging extrovert out of habit. Since leaving, I’ve started chatting with just about everyone as I returned through Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Maine, and only after I got The Look a few times did I realize I was doing it. I’ve had to temper it since returning to Boston, for fear someone would have me committed.

That chitchat in Newfoundland will always be kind. However, it will not always be understood. The local accent sounds like you took a half dozen randomly selected counties of Ireland, especially Wexford, and ran them through a blender for a century.  Demographically, that’s more or less what happened. The local greeting is “Whattya at?” The correct response? “This is it.” “What’s after happening now?” means “What just happened?” Your parents are Mudder and Fadder. I once had to figure out a reply to “Quite some marnin’ we’re having this marnin’.” Like most regional accents, older folks have the strongest ones. One hotel host of mine cheerfully told me all kinds of things for a good ten minutes. I spent the monologue hoping none of it was important, because I caught one word out of three.

The one thing you will not hear from the locals is the Canadian “eh?” at the end of a sentence.  However, there were enough other Canadians that I caught myself telling a family from Toronto wheezing their way up a long hike “You only have a little more to go, eh?” It’s important to realize when you’re in danger of going native, and take steps.  But overall, there’s not very much overlap between Newfoundland and Canada in any number of ways; the province did not join the Confederation in 1870, but instead held out until 1949.  They spent the years between as a British dominion, and then tried independence, until debts from World War I and the Great Depression ended that. They went back to the UK. But the British were reluctant to just assume Newfoundland’s debts like that.  “You have to figure out a real answer in the next few years!” But then a massive distraction broke out in Europe, in the form of another world war. So the can was kicked down the road for another dozen years; and Newfoundland ended up playing a critical role defending the Atlantic shipping routes.

After the war, various parties wanted to stay in Britian, or declare independence again, or even join the US.  But after an only partly shady referendum campaign, a majority decided to finally sign up with Canada. But that historical separation does still tell . If you look at a map, it seems to fit in just fine with the shape of Canada, but St John’s and its peninsula contains the lion’s share of the population.  In a lot of senses, Newfoundland faces away from Canada, towards the Atlantic, and Ireland and Scotland beyond.

A final note: it’s New-found-LAND.  Not New Finland.

THE WEATHER

In most of the US, and the world beyond, if you tell folks you’re from Boston, they picture you in a full fur jacket, mushing a dog-drawn sled across a frozen harbor or something like that. In Newfoundland, folks will ask you what living in the steaming tropics is like.  All is relative.  I had my car’s oil changed up there.  At first, they tried to register my plates as Albertan, since their plates’ color scheme is similar to Massachusetts. After that got sorted, the mechanics told me they’d never seen a five year old car with so little rust.

The average summer temperature hovers around 60-70 degrees. One day it hit 75, and the locals could not stop complaining about the scorching, terrible heat. I did not pack, and did not miss, shorts on the entire trip. I also got unusually nice weather; the island normally serves up dour rainy days.  They did happen, but for the most part it politely worked around my itinerary, and rained in places I’d just left or had yet to be.  So instead I just got big blue skies full of low gentle northern light from a sun that never got too high overhead.

THE HALF HOUR

Nerds like order.  We are attracted to anomalies, but also repelled by them. I found out I can make nerds twitch by arguing the advantages of the imperial measurement system over metric. It’s simple: when one is doing math in your head, a base 12 measurement is infinitely simpler than a base 10.  If you have to space two windows evenly on a wall, dividing the number of feet into thirds between is a lot easier with feet than meters. The outward rationality of the metric system is only useful in a lab setting, which is where the meter and liter were created. Who cares if the number of feet in a mile is a weird, hard to remember number? When’s the last time you saw a distance measured in miles and need to know how many feet that was?

Nerds hate that there’s a good point buried there.  Hate it.  It’s funny; try it sometime.

You can also horrify such a nerd by telling them that Newfoundland’s time zone is `30 minutes offset from the Atlantic time zone. How dare they!  Did they do that just to be difficult?  They have a reputation for that type of personality, up there.  After all, they didn’t join Canada for a long time.

But there’s also good reason here too. The idea of time zones in North America was the invention of railroad companies. Before trains, most towns kept time by the sun. You can determine local noon by the moment when the sun is highest in the sky; a sextant can make that measurement simple. Any port town then would have lots of sextants around. And since nobody had terribly accurate time keeping devices, and travel was slow, it did not matter that each town’s clocks were just a bit off from each other. When you traveled, you reset your pocket watch to the local church bells each day, and carried on — which was a thing you had to do anyway, even if you never moved.

But then large steam engines running on narrow constrained tracks shortened the time between towns. Suddenly, timing mattered a great deal, as two trains found out the hard way.  One day, a train coming from Providence to Worcester was run by a conductor using Providence time, while another headed the opposite route running on Worcester time, just 8 minutes off. If they’d used the same watch, one train would have been on a siding while the other passed. But that 8 minute difference instead produced a head on collision, with many passengers killed as a result.

Train companies had viewed the competing definitions of “noon” as a nuisance up to that point. Now, it was a menace. So they invented time zones: as far as the train company was concerned, each quarter of the USA, or each fifth of Canada, was now on the same time regardless of local noon, and that was the time that train schedules were written in. It’s no coincidence that train stations always have a giant clock set atop their main entrance; folks had to know what railroad time was or miss their train.

The convenience of that shared time in an age of telegraphs and trains proved popular, and the population as a whole, and finally the governments, shifted to using railroad time instead of local noon. We’ve been tinkering with them ever since, but that’s where the concept came from.

But Newfoundland did not have any continental rail line running through it, not then or since.  An island-wide network of rail was only completed in 1898; it finally shut down in 1988, but certainly didn’t cross the enormous distances to the mainland. And they weren’t even part of Canada yet, and wouldn’t be for decades. So, local St John’s noon prevailed throughout the island, and that happens to be nearly exactly 30 minutes offset from Atlantic Time.

It doesn’t hurt much For the most part, transit around the island and to anywhere else was done by boat; and unlike with a train, causing a head-on collision in boats involves some real active stupidity on the part of the captains.  The island’s connection to the rest of the world remains largely seaborne. In fact, Newfoundland worried about the viability of their ferry connection to Canada so much, the treaty of their accession guarantees that the Canadian federal government will sustain the service. That promise in turn was incorporated into the Canadian constitution, when it was repatriated from the British.

THE BEST OF nature

Gosh, there’s so much to say about the outdoors here.  Gros Morne is a spectacular national park, up there with the best of them.  It’s better still for being so hard to reach; there’s a comfortable sense of camaraderie among the pilgrims there, unlike the type of park where half those present view it as a backdrop to their budding careers as influencers.  The park is wrapped around a huge fjord, with other glacial lakes and more.  There’s a shoreline called the Green Gardens that looks like an Edenic fairyland of lush life; and then not ten miles away you can hike the Tablelands, a barren and stark area whose soil chemistry forbids most plants, making you think you’ve stepped onto the surface of Mars.

Terra Nova National Park is not so outwardly appealing.  But it’s the other type of park — less about the geology and more about the ecology.  Here you find a park that’s about what lives in it. Puffins and whales and dolphins in the harbor, and animals and birds and bears and yes, the invasive moose throughout the forest.  I find you can appreciate parks that are about their geology in a few days, even if you know you’re missing a lot. Parks that are about their ecology take months to appreciate, and alas I had two days.

And then on Avalon itself, you find plains to the horizon, a bird colony with thousands of residents, whales playing offshore, and eagles going for casual strolls.  You can walk to the easternmost point in North America, and watch the cold Arctic light play on the waters here before anywhere else.

WAIT WHAT ABOUT-

Newfoundland and Labrador together are about 90% of the land area of California, with 1.5% of the population.  It’s a massive place, with a very thin road network that does not reach vast swathes of hinterland. Initially I wanted to see it all — I checked an itinerary that brought me all the way up the Northern Arm to L’Anse aux Meadows, where the signs of the old Viking settlement were found.  I looked at the ferry to get into Labrador, which makes Newfoundland seem overpopulated.  I explored what it would take to visit Torngat Mountains, on the very northern tip of Labrador. The photos were stunning.  But, so was the price tag.

But I realized that type of trip would involve me spending almost all of it in the car, not out in the air.  So I cut it short, to the greatest hits.  I didn’t get to see the Northern Arm, or the Burin Peninsula, or those little bits of France.  But that’s alright. A place like this deserves a repeat, and so you have to leave things for that to justify itself.

I returned to an actual heatwave, 100 degrees and full humidity in Boston.  It only lasted two days, like heat waves do here.  But I was ready to pack the car and turn around.

One of the hardest things to do when traveling alone is choosing a place to eat.  If you’re in a small place, it’s not so tough, but in a city of any size, you’ll have hundreds of choices with nothing to thin the list.  A large group can be helpful in winnowing — this person just had Thai yesterday, and that person is a vegetarian so doesn’t want to go for barbecue, and soon you’re left with just 2-3 logical choices.  Alone, and unpicky, you might have 200.

I used to spend — waste — a lot of time on these decisions. I don’t tend to return to places, except for a couple of special ones. So if I’m in a mid-sized European city with dozens of good options, it’s hard to not feel I might be missing something special by choosing the restaurant with 4.4 stars instead of the one with 4.3.  Sometimes I’d walk around for two hours trying to weigh the visual merits of the places around me. I like walking around neighborhoods, but this particular brand of aimlessness just felt stupid when I was already hungry.

So ten months before Covid closed the world, I found myself in Porto, Portugal.  The first night I arrived, I was tired, so I walked three blocks downhill from where I was staying, and found a long street ranging down the hill that had about a dozen restaurants visible from one end.  The one on the corner was praised by the other assholes on Google, so I went in and had a lovely meal in a crowd that was open and chatty like Americans. The waiter was headed to Istanbul for his honeymoon in two weeks; I plied him with recommendations. I stayed too late, and stumbled back.

And after just landing there with little effort and only one consultation to the mass wisdom of the Internets, I decided to make one element of my next six days in Portugal easy.  The street looked full of nice places, with some variety in cuisine and style.  So, I would just eat this street’s offerings, nowhere else.  And I’d take it one step further, and not check the internet anymore.

And so I spent most of a week in Porto, working by the morning, touring the afternoons, and then enjoying dinner somewhere on Rua da Picaria. You can do much worse, and it took me all of ten minutes to find dinner each night.  I had Chinese bao, Portuguese tinned fish, tapas from a menu that spanned the globe, and more.  I never had trouble finding something I wanted to eat, and never had a bad meal.  The rest of Porto spread around me, untouched except for breakfast, and it was just fine.

It can distort things a little. I ate one street in Munich and first believed it a city full of young people; only after day three did I realized I’d picked a street right between two large universities.  And some places it’s just not possible with any sanity.  Try to eat one calle in Venice and you’re likely signing up for six identical meals of often questionable quality; Venice is too touristy, so too many bad restaurants survive there without worry or hope of repeat business.

It also makes one realize just how much culture is built up around eating. In the USA you can, just by looking, understand the general quality of a restaurant, what type of food they serve, and the protocol for how to behave — do they seat you? Do you order at the counter? Most people would have a hard time explaining why they knew the drill. Abroad, all those cues are useless, and you either have to watch other people do it first, or ask and immediately brand yourself the dumb American. But it’s better to be the dumb American who asks politely, than the one who barges in.

And it’s always better to be the dumb American who just picks a damn place to eat than the one who circles around an entire neighborhood three times trying to decide what the absolute best restaurant is.  There’s no such thing.  You’re probably not going to find the restaurant of the 200 in Porto or Munich or Venice that is ideally suited to you.  So just find the one that looks like it’ll make a soup you’ll remember.

 

The Channel Islands are one of the least visited national parks in the system, even though they’re only a few hours drive from LA.  They’re protected from the hordes by a moat: you need to take a hour’s boat ride.  There’s no roads webbing these islands.  There’s no access for those who prefer to experience nature from a couch in their poorly driven RV.  So Edward Abbey’s theory that cars shrink the size of our parks rings true here; the Channel Islands are quite small in land area, but if you stand in the middle of Santa Cruz Island, it feels enormous.  We do express distance in terms of time, not miles, and in this park twenty miles is “all day” instead of “half an hour” away.  Valleys paint upwards in all directions, and there’s no little concrete bunkers toilets anywhere nearby.  There is a campground, but unlike most park campgrounds you’ll find no generators, no RVs, or even showers here.  They provide you with a couple water spigots that swarm with bees, and lockers to secure your food from the other wildlife.

August 2015

I went there for the first time almost ten years ago.  I was in LA for a trip that was nominally work related, but was mostly about visiting friends in LA, so I tacked on this side trip to the end of it.  A day to drive to Ventura, a day to sail out and hike around, and then a day to brave the LAX Airport and return east.  It was late August, a spectacularly clear day to a New Englander, ho-hum to southern Californians.

The boat ride turned out to be a bonus I did not plan for — the Channel that you cross to the eponymous islands is a major Pacific migratory route. On that August morning there were dozens of whales and hundreds of dolphins playing and swimming around during their long commute. A fair few people were on the boat just for the marine show, and would never set foot on the actual islands.  I can’t say they chose their day wrong, though they missed much.

I landed on the island and almost everyone else went off to one of the organized kayak tours on the island.  A volunteer ranger asked those of us who were hiking to meet briefly for a short introduction, and I was the only one.  “Did I choose wrong?” I asked.  “Is this not a great hiking place?”

“No,” he assured me.  “Usually it’s about half and half.”

“I got lucky then,” I said, and meant it.   And I asked him about my choices.  There were two trails that were interesting to me; one went up the spine of the island, up the central hills to a high point at the top.  The other followed the east coastline bluffs and ocean below.  Both end at some point north of here, and you had to turn back. I didn’t think I could do both.  Which should I pick?

He looked me up and down and decided I was Worthy.  He said “It’s not on the map, but the trails do connect in a loop.  If you want to, just follow the coastal route here, and at this point ” — he stabbed the map with his thumb — “you’ll see a fork inland. There’s even a sign there, I don’t know why the maps don’t print it.  If you’re feeling like you have enough time and energy and are up for a little bit of climbing, take it and it’ll join up with the central trail in the hills.”

I had my mission.  I launched off along the bluffs, watched the green clear waves crash below, and drifted my hands along the tops of the tall grass dancing in brown waves.  The island is an open clean place, the world around visible for miles, without another soul around to bother anyone. My late Mémère would dub it “the kind of place you can fart as loud as you want”.  You can even see over the channel back to the suburbs mainland, but I tried to avoid looking that way, and pretend instead I was here on this island in an earlier, unmolested and unlit age. My cell phone then had zero signal.  I considered chucking it into the ocean, but the sentiment lost to my impulse not to pollute the waters.

I reached the fork easily enough — this trail was mostly flat after a short climb up to the top of the bluffs. So I ate a quick lunch, and launched up the left fork with gusto. The Ranger had declared me fit and competent to do it!  Here I go! I climbed a hill, and then the one behind that one, and then the one behind that. The ocean behind me grew bigger and bigger the higher I got, and the breeze was a little cooler. Another hill, another. It was the type of landscape where you couldn’t see the full peak, just the next one you had to reach once you crested the last.

As I climbed up the series of hills, I started to look at my watch. I could hear the boat operator’s warning: “If you’re a day tripper, and you don’t make the 5:30 departure time, congratulations, you’re now a camper!”  And the minute hand was still relentless.  So I had a choice.  I could turn back now and make the boat landing fine, but not if I went much further.  Or I could commit and go forward, hoping I had enough time to cover the unknown miles and hills between me and the end of the loop.  Maybe the next hill crest was the last one, and I’d see the boat launch an easy mile or two away.  But the trail could also loop around a lot more than I knew, and I’d still be looping when my ride departed, and my phone was not yet capable of telling me exactly where I was.

I summoned my nominal adulthood, my faint legacy of Boy Scout wisdom, and my general respect for nature in its many forms, and decided to take the prudent path. I was a rule follower as a kid, and old habits die hard. It didn’t hurt that I was nearly out of drinking water, and the sun was hot. Downhill sounded good to me right about then. So I turned, and covered ground I’d crossed before, and made the boat with 40 minutes to spare.

And I almost immediately regretted it.  We attack ourselves most harshly for the things that make us most ourselves, after all.  “You always wuss out of things like that. You never get the best stories because you’re risk shy.”  I could hear the other 9 year olds mocking me for not jumping off the higher diving board.  And that was just the start: that incomplete loop bugged the hell out of me for years.  I strongly suspected that I had turned around at the three quarters point, and therefore my caution made my return much harder.  If I’d just gone forward a bit more, I would have punched over the top and been treated to an easy gradual descent over new terrain. My pedometer, and a trail map later confirmed it; I’d managed to hike almost 14 miles on a 9 mile trail loop.

The memory of it caused me to push myself more.  I started hiking more seriously, chosing the longer paths and harder loops.  I carried a bit more gear, a bit more water and some filters as a matter of course, extending my range.  I looked beyond the most popular hikes and started choosing the less traveled ones, the type that had signs warning you and made you sign in and out of a little book so they’d know if they had to send a chopper to come collect your body afterwards.  I found valleys and notches and hilltops I don’t think I would have before, if I didn’t have to beat myself up about wussing out on the Channel Islands.

But of course, despite that, I still had unfinished business on the Islands themselves.

March 2023

Work brought me to southern California again in March of 2023, and it was finally time to address this nonsense. I booked a boat ticket, another stay in Ventura, and packed my good boots to a tournament that otherwise would never require them.

This time, I would tackle the loop from the other direction.  That would get me up the spine and done with the big climb first, and then I could descend slowly in full vision of the flat bluff-side path for the end. I had solid boots and poles to counteract my naturally ill-coordinated nature. I had the full route on AllTrails now so I would know exactly where I was. And I had twice as much water, even though the rain was rainy and I would not need it all.  And once the boat released us, I started right away up that hill spine trail, determined to see just how much time it actually took me to do that loop.  I would conquer this unfinished challenge now in full spirit, and yet also know the full extend of my decade-ago shame.

That winter was a true California rainy season, the first one in years. The island was shocking green, not sere and brown. Last year’s tall grasses were matted down while their green children grew up around them, and the trees and bushes exploded with flowers. Clouds drifted back and forth, caught by the hilltops.  For a good hour, I had no view other than the mist that clouded around me.  My rain jacket came out early and stayed on the rest of the hike.

But rain doesn’t stop a New Englander with a penchant for the outdoors.   I climbed up a bowl valley, then followed switchbacks up to a ridge line. This view was more compact and hemmed in, thanks to the clouds, but it still felt like a big place, its size defined by the limits of how far we could go on foot. Our world is larger when we’re on our feet. Consider how big a state Rhode Island seems to be if you’re in a car; but now think about how large it is if you have to walk from Newport to Warwick.

I wasn’t totally alone this time, but saw a whopping six other hikers along this eleven mile trail. If you change your pace just a little it’s easy to avoid other hikers, and maintain your own bubble. I surprised a few foxes, following along narrow saddles, and kept going.  I could taste the easy victory ahead, and looked forward to sitting on the clifftops for a hour afterwards watching the waves, before I had to return on the boat.

I didn’t stop for breaks much, apart to snap a very few photos, and kept my pace going. After a while, the trail drifted downwards and I found myself below the cloud line again. I could see the open plain and bluffs and green grasslands again, but had not yet reached the point where I’d turned back last time around.

And so it was here that my self-hating theory of cowardice and shame, a guidestar of self-improvement that had driven me up hundreds of miles of trails and backwoods over the last decade, was proven total bullshit.  I marched along the circuit of the bluffs again, less spectacular this time because the emerald green waters were pregnant with mud runoff from those rains. I took the last three miles at a fast pace, no stops, and strolled up to the boat launch with time to spare.

But… not that much time.  I was the last one on the boat, and about 20 minutes away from being declared a camper.  I now know that I had not been a wuss at all ten years ago.  If I had not turned around, I would have been absolutely screwed. Whatever the ranger saw in me that led him to suggest that I could do the full circuit and be just fine was apparently a mirage.

People tend to attribute a lot of physical ability people of great height, but the fact remains, I wouldn’t have ended up a 6′ 6″ debate coach if I had any athletic talent.

I was a bit subdued on my muddy boat trip back to the civilized shores. In the script, I’d be now thinking “See! I totally could have kicked that islands ass all along!”  But instead I was observing how my own ass had been gently kicked today. I was wiped out and stiff, ready to wash off all that mud and nasty exercise, then go drink a bucket of water and mildly overeat. One of my guiding stars of the last decade in nature had been proven a lie.

—

When you travel with people, you don’t tend to focus on others around you.  Travel alone, and you can hear an awful lot of ridiculous things. Overhead bullshit in National Parks can be pretty special. One lady at Acadia complained how the rocky shoreline wasn’t better designed for her stiletto heels. A German tourist in the Canyonlands wondered why the mesas were built with no access to the top. A wheezing dad started kidding-but-not-kidding about wanting an escalator at Zion. And a redfaced man yelled at a park attendant who stood between his RV and an unstable cliffside road.

Most of the real nonsense boils down to the expectation that the park was created for us to enjoy. In a legal sense, that is true, but the park is not just lines on a map and the legal fictions that force us to respect that part of the earth more than the rest. Nature itself is not there for our purposes. The cliffs and bison and trees and rains move to their own agenda, and if you try to count on them to follow your schedule, instead of adapting to them, you’ll just be disappointed. Santa Cruz Island was not built, is not crossable in an afternoon, and does not care about how long you have until the boat departs.

So I unlearn the lesson. Caution is good; it’s one of my life goals to never meet a search and rescue party the hard way. But I think the real lesson was one I never noticed; instead of spending afternoons in nature, since that failed challenge in 2015, I’ve been spending weeks there.  When the path ahead and your ability to follow it outstrips your schedule, the easiest thing to change sometimes is the schedule.  So next time I go to the Channel Islands, it’s time to bring a tent.

When Tokugawa Ieyasu took over and became Shogun, he centered his clan and government on a tiny backwater village called Edo in the Kanto plain. The era of near constant warfare was traded overnight for perpetual peace, and the country reacted to a 160 period of disorder, death and chaos with a total commitment to their opposites: caste, social station and duty all became rigidly fixed, determined by birth. The mass armies of Oda were banned, as non samurai were forbidden to own weapons at all, while samurai were required to. A daimyo lord could only serve as a close shogunal advisers if his clan had submitted to the Tokugawa before 1603, when one final battle made it obvious to everyone that the Tokugawa would prevail.

The armor and weapons of the period became ridiculously overdecorated and impractical. This period invented the myths of the legendary warriors of old, master of blade and halberd who feared only dishonor and never death. A ruling warrior caste that no longer had wars to fight had nothing better to do. The armor and weapons of the period became ridiculously overdecorated and impractical.

And the interfering Westerners, especially the Christian missionaries who meddled and messed around so much during the wars, were eventually booted out altogether, and Christianity became the only religion actively banned in Japan. Outside contact and trade was confined to a single annual ship the Dutch alone could send, along with the usual share of piracy and smuggling. But despite the lack of official outside trade, the era was one of creation, and prosperity. Edo grew almost overnight into the largest city of the world, stealing both Kyoto’s role as the center of culture and power, and Osaka’s as the center of trade and commerce.

The growth eventually would end the rigid social system that created it; by the time that American Commodore Perry sailed into Yokohama Harbor in the 1850s demanding access to trade, the warrior caste was no longer capable of resisting them. Their nominal position at the top of Japanese society was already seriously questionable, as they “ruled over” a far wealthier and more inherently powerful merchant class; samurai forbidden engaging in commerce often ended up in debt up to their eyeballs to those merchants. Some of the powerful clans kept out of high office started acting up again.

And in the mix of the crisis, the emperor was suddenly revived as a symbol of national unity and purity. Perhaps the Shogunate was incapable because they’d upset the ordained order of Japan. Japan was only weak in the face of the Westerners because they’d sidelined their true divine ruler. After some more drama, therefore, the Shogunate collapsed and surrendered authority “back” to the Emperor, in a period known as the Meiji Restoration. But at this point Edo became the official capital, as the Meiji Emperor abandoned that spare palace in Kyoto in favor of the lusher Tokugawa palace, now repurposed as the Imperial Palace. Edo therefore also now changed its name, to “Eastern Capital”, or Tokyo.

What did not happen is the Meiji emperor began issuing edicts and leading Japan directly into a new era of traditional culture and ancient spirit.  He was 16 years old, and had zero education in practical government. Instead another cast of characters took power around him as advisers, councilors, and the like. That grew into a not-quite-democracy, more or less around the Prussian lines where a representative Diet influenced but did not control an Imperially run civil and military government. If the Emperor did open his mouth now and rule on something, it was taken as divine word; but that encouraged them mostly to keep their mouths shut. It remains incredibly unclear just how much individual authority, and therefore blame, the emperors had for what followed.

But whoever was actually in charge, eventually the technical gap between the West became too obvious to deny and instead of embracing classic samurai culture, the Meiji government went whole hog for modernization and industrialization. That new power, combined with a belief that the restoration of the Emperor’s divine guidance meant that Japan was unlocking its superiority and potential once and for all, meant the dominant government figures felt now they could never lose. You know how that story ended.

Tokyo recovered in the aftermath. The emperors once again retreated into their old nerfed role as figureheads and ritual leaders. The emperor isn’t even allowed to quit — the Heisei Emperor, Akihito, grew too old for the job about a decade ago, but he had to obliquely hint that maybe someone of his age might like to step down and hope the Diet picked it up, because the emperor isn’t allowed to speak on political matters either. They did, and passed a law letting him retire, but only him — future emperors will have to hint again if they want to quit. So if you want to see the world’s fanciest prison, you can stroll the east gardens of the Imperial Palace, which lays alongside the Ginza neighborhood. They’re nice, but honestly the Meiji Jinju, the shrine to the Emperor during the change, was nicer, and doesn’t involve a security screening. We’ll return there.

I confess I don’t always do well with capital cities. Crowds are overwhelming, and the size and constant noise is draining for me. Any large city has those things, but a capital center is to some degree about being crowded and loud. It embraces the ethic proudly — New York is the “city that never sleeps”. And I wonder why the hell not — sleep is awesome. You feel more oafish if you don’t know the drill at a restaurant with a big line. Reservations and planning is hard on outsiders. I admit I retreated to Uber Eats in the hotel more often here, though I did get some very excellent sushi, and hit up a Ramen shop with a flying fish based broth after figuring out you order your food in advance from a machine, and then stand in line with your ticket for your turn to slurp away. But still, it’s tiring. And that’s why it’s important to me to go places I’m not supposed to go, when I travel. One of my favorite stops in Japan was the non-capital Kanazawa, which I’ll write about later. Never heard of it? That’s why I went. So I’m near guaranteed to hate a trip someplace where I limit myself to the capital city.

Still, Tokyo offers a hell of a lot. I stayed in Ginza, which is the Fancy Shopping District, more or less — high end brands abound here, and since I was there in early December it was all dolled up for Christmas. The restaurants there were a little difficult for an outsider to manage — they tended to always be full up, with complicated systems for ordering and managing the wait. But one of the nice parts about being the Monstrous White Guy in Japan is nobody expects you to be polite or knowledgeable, and they’re even pleasantly surprised when you’re patient and reasonable with your own linguistic failings. Most Japanese folks I encountered in service roles and the like did have decent English, but not excellent. It was more than good enough to order dinner or ask where the restroom is, but not often good enough that they could carry a conversation. That’s no shame on them; almost all of the English I heard was better than the six phrases of Japanese I knew. But speaking slowly without sounding patronizing can be tough. And even after I got back home, I ended up ordering coffee in slow simple English out of habit a few times.

Speaking of, it’s nice to know a few. When you’re getting your food at a cafe, an arigato gozaimasu is traditional. As you’re leaving, it becomes arigato gozaimashita, which sort of combines a thank you and a goodbye. You will get welcomed when you walk into a store but a head nod is enough, there’s no polite reply. And finally a sumimasen will do if you want to ask for the check, or bump into someone in the subway by accident. Otherwise, there’s not much chitchat. Japan’s a place with a strong culture of internal privacy, like Paris and my native Boston. If you spend your time surrounded by crowds of strangers, you retreat inwards a little, I think. It was walled off enough that even I relished the few I did open up — a calm slow conversation with an older man from Saitama City as we walked to the Nikko mountain shrines; the explanation of the printmaker’s craft I got from a shop owner in Tokyo; or the outrageously funny dinnertime conversation I shoved through Google Translate with the young staffers at SUPER MEAT BROTHERS in Kanazawa.

Tokyo has lots of the iconic; the big Shibuya street crossing, which honestly I don’t get. It’s a big friggin crosswalk. That’s it. The Shinjuku area is where you’ll find enough loud blinking signs to turn anyone to a seizure. It’s worth going through the warren of the Yodobashi Camera Store for the sheer ridiculousness of it all — the signs, the colors and the loudspeakers will all constantly shout at you, and the store announcements have that shade of mis-translation that renders its pronouncements a touch sinister: “Yodobashi Camera’s products ARE the best ones for you!” Is that slogan, or command? I was a bit disappointed that I could not find a better case for my rare-in-America Sony brand cell phone; I figured there was a chance here in the land of Sony itself, but mostly they sell iPhone cases too. I also was wondering if I could get a tariff-free deal on lenses for my Canon camera, but that too proved untrue. The exchange rate was favorable, extremely so for hotel rates and foods, but the durable goods proved undiscounted.

Tokyo was full of small serene fountain pen stories. At one I found a steal of a gold nibbed pen in excellent condition used, and the staff member brought me through the same ritual of wrapping and sealing it with the care due a far more expensive item. The teamLab museum was a riot, something I did with some hesitance but enjoyed a lot. I walked through the Akihabara Electric City and saw shops selling gear and items related to hundreds of anime series I’ve never heard of. It’s also a center for French maid cafés, which, well, sell overpriced food and various shades of companionship from young female staffers to customers who are generally not young or female. I gather those are more rare post Covid anyway.

The Ema of Tokyo
And my last impression for this run through the capitals was of the Kanda Myojin, the main shrine in Akihabara, dedicated to Daikokuten, deity of trade, fortune and wealth, and Ebisu, god of fishermen, merchants and good luck. Those two mandates, together with the location, make it the ideal shrine for your tech bro worship needs. Tech company employees come here to pray for success in their next IPO, and that type of thing.

I’m making it sound horrible, and to some degree it probably is. But it’s also an attraction. At Japanese shrines, there’s always a few displays of ema. An ema is a small wooden board, you can buy for a little money at the shrine as an offering. You write an intention, prayer or hope on the ema, or maybe draw an image that means something to you or the purpose of the shrine. And then you hang it on a peg on these public boards, and leave it there as an intention. Eventually the priests will hold a ritual burning of the ema and clear space for the next batch. I’d seen hundreds of ema at this point, at temples in Kyoto or the Fushimi Inari or Nara.

But the ones at the Kanda were more a direct attraction than theoretical. For one, a lot of them here are art — folks do drawings of tech themes, or anime characters, that are frankly amazing. That was the prime reason I went over to see them up close, and it was fantastic. But then when I later walked in the Meiji Shrine, it made me pay more attention to them. The shrine sits at the center of a evergreen wood, and even in winter lays shaded and dark, with the soft cool smells of the forest. As much as I said most shrines here feel wrong, this one is closer to my Western grafted ideas of a holy place. And so I strolled over to see the ema.

In Kyoto and Nara, most of them were in Japanese, Chinese or Korean. I let their contents remain a mystery. Ema are supposed to be public, but holding the ol’ phone up to run them through Google Translate seemed disrespectful. But here, I could read about half of them. Maybe because Tokyo has more Westerners, or perhaps because they had signs explaining the purpose and practice of the ema. Most travelers confront situations where we don’t know how to do something Properly. The only way to participate is to dive in, and hope that good intentions overrule our ignorance of the rules. Doing that in a market or a game is great. But I don’t think it wise to wing it at a temple or place of worship. That’s how a Jewish friend ended up lined up for communion at a Catholic funeral mass.

But if they tell you how, go ahead!

In the west, our prayers aren’t logged like this; they’re thought silently at the heavens. My old Catholic church wants to hear your sins expressed out loud, but please keep your homes and dreams to yourself. But here, you can read through the bunch. Some were really pedestrian and materialistic, of course. A child’s handwriting asked in French for PSG to prevail in this year’s Champions League. A family asked that their child get into Brown. A new couple just wanted a lot of money.

Most hopes were for standard but hardly trivial things — good health, long life, and prosperity for their whole family. Those wishes are for content people — their lives are generally good, and so all they ask is that nothing come along to upset it. More of the same, please! It’s reassuring that so many of the prayers fell into this category. And others asked for access to that life — people without families wanted to find love to start one, or someone to share the hard times with.

And then, others bore the residue of heartache. One man asked for nothing, but expressed the hope that his granddaughter was looking down upon him from wherever she may be, and that she took pride in her sister’s success. Another asked “I need help finding direction and focus. I do not want to be lost.” These little balsa panels seemed too light to bear their words.

Every panel is the same cut, the same shape, the same wood. They each cost the same 500 yen, which is about four bucks at the moment. They will be treated with the same reverence by the shrine during the ritual, whether it’s French soccer matches or lost granddaughters. And who can know what becomes of them afterwards? I suspect that the Brown admissions office and Champions League results will be unmoved by the influence of Emperor Meiji’s spirit. But whatever comfort is brought to a grandfather who had to attend his granddaughter’s funeral is worth the ritual. And maybe putting the words down onto wood will spark the direction that the lost soul is seeking. A lot of life, like Kyoto, involves trying to fake it until we make it.

As I was leaving the shrine, the sunset hit just the right angle that it lit up the tall canopy of trees from below, painting the roof of the forest in bright gold. Crows were loud here, and another type of bird unfamiliar to me chirped higher and louder, but they softened a little in the dying day. And then loudspeakers hidden in the trees crackled on, shouting at me in four languages that the shrine was closing soon. And one final lesson: Japan is very good at casting spells, but just as good at shattering them.

IV Kamakura

Kamakura is a real catch it if you can reference to history, but despite the fact that most haven’t heard of it, it has a much more secure position on the list of the capitals of Japan than Osaka does. It was the real center of Japan’s political administration for a period from the 1100s until the mid 1300s, a period which included the successful resistance to the Mongol invasions with the help of the kamikaze, the divine wind. In other words: hey Mongols, before sailing out, check the weather!

When Kamakura was founded, it was cheerfully located at the ass end of nowhere. It’s a port city on the Kanto plain, which at the time was like America moving its capital to the Colorado frontier during the 1850s. That happened for a couple of good reasons. The system of an emperor retiring his ritual throne duties but keeping power had broken down into control by the Fujiwara clan of court nobles. But a number of rising competing clans descended from the Imperial clans themselves had risen up.

One of the reasons the Imperial line has lasted is they never lacked for heirs. Emperors had multiple wives, dozens of kids, and their brothers would have dozens of kids of their own. The line was safe, but that created risks of its own: too many heirs can be dangerous. If some outsider clan wants to take power, they can find some unhappy prince, make him the nominal leader of their cause, and toss out the current emperor. They can crown their purchased prince, and now they’re set and perfectly legitimate. So the Imperial clan would sometimes prune its ranks. They’d take a bunch of spare sons of lower-ranked concubines every now and then, and the emperor would “grant” them clan names. They’d enjoy high rank, and the clans formed — the Taira, the Minamoto, the Tachibana — became the nucleus of the new samurai military caste. But they’d never be emperors — remember, the Imperial clan had no name, so these nephews and younger sons were now no longer princes, or Imperial at all.

But they were still powerful, privileged and ambitious. And, as we’ve said, the retired emperor had proved that you didn’t need to be an emperor to exercise power. If a retired emperor could be the real power, why not an ex-prince? Or a powerful noble clan head? Or a military leader? Cue a war! In the aftermath, the Minamoto clan won out, winning the new title of Shogun, and seated their power around their own clan capital in the East. That proved useful to avoid and sideline the court intrigues and politics. The warrior caste was nominally subordinate to the throne, and kept up that pretense. If they were in Kyoto, they’d have to publicly defer to the higher rank of the emperor. So the Shogun just never went to Kyoto. But they too were not immune to power being flexible. The original Shogun’s grandson inherited young, which is always dangerous, and his rule was entrusted to a regent from the Hojo clan. The Hojo, somehow, never quite got around to restoring power to the main Minamoto line, and they were the real rulers of Japan for the Kamakura era.

So to recap, when the Mongols invaded, Japan was ruled by an Emperor (tenno), who exercised no political power. The emperor had a Fujiwara regent (sessho) a once powerful office that ruled “for” the tenno, but now was also sidelined. He also had a Minamoto clan shogun, who was titular head of the military caste. But the shogun had no more power either. The shogun now had a Hojo clan regent (shikken), and that guy was the one who actually called the shots against Genghis’s generals, despite being officially of mid-tier rank both on the Imperial court rank system and any org chart.

I know this is sounds insane on face — why keep so many high ranking nobodies around for funsies? A lot of it was about legitimacy; if you co-opt the power of the tenno but leave him in office, the country as a whole doesn’t notice or care like they would if you replaced him.  And Japan is not unique in this regard; ancient societies often constrained their divine rulers and their theoretically unlimited powers with ritual obligations.  If the sacred king can execute anyone or appropriate anything in sight, keep out of his sight. His Holy feet may not be polluted by touching the soil outside the sacred palace! If it helps, make sure he was always a governable child.  That way you can exercise the power of the emperor without losing the stored legitimacy of the traditional clan.

The label primitive may tempt you here.  But how are Charles III and his dukes and earls different?  Or the half dozen other remaining powerless monarchs in modern Europe?

—

Kamakura today is an appendage of the massive Tokyo metro. You take a train from there, past Haneda airport down to the southern coastline. Kamakura has none of that former-capital we’re-better-than-you feel you might pick up in Kyoto — it was last a capital in the 1300s. But that period coincides with the introduction of the Chan school of Buddhism from China, more famously rendered in Japanese as Zen. Zen temples ring the bowl of the city, providing stunning views of the town and the ocean beyond. It’s worth the shlep up to see the views. The town is much smaller than the other four; which makes it an easier place to wander around and find a cup of coffee or a lunch. The crowd does run to tourism, but not as heavily as you’ll find at the big sites in Kyoto.

Funnily enough, Zen is not the most prominent school of Buddhism in Japan — Jodo Shinshu is. Zen can’t claim even 10% of the whole. It did, however, market itself in the West better, stripping down its practice to a spare, meditation and insight oriented approach that was lighter on deities and potential blasphemies for a Christian audience. It’s a type of practice that feels compatible with monotheistic Western faiths. That’s no reason to skip Kamakura — just know that we may think of Zen as the “real Japanese Buddhism” at some level, but most Buddhists don’t.

I’m not much of a Christian, but I do admit there’s a funny disorientation for me when I go to shrines and temples here. There are temples as spare as a Calvinist stone chapel, and others as maximally decorated as the San Juan de Dios in Granada — where if it can be gold-leafed, it will be gold-leafed. All are unmistakably places for spiritual observation, but at the same time they’re so utterly different. The carved figures have facial expressions you’d never find in a Catholic church. Some are carved in repetitive rows that are unfamiliar, for purposes unknown to me. The colors run heavily to bright red. The layout feels wrong: many are built for continuous individual use, not oriented to mass collective ceremonies. Many rituals are conducted only by the priests or monks, or are held standing out in the courtyard; there’s no rows and rows of seats here for an obedient congregation to gather and be preached at.

So they’re beautiful, and fascinating, but it doesn’t feel right. We’re all subject to more influence of our own tradition than we realize. However, pursuing that feeling of wrongness is a good reason to travel. It helps you question things that deserve it. Its good for everyone, but especially the citizens of a giant country like America, to feel like a foreigner sometimes.

After seeing the temples and the town, there’s a ancient rickety little trolley like that you can pack yourself into and visit Enoshima Island. It’ll drop you on the mainland, and then you either bus or shlep along the long causeway out to the island. Be prepared to secure your hats, because the wind can whip right along the causeway with a fury. But the island itself is delightful; a forested over warren of hills, the whole island is a shrine to Benzaiten, the kami of music and entertainment. By day, the island has the closest sandy beaches to Tokyo — not normally much of a draw for me directly, since I never travel this far just to go to a beach when I’m ten miles from one at home. But it’s sometimes nice to get a walk in an open place like this if you’ve timed out on the crowds in Tokyo. However, if you’re not motivated by that, come towards the end of the day. You’ll find a shrine complex with buildings scattered everywhere, mildly overpriced restaurants with stunning views, and dozens of fantastic sunset angles on Mount Fuji across the bay.