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Kintaro was the first pan-Japan walker I heard of. I was planning the PCT at the time so while I thought it was a cool idea I was far too busy to do anything about it. On my way home from the trail I dropped in on him in San Francisco and talked a little more about it and since then it has been sitting in the back of my mind as a way to truely immerse myself in the Japanese culture which has interested me for so long. | |
| To say I was a little stunned when I discovered this would be an understatement. If course I know plenty of other people have walked across Japan over the years, but to find two Australians doing it this year and one of them going in my direction just two weeks before me? Well I just had to get in contact with them. Chris and Ian seem pretty well organised (they have picked 20 waypoints to visit, I can't even name 20 places in the whole country) and they'll be camping too. I expect to run into Ian as he heads south-west and might be able to catch Chris as he goes north-east. It's still a solo journey but having someone else who really understands how and why this is done is heartening. Here's to the Class of '08! |  |
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This is the journal of my 2007 through hike of the Pacific Crest Trail. As you'll find out if you read it I was vaguely thinking of doing the Appalachian Trail "some time before I'm 30" until I met Bethany Axtman (a.k.a. Gloves) who was working as a hut warden in New Zealand's Tongariro National Park. She'd done the PCT the year before and convinced me it was the better trail. Within a year I had my bags packed and I was looking north towards Canada. It is to Gloves that I owe perhaps the greatest debt. As with this blog my father is editing all entries before they go live. Spelling/grammmar mistakes are my fault, hiding them from you is quite a task. He'll also be getting my pictures online when I can't upload them myself. |
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| Alan Booth's The Roads To Sata has me more than a little worried about the weather and the reactions I'll get as a foreigner in the back-roads of Japan. He walked south-bound in 1977, when outsiders were still quite a novelty. I hope to reach places where no-one speaks English but the different treatment Alan got, despite speaking fluent Japanese, wore him down and I am not looking forward to that. Plus he seemed to have terrible luck with the weather. At least I hope it was bad luck and I'm not going to be drenched every few days. The book is defintely worth a read if you're into this sort of adventure. |  |
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As mentioned on my gear page Ohararp LLC make excellent dataloggers. I carried a V2 last year and have a V3 with me now. That's how I'll be sharing my route with the world, and it's also great for tagging my photos with a location. On a Mac I use GPSPhotoLinker to interpolate between the camera time-stamps and the GPS fix timestamps. | |