Bits and Pieces

I meant to include these in my posts about Beijing but never got around to them at the time. First up is my plenary address to the AILA Conference where my spirited rendition of the 'ABC' song proved to be a huge hit, though I did have the odd tone-deaf heckler to contend with.

"Yes you, you at the back. Yeah, you with the brown eyes and the chopsticks. What did you just say? What?! Oh yeah, right, listen pal, like you can sing better. Yeah? No, not with my western leathered foot so far up your communist ass you'll be choking on my shoelaces...Oh yeah? You and who's army, Mr. Ming?....Oh, the People's Army you say, well, bring 'em on, bring 'em on..."

On our way back to Sapporo from Beijing our flight was delayed by nearly two hours as the pilot had to "negotiate" (read, 'haggle') with air traffic control for clearance to take off. This meant that by the time we arrived at Incheon airport in South Korea for our connecting flight to Sapporo, we had all of twenty minutes to make our connection.

But this is East Asia folks, where the concept of 'service' is as integral to society as rice consumption is. We were met at the gate by a representative of Korean Air holding a 'Sapporo: Flight KL 379' sign. There were three of us who needed to make that flight and once we were all assembled we began to move while Mr. Lee got on his walkie-talkie and arranged to have us 10-4ed through all the transfer passenger security checks. After that he layed on some more of his rubber-ducky magic and had them keep the gate open for us as we jogged through a crowded Incheon airport on a busy Sunday evening.

Made the flight. Get to Sapporo where we are met at the gate this time by a female JAL representative with a sign saying 'Gaynor Brian'.

"Honey, like countless women before you, I gotta tell you, much as you'd like it to, it's not going to happen. I'm married".

Which was met with a very Japanese "eh?". Turns out she was there to regretfully inform me that my suitcase had not made the connecting flight and would I accept their deepest apologies. And all this accompanied by deep bows and much wringing of hands and wailing of teeth. Or however it goes.

So as we made our wringing and wailing way to customs I filled in the necessary paperwork while Ms. JAL promised me they would courier my suitcase down to Muroran the very next day.

Which they did. Effortlessly.

Whereas last December when we went back to Ireland and our suitcases decided to take the long, slow scenic root from Amsterdam to Dublin, we had to go out to the airport, queue for two and a half hours and then search for our own luggage in the arrivals area.

September in the Forest Kozan

Occasionally you have to take the time out to smell the daisies, even in the rain. So it was with this month's trip to Forest Kozan where a wet day and unseasonably cool temperatures meant there were only 12 of us this time; a far cry from the 70 or so who turned out on our first visit back in May.
Warm weather wusses.
So us 12 foolish, sorry, hardy souls donned jackets, hats and rubber boots and slowly wandered around in the gentle rain, taking our mellow time to marvel at Mother Nature's miniature marvels. (Yes, my friends, thrill to the alliteration. Thrill, I say. Thrill!).
There were spider webs spun in a frieze of raindrops; glistening green clover: stalks of inudate splayed to the sky adding speckled stripes of vermilion to the verdant green; pale birch bark furrowed and fissured, splotched with peeling, faded lichen.
But wait, what's this .... a water slide!!
Yesssss!!!
To hell with speckled, verdant, etc. Mother Nature; we want to go splash - splash (though in as much an alliterative way as possible).



And once we were finished there was a nice barrel of steaming hot water for us to sit in and soak ourselves warm.

The Niseko Trail Run

Or rather, to give it its full title: "The Complete and Utter Wretched Bastard of a Niseko Feckin Trail Run".

I had always wanted to climb to the top of Mt. Annupuri. From its 1309 metre summit you look west and you can see the dark hulk of the Shakotan Peninsula shouldering its way out into the Sea of Japan; to the south and east you can see the great sweep of southern Hokkaido encircling Funka Bay; whilst to the north the serrated ridges of the mountains give way to the broad expanse of the Ishikari plain.

Well, last Sunday, I finally got to fulfill my ambition.

Twice.

The occasion was the annual trail run race in Niseko organized by NAC with whom we went rafting earlier in the summer. I used to take part in their runs and adventure races quite regularly back in the day when I was the bear-chasing, deer-skinning, squirrel-eating man, but lately.... ahh lately I have been to much of the surf brah and lost touch with my inner Grizzly Adams.

30 kilometres. Yes, dear reader, 30 shagging kilo-feckin-meters. That was what I signed up for. Middle-aged madness I hear you cry. Too bloody right is how I reply.

Somewhere about the oh, I don't know, the 3km mark maybe, I was already thinking "What the good f*** was I thinking?!!"

We started at 8.00am at the 400 wooded hilly metres above sea-level mark, then panted our way up to 1200 metres, headed back downhill to 350 metres and then back up to top out at Annupuri's 1309 metre summit. And that, as the NAC man waiting there gleefully told us, was only the half way point.

Above vultures wheeled and screeched in the featureless braised blue sky. They looked hungry.

My watch said 11:03 - already three hours gone. And then my watch fell off.

Down, I thought, at least it's all downhill from here on in.

And, as it turned out, uphill, across hill, down stream, through stream, up-down-up-down muddy trails, for what seemed a forested eternity.

By the end of it (me?), my thigh muscles were cramped so tightly you could have put a bow to them and played Barber's Adagio for Strings.

I staggered, teetered and moaned my way across the finish line like a blinded bear off his head on methylated spirits some five and half hours after I had first set off. To put that in perspective, the fleet footed freak first past the post, sorry, the winner, came home in three hours fifteen minutes.

Freak.

Mind you the last person back took eight hours so I didn't feel too bad. Actually, I did. I felt like shit. And, as you can see from the following photos and videos, I looked it too.

Before and ....

.... After

Yes, I ran up that.

Not content with the immediate dangers of falling, dehydration, exhaustion, bear attack, rabid squirrels, etc., the organizers also routed the course close to Hokkaido's only nuclear power station. Ahhh, deep breath and inhale those cesium isotopes...

Some videos - those of you who suffer from motion sickness may be better off not watching.

Yesssssssssssssssssssssss!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ireland 15 Australia 6 (Holy Shit!!!!)

Beijing Part II

The Great Wall. Lives up to its name. We visited a section a two hour drive north of Beijing. In a fast Hi-ace van. It supposedly gets less visitors than those sections closer to the city, but it still had a chair-lift to cater for the crowds (something the wall's builders no doubt planned for all those centuries ago).

What struck me most about the wall is how it was constructed atop the mountain ridge lines regardless of incline or accessibility. I have no idea how they managed it. Probably with monkey magic. Apparently until late last year you could hike along sections of the wall that had 60 degree or more inclines, but decadent, lumbering westerners kept falling down/off the wall so they closed this section. Which was a pity as I was really looking forward to tackling the Spiders Steps* and the Dragons Broken Wing**.

And 'hike' is a bit of a misnomer to. The section we did could have been done in a comfortable pair of runners, a hat and a bottle of water. But no, Outdoor Gear Brand Man here went in full REI.com summer hiking special and looked like a rich, decadent, overdressed westerner who deserved to be pushed off the wall.

Perhaps that is why it proved so hard for me to fathom what it must have been like to patrol this wall all those hundreds of years ago. In a tea-shop we stopped in after our walk, sorry, 'hike', there is a photograph of the wall in the midst of a thunderstorm. Like I said, the wall sticks to the ridge lines making its guard towers the highest objects around. And they, if this picture was anything to go by, attract lightening strikes the way I attract mosquitoes.

What must it have been like half a millennium or so ago when the sky crackled and the clouds roared and the unlit tower you sheltered in shook to the thunder and exploded in the light of lightning? What could you do but tremble before the wrath of the gods and fervently pray you would be spared their tumultuous anger?

That or grab your Patagonia Torrentshell Jacket and make a run for the chair-lift.

(* These are approximate translations of the original Mandarin terms).

(**Actually, they're not. I just made them up).

Beijing Part 1

I spent last week in Beijing, fearlessly striking a blow for democracy and freedom against the oppressive communist authorities that have blighted a billion peoples' lives for nigh on 60 years.

And eating some rather tasty dim sum too.

I was ostensibly there to attend and present at the 16th World Congress of Applied Linguistics (and yes, it was just as impressive as its title), but as everyone who's everyone knew (Hilary Clinton, The Dala Lamai, Richard Gere, my wife, Kung Fu Panda, etc.), I was really there to ride a horse through Tiananmen Square with my arms out-stretched yelling "Freeeeeedommmm!!!" as the first crucial step towards the country's political emancipation.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find a horse, so I had to confine myself to muttering "Go on, ya good thing" to my sweaty pedicab driver as he dodged crazed taxi drivers and we-don't-stop-for-anything-bar-a-direct-airstrike truck drivers.

Our flight arrived late in the evening so my first impression of Beijing was one of smell - it has that sweet, warm acrid mixture of gasoline, sewage and cigarette smoke that for me is one of the defining features of Asia. Japan, or certainly Hokkaido, doesn't have this, which is fine as I don't think the auld bronchioles could take too much of it; but the rain washed, fresh air reared Irishman in me does enjoy the unhealthy exoticism of it all.

That's me, parochial to the last breath.

What follows over the next couple of blogs are my impressionistic, eh, impressions of the city, along with some completely objective-grounded-in-the-vast-expertise-I-accrued-in-my-five-day-visit statements about the Chinese, all 1.3 billion of them.

The Forbidden City

They wouldn't let us in.

The Forbidden City II

Yeah, I thought that was funny too.

Listen, the place is impressive; anything constructed on that scale is bound to impress. It is close on a kilometre from north to south and 750 metres from east to west, giving an expansive but still cosy total living area of some 720,000 square metres (or to everyone in the US of A, the same size as Disneyland).

And that is about all I remember of our tour guide's explanation. There is a lot of history to the Forbidden City, or more specifically, a lot of Chinese history. Call me a bigoted monocultural, Western imperialist lackey from a fatally flawed late capitalist society drowning in its own degrading excesses, but I'm afraid the detailed explanations of all the various dynastic Xings, Qings, Mings, etc., merged into a gilded, incomprehensible whole so I turned off the headset and just wandered off on my own for a bit.

The unceasing grandeur, the indurate spectacle of 'this majestic, you puny' architecture gets to you after a while. It stops impressing and starts oppressing, as I am sure all those Xings-Qings-Mings no doubt intended all those years ago.

Plus, traipsing around (and after two hours, there's no other word for it) in the late afternoon heat of an August day in central Beijing, my less than divine thoughts increasingly tended towards more, mundane, peasant like matters such as beer, preferably ice-cold, and sometime soon.

See, that's me, not afraid to tell it like it is - travel writing as it should be.

Sooo, we went down to the river, and into the river we dove...

Back to Forest Kozan. Back to the river. Oh when, when oh when, will this watery madness ever end? Summer 2011 essentially means water, both sea and fresh. And usually Cian is in it. And if Cian is getting wet it means that Daddy has to get wet too, as Mammy only likes to eat fish - she doesn't particularly want to become one.

It was a grey, rainy day when we went to Forest Kozan in August but that didn't stop Cian, or rather 'Dances with Salmon' as he is now known, from plunging into the first stream he came to. And who had to plunge straight in after him as he began to helplessly float down stream?

'Dances with Salmon' needs to learn how to swim as 'Daddy of Dances with Salmon' isn't too keen on having his nether regions reduced to shriveled peanuts when he has to go wading into the "mother of sweet jesus but that's feckin freezin" river after his son.

Neither is his wife.