Our forty hours of Mount Fuji

A quiet night in Kawaguchiko was about to get interesting. 

I was standing alone in front of a four-person taxi line outside the closed Kawaguchiko train station. It was nearly silent by 8:30 p.m. in the vacant town square, Chris and Timm had wandered off in search of help, strong gusts of warm wind were pushing through and lighting flashed in the distance, each one a little closer than the last.

This was not what I had crafted in our plan.

We had ridden four trains up from Yokosuka through Toyko that Friday afternoon, through one thunderstorm and a close call on making a transfer, to find that our connecting bus to the Fifth Station of Mount Fuji was canceled that night. The only other option, we were told by some Japanese hikers who shared our idea to summit overnight and enjoy sunrise on Fuji-san, was a taxi. A $110 taxi, that is, to set up a potential date with a thunderstorm on the rocky, steep, and likely slippery trail crossing the exposed face of a 12,388-foot volcano.

It wasn't, by anyone's judgment, a good plan.

So when Chris and Timm returned to the taxi stop and said they had been told about a nearby hostel with potential vacancies, I was an easy sell. We needed to at least check our options, and tear up my plan if needed. We walked down a dimly lit block from the station to the hostel, and a young woman was tending the desk. She had one room available, coincidentally enough, with three mats. And whether we needed another gentle tap on the shoulder or not, the heavens opened up at that moment and the Kawaguchiko street was filled with inches of water in minutes. A quick look at one another, and we turned back to the woman at the counter: "We'll take it."

The next morning, rested from a night's sleep on three mats rolled out side by side on the tatami-mat floor, Timm and I, with Chris Peterson, a Tokyo transplant friend of ours from North Park who we'd talked into joining us for a hike, caught the 6:40 a.m. Fifth Station bus under lovely, partly cloudy skies. The new plan was going off without a hitch.

We were going to hike Mount Fuji.

A beautiful new plan for our day.

We had read that all Japanese citizens hike Mt. Fuji at some point in their lives. There's even a saying for it: Anyone who does not climb Mount Fuji is a fool.

Kawaguchiko Fifth Station. There are bathrooms, restaurants, and
a store to stock up on anything you forgot before leaving. 

And on the hill we saw a broad cross section of the country, from children as young as four or five to  elderly to teenagers in jeans to religious groups on pilgrimage to large guided trips with the latest, and most colorful, in high-end hiking gear.

But those walks of life all have a different pace, which you need. Mt. Fuji is not easy, nor beautiful. After a few hundred yards of an even and tree-lined path leaving Fifth Station on the Subaru Line/Yoshida Trail (there are four different starting points and routes), the trail is a numbing slog uphill that gains 1,400 meters of elevation over about 6 kilometers of rocky outcrops and short, repetitive switchbacks over a mostly blank, volcanic-rock canvas.

Our afternoon on the moon. 

That's why the phrase I used above has a second part: But only the foolish climb Mount Fuji more than once. 

It is a beautiful experience, however. Though not a hike I'd describe as enjoyable in the sense of appreciating trees or riverbeds or wildlife, it is a hike I would not have missed for anything when visiting Japan. The climb, during which we shimmied past hundreds of hikers during the three hours it took the three of us to summit, was exhilarating and challenged our leg strength. It's a battle of will to just keep putting a foot in front of the other and keep your balance. The huts at each station (Fifth through Ninth as you move up) are a wonderful melting pot of hikers resting, sleeping and eating before starting their next leg. Each was a place much more friendly than the crowded streets of Tokyo or the Ginza Line. And the summit, which we reached during a partial clearing and enjoyed for just a few minutes before rain and hail moved in, was breathtaking in its view and thin oxygen level.

As you can see here.

Subaru Line heading out from Fifth Station early in the morning.

Looking down at Lake Kawaguchi and surrounding hills,
from just before Sixth Station. 

Timm and Chris Peterson head up the trail. 

Looking up the mountain as we cleared the tree line. Note the
little hikers. It's very easy to spot the trail because there's
a constant movement of people who only look like colorful ants. 

Photo op at Sixth Station.

Straight, simply straight, uphill at some parts.

View of the valley from a little higher altitude.

One of the huts that line the Yoshida Trail to the top. At each station
there are a series of huts, stacked nearly one on top of another (some maps I saw
listed stations in ".5". There were usually benches on one side, with the huts built
against the mountainside. Hikers can sleep inside and get a meal, we were told
it was about $50 U.S. to do that for a few hours overnight. It was about 100 yen
to use a bathroom, but that price increased to 200 yen per pee-pee by the top.

Looking down on the top of a hut, with switchbacks
in the background. Note the structures built to prevent erosion.
With the loose volcanic rock and soil, it seemed
really easy for the mountain to simple slide away,
particularly with the hundreds (thousands?) of hikers going
up and down each day and the wind whipping across the path. 

The color line. We went through one or two rainy sections
both going up and on the descent. When everyone got geared
up, it was like a rain jacket rainbow lining the trail.

A statue greeting you to the Okumiya Shrine, just below the summit. 

Looking back at the shrine's gates as the clouds roll in. We made it!

Erosion control at the Mt. Fuji summit. 

Chris and Timm take in the view on the rim of Mt. Fuji's crater.

Looking into the crater, where some snow was still standing.

A group arrives at the summit. The house barely visible in
the background is the hut at the top.

Timm enjoys a snack on top; Chris gets cell service! 

Pilgrims walk the crater's edge. This group came up on us from a small
shrine kind of hidden in a rock outcrop. They were chanting, almost singing verses as they walked, repeating the same chorus. Mount Fuji is a sacred place for many Japanese, which I'm glad this group honored among the throng of obvious tourists or foreigners.

Looking at the crater's edge as the clouds began to cover us. When
it started hailing, it was time to start hiking back down. 

Every age group was on the mountain. And this
little kid probably beat us down. We hustled up the mountain,
getting there in just three hours, which was tough but not too taxing.
But we meandered the way down. The Subaru Line has a separate
route for descent, and rather than a steep, rocky path, you descend on
loose, almost sandy volcanic soil, on long switchbacks that seem
to go on and on. I think the descent may have been more difficult for
me mentally, and we walked down for a little more than two hours. 

Kawaguchiko's Fifth Station on the return, where we waited for
our bus in another downpour. 

Although we ended the hike soaked (see above photo), summiting Mount Fuji was a wonderful experience, and especially special with Chris joining us. He moved his family to Tokyo in May and is exploring the country with his eyes wide open, and as the father of a 2-year-old and newborn, couldn't exactly justify this as a family trip. So hopefully Hannah, his wife, will get her own trek up the mountain with friends while Chris babysits sometime soon.

We rode down the mountain on the bus quietly, watching a line of cyclists climb the hill, wondering what the lower trail looked like. You can hike Stations 1-5, though it sounds like few do, despite the odds that the lower portion would probably be more enjoyable as a nature walk. We were tired, soaked, out of money (see that first post) and feeling our way back to Tokyo on a different train line that we came out on. We eventually made it, ambitious planning be damned, but praise be to travel flexibility.

Early in the week Timm had started calling this our trip's "40 Hour Day," because we weren't sure when we'd sleep with all the traveling and moving parts from Yokosuka to Kawaguchiko to Tokyo. The 40 straight hours of a Mount Fuji experience didn't come to pass. But finally sitting on the train, riding to our bed at 11 p.m. on Saturday after our 3 p.m. Friday departure, it kind of felt like we'd done even more than that.

Something to believe in

During the situation at Haneda airport I described in the last post there was an interesting exchange. The fourth Asiana Airlines employee who came to speak with us was a man, probably in his early 30s. Called to the baggage claim at 1 a.m., his task was to clearly tell the Gaijin, "You guys not having a bed to sleep in is not our company's fault."

He was polite yet firm in doing so, and we were polite yet firm when we argued back. After a few minutes of that dance, it was clear he had no wiggle room; his company's policy gave him no option. But each time he listened to our case and turned us down, he grew more and more apologetic. After a few times back and forth and the man growing more and more emotional, we finally said, more or less, "Look man, don't take it so hard. We know it's not your fault."

Except to him, it was. He said as much. I'm paraphrasing, but essentially, a junior middle manager working the graveyard shift on a weekend told us, "If my company did something to bother you, I have done something to bother you." He took the blame personally rather than blame his employer, no matter the inconvenient situation he was in that night.

So we learned a little lesson about the Japanese attitude toward the workplace, and the significance of loyalty. As anyone who's traveled abroad knows, your first 10 days in a new country are full of these kind of observations. I subscribe to the theory, explained to be by my father once, that people are experts on the place they are in during the first 10 days — when you are absorbing everything you see and hear — and after ten years, when you have the benefit of context, history, language and experience.

We didn't quite make ten days in Japan, but there were some initial cultural observations that stood out.

Want good coffee? Somebody better be in charge. 

1. Coffee. Maybe in part because we saw the largest and possible nicest Starbucks ever, on the green at Ueno ("Way-No") Park, Japan felt like a "coffee" culture as much as, if not more than, the "tea" culture I expected. The vending machines on every corner and train station dispense a variety of cold frappes or bottles of iced coffee for on-the-go drinkers. Restaurants we were at served really high-quality coffee, in small cups (eight ounces, no refills) but with large prices (400 yen, or $4, easy). Either way, breakfast at Mike and Tracy's (our American hosts in Yokosuka) later in the week ended up feeling like a little culture shock — huge cups of Dunkin' Donuts blend? And refills?

He's going to destroy all the dry grass!

2. Godzilla. I'd grossly overestimated how popular this guy is. When our friend Mike asked these men in Kurihama which way the Godzilla was — and keep in mind, this Godzilla is supposed to be a "giant" tourist destination and we were less than a mile from the site — they didn't seem to know what he was talking about. Mike then acting like Godzilla may of helped (definitely helped us), or it may have made the guys just smile and point in a direction so we'd leave. We eventually found the Godzilla statue in a little family friend park called Flower World, which was full of wilted flowers (we missed the peak by a few weeks) and three old people on the top of a hillside looking at a lonely statue of the great movie star placed near a playground. So with 30 million potential visitors surrounding this Godzilla, either everyone's seen it, or my more likely guess, Japanese people don't put looking at this thing very high on the bucket list.   

2. Fashion. I know little about this topic, so it may be a risk to parade around my amazement. I'm sure this scene is well, well documented, but as a fashion world ignoramus, the way people dressed in Tokyo fascinated me. There is a seemingly rigid standard of men's business wear  — dark dress pants, short-sleeve white shirt (or sliiiighly off-white, though with very little variety), with no tie. (We were told that's because the Emporer had taken off his tie for the summer. When 'ol Akihito puts it back on, so does every guy on the subway.) No polos, no khakis, definitely no Friday Jeans.

Yet non-office workers seem enamored with American logos and labels; all writing on t-shirts was in English, never Japanese. For women, other than kids in school uniforms, I was struck by the individuality combined with a real sense of class. There's probably a J. Crew in Tokyo, but they must only stock one of each item. You'd see a beautiful pencil skirt that could be an heirloom from 1960, worn with Air Jordans; all types of high heels, even on the women riding bicycles; and Saturday night was kimono night, with many women riding the trains in bright and colorful patterned full-length ropes. Of course, this item would be way more interesting if I photos. The problem with that was...

Enjoying some mental privacy — and serious mobile
phone time, sheesh — on the Ginza line.

4. Privacy. In a city of 30 million, privacy is at a premium. You are almost never alone. So when a Japanese person is standing on the train or walking down the sidewalk, we were told by a guy who's lived in Japan a number of years, they are enjoying a moment of what was described to us as "mental privacy." So don't you Gaijin start just saying hello (or gawking and taking photos of their clothes). The averted eye contact was an interesting reaction compared to Kenya, where every Kenyan, especially children, would stare at us, smile, or shake hands. I don't mean to generalize too much, of course, there were Japanese children who'd smile or wave, and at Mt. Fuji the fellow hikers seemed warm when you'd nod while passing on the trail. But in general we observed a very quiet, respectful culture, where folks kept to themselves unless asked a question. No one approached us to speak, or went out of their way. Except one that I can think of...

5. Baseball. On the train Monday night, a short, middle-aged Japanese woman was standing to my right. It was a typically crowded evening train, and she was standing inches away. "Excuse me," she said quietly, and held up her cell phone to my face to show a photo on the screen:

So, David, new hat?

"Is this you?" she asked. Shaving my beard before the trip paid off! I had been mistaken for Bryan Bullington, an American pitcher for the Hiroshima Toyo Carp, this woman's favorite Nippon League team. She decided to interrupt my subway quiet time to take a bold chance at meeting one of the players, who were in town for a series against the Yakult Swallows. We laughed about it, I chose not to make jokes about my inability to hit a ball out of the infield, she was very nice and we talked about baseball until her stop. Timm and I were planning on going to a Swallows game later that week, in fact, and Saturday night we were sitting in Jingu stadium, on a warm, muggy night in Tokyo, watching the Swallows against the Chunichi Dragons, two of the three teams (Yomuri Giants the third) in the cross-town Tokyo rivalry.

Meiji Jingu Stadium exterior.

Meiji Jingu Stadium, the size and condition resembling an American minor league park, the concessions resembling a high school cafeteria (plus weak beer and noodles), was nearly full that night. What stood out was not unfamiliarity of something foreign, but how authentic the whole atmosphere seemed. (Well, maybe other than the fifth-inning break for fireworks.) More so than a Major League Game, in a sense, this felt like how baseball should be enjoyed. We were sitting in the Chunichi section, and almost every person was wearing a Dragons hat or shirt. The attention on the game was much more intense than I'm used to — we'd even wait until half-inning breaks to leave or return to our seats, so not to interrupt — and there are few interruptions like video scoreboard games or pop music introductions. Finally, the fan sections in left field (Dragons) and right field (Swallows) would stand and cheer wildly through their team's at-bat each inning. As the Swallows, with former Seattle Mariner Wladimir Balentien, closed out a 9-0 blowout, the Chunichi fans, still full in the left field bleachers, stayed on their feet, singing and chanting, until the final out.

Trade proposal: Seventh-inning stretch for fifth-inning firecrackers.

The passion for the game goes beyond a rivalry game or a winning season, we were told, which echoes what I've read about the importance and reverence for baseball in Japan. Even the professional players traditionally stick with the same club over their career, mirroring an ethic of loyalty we saw in Carp, Dragons and Swallows fans, and even Asiana Airlines employees on the night shift. Something tells me  a decade in Japan would provide plenty more illustrations of how serious dedication is taken, if you'd need so long to have that characteristic cemented in your image of the country.

The Yakult Swallows new No. 1 fan.

As for Timm and I, we're now Yakult Swallows fans. No going back.

Samurai of the Sev

Classy Seven Eleven, in the basement of a high-rise
office building across the street from Imperial Palace.

At my first professional newspaper job, in Logan, Utah, there was a 7-11 on the corner of Main and 400 North, just through the back alley behind our shop. At my current job in Bremerton, there's one on Sixth and Park, less than two blocks from the back door. I'm not sure if the green-and-orange sign can be found down a skeezy alley from The New Yorker, but if there is not one, consider that career dream dashed.

Where I didn't expect my tendency to intersect with The Sev, as I learned to call it from a great Sev connoisseur and former city editor Darrel Erhlick, was in Tokyo. But the week Timm and I spent there at the end of July/early August taught us many things — and one was how indispensable Seven Eleven is to Japanese customers of all stripes.

The trip came about coincidentally. Timm and I travel well together, as this blog noted three years ago, and this summer two friends from different chapters of our lives happened to both move to Japan. That's a good enough reason to dust off the passports and to revive this blog to share some stories, show some photos, and offer my half-baked and probably culturally insensitive observations. (I mean, just look at what I titled this post...)

"An American family eats Tokyo," by Matthew Amster-Burton.
Of course we tried octopus...

Then Timm and I each read a book called Pretty Good Number One, and we had another strong pull: we weren't really living until we'd tried authentic Japanese food.

Pretty Good Number One had a chapter about Seven Eleven, so telling the world that, *gasp*, Japanese people love the Sev!, wouldn't exactly be breaking news. The company's international division is based in Tokyo, after all, and there are more 7-11's —15,000 — in Japan than any other country in the world.

Which becomes obvious after you visit. Less obvious is how much nicer they are than the running punchline on Park Avenue, how many people eat lunch there regularly, how there are no Slurpees or nacho cheese, and how often a Gaijin — the word for muzungu in Japanese, or us — will depend on the Sev during his or her visit.

All alone, abandoned in Seoul, no rice balls to snack on...

Our July 26 flight to Tokyo snarled the trip's beginning. A delay leaving Sea-Tac meant a missed connection in Seoul, which meant a rerouted flight to Haneda Airport rather than Narita Airport, where we had hotel reservations, which meant that by 1 a.m. Timm and I, bleary eyed and exhausted, were standing outside Haneda's Customs Desk, being told by a grump at the Hotel Reservations Desk that, on a Sunday night in a city of 30 million people, there were no hotel reservations available. None. And should we have desired a taxi ride to our booked room, it would run us 300,000 30,000 yen (note: corrected that number and a  figure below that grossly overestimated our means, for those of you doing currency conversions), which was approximately all the cash we had for the rest of the trip. (Remember that detail.)

After another hour's worth of begging, polite argument, whining and sweet talk (one of the four airline employees we dealt with was a big fan of Grey's Anatomy and was thrilled we came from Seattle, and maybe that helped!), by 2 a.m. we ended up with two very small rooms at a high-rise near Haneda — right across the street from a Sev. Our first retail stop in Toyko on Monday morning it was!

Have you tried the ramen? This little place near Ueno Park was the best
 we found: maybe three two-person tables inside, rich soy broth with nice sliced pork
bellies in the ramen, a large piece of seaweed for no extra charge, and the
proprietor took our order when we couldn't figure out the vending machine. To
generalize, even in a nice place you order from a vending machine. 

Pretty Good Number One is a book about food, so we had an itinerary. Authentic ramen was on the list, sushi made in front of our eyes, cold soba noodles, tempura, gyoza, miso soup for breakfast. We checked them all off.  We added Japanese hot dogs at a Yakult Swallows baseball game, seafood curry at a Japanese-Indian restaurant, greasy little fried chicken balls that seemed really popular, and even lousy Chinese food at a place we stumbled into that had no English sign, no English menus, and no English speakers — which we incorrectly assumed would have meant good non-English food.

The best restaurant of the trip. This is the whole place, room
for no more than seven. The chef works on his schedule, not yours,
and there's no menu. He orders you the special, you wait an hour and fifteen
minutes (no exaggeration) and you get the most delicious plate
tempura pork, shrimp, ham, carrots, apples and salad imaginable.

The Sev's specialty (at least at our price range) seemed to be rice balls, so the ubiquitous line-up of them on every refrigerated shelf became our go-to place to find snacks. A rice ball is a tennis ball-sized handful of sticky rice, wrapped in seaweed, with a surprise fish option in the center or just a generous soaking of soy sauce. Walking down the street and see a Sev? Rice ball it is! Going on a day hike? Let's first have a rice ball! Hiking Mount Fuji in the middle of the night in a thunderstorm? Three rice balls! At least that was the working, and delicious, theory.

It's a jelly, eh?

The Mount Fuji story is one that will be told soon enough, but here's the key plot twist for now: an unexpected expense meant we left the mountain with no yennies in our pocket, and two of three American credit cards that, up to that point, had been denied when we tried to use them. The Fujiyuka train station wouldn't accept our ATM cards to make a withdrawal, and save for the round-trip train tickets we had purchased, we would have been a couple of out of luck gaijin.

We made it back to the city thanks to those train tickets, but we were penniless. The plan was to meet friends at the Yakult Swallows game, where we'd need some yen to get in, buy hot dogs, and then a little more for subway fare to our beds that evening. We looked all over the Harajuku subway station — only Japanese ATM accepted. We stopped at a Family Mart (kind of like a 7-11), and our American banks were no good there. We kept walking toward the stadium, and on a quiet little street there's a — yep — a Sev. How could we resist?

I stood at the door while Timm went to the machine, tucked back behind the newsstand, and asked for another 200,000 20,000 yen. He turned around and smiled: "The Sev saves us again."

Mike instructs his daughter in the ways of the Seven Eleven on
our trip to the Boso Peninsula. Arrigato gozaimasu. 

The slow boat ride to paradise

Takawiri Beach

The best day of the trip was the day I thought I had lost my eyesight. My eye doctor (and my mother) will be happy to know I've been reminded of the value of sunglasses. I was nearly blinded by the beauty of it all. (Or it was all that squinting through the glare off the water for eight hours at zero latitude, which my left eye eventually had enough of.)

Mfangano Island is west of Rusinga, and it's a larger and considerably more lush piece of land. As we approached in the small fishing boat we rode on for the day, Dan Nyangweso gave us a short geography lesson. The people of Mfangano, by ancestry the Suba tribe from Uganda who, over the years, has mixed with the Kenyan Luo tribe, have done a remarkable job at preservation. Subsistence farming and fishing were about it as far as industry, similar to Rusinga, but the number of trees covering the hillside set the island apart. That allows Mfangano to be a more attractive destination for tourists, though, outside of an airstrip and one small resort with float planes, as well as boat trips over from Rusinga, it seems like access is still limited.

The fishing villages suffer the same sketchy reputation as those on Rusinga (namely, fisherman are transient and tend to bring problems like alcoholism and prostitution, as well as living conditions of corrugated tin dwellings and environmental problems that result come from washing and bathing in the lake). However, slightly different weather patterns help prevent drought on the island, and sustainable farming practices have prevented erosion or clear-cutting. The hilly geography of the island may help as well, most hillsides are extremely steep and the best transportation is motoring around over the lake rather than walking or driving through. 

Fishing boats on a Mfangano beach.

An African named (really) John Kennedy, with the company of Dan and Ochieng, got us there. We met Kennedy at a beach on the west end of Rusinga, and as the real fishermen were coming in from the night's work the five of us were heading out. Since fishing occurs overnight in Lake Victoria, we had the waters nearly to ourselves.

John Kennedy and Timm. There's actually a good explanation for his name. Next post though.

Kennedy's boat had a little outboard motor, connected to the gas tank by a small hose that seemed to fail regularly at moving the gas to where it needed to be. After the engine stalled out for the third time in the first 20 minutes of the trip, Dan, absolutely deadpan with a little smile, says, "We may have a problem with transport." But Kennedy and Ochieng made sure we never had to paddle or swim, and after maybe an hour we were at the beach. The slow ride was fine, as Dan had time to give us a history lesson and point out the sights as we sailed along the island's shore.

Pretty smart muzungu, bringing his sunglasses and all.

We ended up in a small fishing village, where the women were drying the morning's omena catch. We walked through the row of tin shanties and, on the other end, hit a trailhead not that different from what you'd see at an American state park. The hike was advertised as a 90-minute loop to the summit, and looked like a signed and well-worn path to an ancient rock art site as well.

Looking back on the "trail."

The trail isn't worn from traffic of American hikers like us, however. It's much more likely the transportation network everyone is using. As such, the trail winds through people's yards, crosses the fences they've built to contain livestock, and crosses other trails pretty consistently. Even after stopping to ask several residents if we were headed the right way, we got sidetracked and found ourselves at the top of a long draw.

Luckily, Kennedy had fallen behind. The other four of us were pretty high up a face when we realized it was the wrong side of the little canyon we were trying to get up, so we yelled back down. Two women tending the steepest hillside garden plot you've ever seen, on the facing hillside, talked us down and to another trail. We took that route up a skinny dirt path through her nearly vertical maize farm (past a little dog who's job it was to scare monkeys away!) and met Kennedy. He had the sense to find the ranger who would let us into the rock art site, and who knew the way.

Dan looking at the signs at entrance to the Kwitone rock art site. Timm and I paid to go through the small fence and see it, but somehow Dan talked the ranger into letting the Africans ride for free that day.

Kennedy looks at the rock wall where the markings could be seen. This site was traditionally used by village elders for meetings and ceremonies that included animal sacrifice, we were told. Modern village leaders still use the site for meeting on occasion, and the ranger's full-time job seemed to be to protect the site.

The Kwitone rock art looks like graffiti, but it's actually extremely rare, thousands of years old, and culturally significant because so much African rock art has been defaced or lost. You can see the sun image in these examples, which obviously had significance to an agrarian society.

We scrambled up a rocky path just past the rock art site, found the summit of the mountain and could see in every direction. There were a few other historical sites, such as the clearing where women meet to grind grain, and then took a trail that was more meandering (and much easier to follow) back down to the beach.

We hopped back in the boat and motored for another 30 minutes to the eastern side of the island (as my head started to throb and I realized I didn't put my sunglasses in my pocket). We stopped at a dock and had our day's ugali at a small community museum that had more history of rock art and a small collection of ancient Suba tools and instruments. After lunch we set off again, beached quickly at Mfangano's main village for gas, then headed to Takawiri Beach.

The approach to Takawiri Beach.

There's two reactions I had to Takawiri Beach: First, you're flummoxed to have this pristine, clean, 100-yard stretch of the only white sand beach in the area all to yourself. It was the prettiest place we had landed on the lake, would have been flooded had it been Hawaii or another "destination," but the beach was completely empty on a perfect afternoon for a swim. The second reaction is to be confused (and maybe eventually, disappointed) to see a shuttered resort just back from the beach, still in working condition but unable to take advantage of the potential for tourism that would undoubtedly benefit the region. (And benefit tourists lucky enough to stay at a place so remote, peaceful and beautiful.)

The shuttered resort. See how nicely kept the grounds are. It was odd, almost like a ghost town.

We swam in the lake, sat on the beach, walked around the six empty (but surprisingly well-kept) cabins and pagodas, and then met the caretaker. He said we could have all the coconuts we wanted — as long as we picked them ourselves. After watching us (all of us, not just the clueless muzungus) struggle with a strategy to actually climb the trees, the caretaker brought a ladder and long stick to us. Wiseguy.

Somebody's been to Takawiri Beach...

The last stop on the boat tour cycle was Birds Island. This small island just south of Rusinga is a protected habitat, though Dan told us there's some need for better protection by government or wildlife groups — someone recently tried to squat on the island, and we could see a field of maize someone was obviously cultivating. The name of the island, of course, tells you what's being protected. Lake Victoria is one of the most diverse areas in the world for species of birds, and Birds Island seemed to have most of them. I'm not ornithologist, so I can't cite names for you. But there were trees and rocks turned white with bird poop, if that helps with the mental picture of how many birds are circling. I was squinting pretty heavily by this point and could really only open one eye. (And I was getting a little scared, actually. I'm not an opthamologist either, and I doubted anyone on Rusinga was.)

But what I could see was fairly stunning. Here's a few photos for you bird-watchers. Keep in mind I was shooting a little, well, blind at this point:

That day was our most "touristy," outside the safari excursion at the end of the trip. I've emailed with Dan Nyangweso since returning, and he told me he's now part of a small task force planning strategies to better take advantage of the region's attractions like Mfangano, Takawiri and Birds Island. To me this seems a bit like our interest in organic fruit, which I mentioned a few posts back. That is, as Americans we're often seeking the way things used to be, and in tourism that means finding preserved spaces or the rare place that isn't commercialized or full of other visitors. But Dan, like Vitalis and his comment about how GMO crops would be widely welcomed in Kenya, would love to grapple with the headaches of a tourism industry. I'd hate to see a McDonald's there, but I'd also hate to see such a special place stagnate without being shown to the outside world.

When you go to visit Rusinga, make sure this type of a trip is part of your itinerary. You'll see a variety of landscapes, meet people outside the villages, learn some history, feel the sun and wind over Lake Victoria, and be stunned by a postcard-perfect beach and pristine island wildlife. Just don't forget your sunglasses, or you'll be wearing them the next few days to readjust your vision.