Pay Phones, Sleep Deprivation, and Snow: A Fever Dream of a Day

Night bus all to ourselves. Zero sleep. Ramen shop open at 5am with several customers. Trying to organise tutoring. Beautiful sunrise over Osaka, to which we’d never been. Ticket debacle, 24hr McDonald’s. Walk into the station only to bypass the road and get to the park, just to fill up with water. FamilyMart. Back into the station. Feed through ticket. Lose ticket. Doesn’t matter. Beautiful train ride. Some sleep. Quiet time. Large window. I love trains. Blue ocean stretching to the horizon. Tanabe. Looks cute. Stay for about five minutes. Probably a good call. Accidentally ask for a bus to Tsukiji (Tokyo) not Takijiri. More bus sickness. Arrive at Takijiri. Us and one other hiker. Comforting. Start the trail. Feeling good. Mountain air fills the lungs. Tough ascent but beautiful forest. Reach a lookout. The payoff is strong. Really cold. Windbreaker on. Downhill. Suspiciously more downhill. Okay, yep, uphill gain. Reach a picturesque town. That was easy? That was great. Plenty of sunlight left. Are we in Switzerland? Walk to a shrine with an attached art gallery. Sign the guest book. Many Australians, a few more us today even. Stamp. Stamp. What now? We need to call the accomodation. WhatsApp? Not an option. No cellular data to call. There was talk of a pay phone around here though. We find it. It was quite obvious actually. Green little box. Ring ring. Crickets. Put the phone down and our 100¥ comes back to us. Okay again. Did we just accidentally call emergency services. No, okay I don’t think so. Try again. Error response in Japanese. Hold the phone up to Google Translate. Something that we basically interpreted to mean not working. Maybe wrong generation to operate a pay phone. Sorry. Allegedly WiFi. I stand next to the literal router. No WiFi here. Sit inside and freeze. See a car pull up. Cleaner. The nicest lady. No wonder the bathrooms here were so beautifully maintained. Pre-translate message. A sheepish すみません！

We use her phone to ring our stay for the night. Pickup in twenty minutes. Twenty cold minutes. We don’t see a single other walker. How come all the accomodation in town was booked out then? Great facilitates to wait in though. Pickup time comes. Beautiful, winding valley roads. We were headed to the local market and I didn’t know what to expect. What would they sell? Would they be near closing time? Ohhh, the supermarket. Perfect. Nice, we can make that work. Load up on fresh supplies. I look forward to the home cooking. It start snowing, just a little bit. No wonder we were freezing cold. Very pretty scene though. Reach the place. Wait, it is absolutely beautiful. Old Japanese house all to ourselves. Okay, great call. Impossibly cold though. Our driver races around the house to turn like nine different heaters on. Thank you. The lodge honestly has everything you could want. Shower and even indulgence in a bath warm my soul. Cooking warms my soul. Eating my cooking warms my soul. True. We didn’t sleep a wink last night. Futon calls. Very comfy. We steal extra blankets from the cupboard. The tatami floor greets us with open arms. Crazy day. Keen to do it all again tomorrow.