Escape to the country

For those who have spent any length of time in a big city, a need for escape will be a familiar story. Having spent a little over two months living in one of the biggest cities in the world I found one such escape a couple of weeks ago in the form of a week in Shizouka assisting on an environmental ambassador exchange programme. In the process I got to tick two more things off my bucket list; I saw Mt Fuji AND I went on a Bullet Train!

The first obstacle of the week was to get to Shizouka though which is situated about two hours away from Osaka by Bullet train. Having perfected the art of buying cheap advanced tickets in England it’s come as a bit of a shock to me that train companies in Japan don’t really offer discounts, making train tickets here an expensive luxury. There’s more than one way to skin a cat though and for those who can’t afford the train there is an overnight bus service from Osaka to Shin-Fuji for half the price of the train. On the downside it takes a little over three times as long!

For the outward journey I took the latter option and despite the relative comfort of Japanese buses the nature of an overnight bus trip inevitably means arriving tired and hungry. While the nearby McDonald's (seemingly the only place open in Shin-Fuji at 5.30 in the morning) dealt with the hunger it took something a bit more spectacular to deal with the tiredness; Mt Fuji. This was the first time that I had seen the mountain outside of the pages of books and magazines and the image that greeted me was even more spectacular than I had imagined with the peak densely covered in snow and glowing in the crisp spring sunshine. Mt Fuji doesn't simply dominate the skyline, it owns it. 

Growing wasabi

The source of Japanese hay-fever!

Green Tea plantation

I was lucky enough to see a lot more of Fuji-san (as it's known to locals) over the week with the views visible from my first nights accommodation - the home belonging to a family friend of Eri's who organised much of the environmental ambassador programme - particularly special. The programme  itself catered for ten Japanese, and two girls from Hawaii, taking in the forest and the ocean together with the urban sprawl of Shizouka. Although I was pretty much redundant in my role as 'Cultural Assistant' (primarily due to the fact that 90% of the people on the trip didn't speak English) I did get to have an enjoyable week and I even learnt quite a lot.

Fuji-san

Did you know for example that 75% of Japan is covered in forest, which in an age of Co2 awareness is an astonishing fact. Unfortunately as I was to find out the vast majority of this forest was planted artificially following the extensive rebuilding programmes in Japan after WWII and although the fir trees that were planted do a pretty good job of removing Co2 in their first 60 years of life, beyond that they do little more than contribute to the high pollen levels prevalent in Japan that cause such suffering for those with hay-fever. Thanks to the abundant supply of cheap imported timber the Japanese timber industry is all but dead and alas there appears to be little prospect of the government reviving it, even as a means of Co2 removal.  

 

As you probably guessed from the opening paragraph of this blog my journey home from Shizouka was a considerable improvement on the outward journey and even though it cost an arm and a leg, going home on the bullet train was completely worth it. OK, so I suppose the bullet train is just another train, but that's hardly the point. I remember as a primary school child being utterly amazed by stories of the speeds that bullet trains carried passengers across Japan, indeed the images of Japan that I had as a child were filled with blurred passenger trains speeding past a snow capped Mt Fuji. In the space of just a few days in Shizouka I was finally able to bring these images to life.