Travel

Between Nepal and Bhutan lies Kangchenjunga, the third highest peak of the world with an altitude of 8595 m in the district of Sikkim in India. According to a beautiful woman rider, who made a motorcycle journey around the deserts in Australia during more than a year, a young woman at a mountaineering lodge in the middle height of the mountain once boiled some tea by a fire with only two branches as slender as little fingers. I made an experiment on this, when I made a motorcycle trip with the rider. I was able to acquire a technique for starting a fire with a match and a sheet of tissue paper, but I don't think I will be able to boil water with two slender branches for the rest of my life. In the world there is certainly a person who can do a magic thing. The woman rider herself had a flat tire countless times in Australia. Thanks to this she naturally acquired a complete skill to patch a punctured tire, and she can now do it within five minutes. Even a professional at a motorcycle shop may be beaten by her rapid work. I also like traveling and have visited around 30 different countries in my around 30 trips in total, which were made once or twice each year. Because of my aspiration for foreign countries I diligently learned English at school, but I really didn't like other subjects. However, after I started traveling to foreign countries, I came to learn some other foreign languages besides English and in addition I began reading books on history, geography, climate, culture and so on of these countries. If you actually visit a country, you naturally become very interested in these things.

The contact with different culture in a foreign country makes us rethink about our own culture or language. In my second trip to Mexico after the trip to the UK, I somehow thought much about Japanese language and after the trip I began to learn the classic Japanese, which I really hated in my senior high school days. And at the same time, I also became interested in the Japanese history that I got bored by the entrance exam.

A few years after the graduation from the university, I took a plane for the first time in my life. It was a chartered flight of an US airline company, which carried only students from Tokyo to Belgium. As my face probably showed an extreme nervous tension then, an stewardess with fair hair said a word to me, "Are you all right?". Even now I clearly remember her considerate smile that made me relaxing. In the way like this, I was a coward and weak person. However, till then I believed I was a man of strong mind ...

On the previous day of that first flight, I, a country boy who had never visited Tokyo except for the junior high school excursion before, wandered around the capital, looking for a cheap hotel, and finally happened to stay in a slum. The receptionist of the cheap hotel told me that he had once been to Germany when he was young. He confessed that he in fact had studied there for some years. According to him, he made a scientific research with Shin-ichiro Tomonaga, a Japanese Nobelist, however, he himself resigned from the research institute because he was against the Japanese militarism. I imagined some hard or destined aspect of life at that moment.

A travel in an unknown country often brings us some troubles, such as the loss of possessions and sufferings from thefts or frauds. A misjudgment of the situation may expose us to a serious danger. No one helps us. So we have to solve the problem by ourselves. An accurate judgment and rapid decision-making are required. The things that guarantee these mental reactions are objective logicality and good knowledge of the culture and the social system of the country. To make a wrong judgment means death at times. Traveling is dangerous.

Even so, we travel. Mountains and the sea, which are originally hour native places, or animals and plants, which are our old friends, might be sending some inviting energy waves, saying "you mustn't be there" to us, who live in an artificial, limited space of urban areas every day. When I visit a country in which nothing is touched by technological civilization and rich nature is still conserved, I sometimes wonder if I can survive in a land without any trace of civilization. Among all, can I make a fire for lighting the darkness, for keeping me warm and for cooking? I suppose that the young woman in Kangchenjunga shows the fragility of our technological civilization.