Film retrospective: Birmingham, 1998-1999

Acquiring some kind of higher education had always been a goal of mine, and in 1998 I began my studies in Birmingham (which at the time was an uncomfortably long way south). I would spend the best part of the next eight years there learning a lot, making some of my most meaningful discoveries and decisions; finally breaking out of the ivory tower to go travelling in 2006.

By this time I had upgraded to a poorer-quality-than-35-mm-yet-idiot-proof APS compact camera, which would serve me faithfully all through my undergraduate years until the advent of the digital age. On the left, you can see one of the many stereotypical student-y activities my friends and I were apt to engage in – cricket in the excellently-proportioned corridors of our first-year halls of residence. We did manage to knock some plaster out of the walls with a few spectacularly mistimed deliveries, but the building was demolished a few years later so I any loss of structural strength was short-lived.

The outdoor photographs below mark the beginning of my involvement with the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, a broad programme of self- and community-improving activities for young people. Having breezed through high school largely ignorant of this opportunity, I wasted no time in starting and soon found myself labouring up on the slopes of Mt. Snowdon.

The D of E support group was mostly concerned with helping students get their hiking expeditions done, and I spent a few enjoyable hours with the Handbook figuring out what I could do for the other sections of the Award. The list of approved activities has (of course) been updated since I was wondering what to do, but I’m fairly sure there were a few eyebrow-raisers like sheep training and wallpaper appreciation for the Skills section.

The two photographs below are from an expedition to the north-west region of the Peak District National Park, famed for its bleak moors and dramatic vistas. Rare was the trip that didn’t involve torrential rain, and we were always watching the skies as we puffed along sections of the Pennine Way.

 

Film retrospective: Germany, 1997

Hot on the heels of the French exchange, I also went on two school exchanges to Germany over the following couple of years. The first was in the north-west, near Düsseldorf (from which I could find no photographs), and the second was in the south, near München. I haven’t been able to find many records of this trip and so cannot identify the stately home in the photographs, but do remember being a little awed by the sheer scale of the architecture and the mountains (much bigger than I was used to) looming over everything.

 

Film retrospective: France, 1995

Quite a bit of my time recently has been taken up with sorting through my possessions for the fairly-imminent move to Canada. We’ve shifted around half a ton of things I definitely don’t want out to the local Oxfam, and more will be going after I make final decisions (based largely around the cost of shipping). One sub-project of this move has been the digitisation of my old camera film, so I don’t have to ship boxes of old photographs that I never look at. Over the next week or two, I will be putting some of these pictures online for posterity (note: there will be no embarrassing photos of me as a kid, at least not until we digitise my parents’ photographs sometime in the far future).

The oldest film negatives I had were from a school trip to La Rochelle and the Île de Ré in France, circa 1995. I’d like to say that they showed my potential to be a great photographer, but they are mostly incorrectly exposed and poorly focused – the twin consequences of very basic equipment (I had a promotional Supasnaps Flicker toy camera at the time) and a near-total ignorance of how photography works (thankfully, working digitally allows me to pick and choose which images I publish, and also to correct some of the worst composition and exposure gaffes).

I believe that the two towers shown here are in La Rochelle, but strictly speaking they could be anywhere between La Flotte and Paris.

 

Countdown to the Big Thaw

Although there were no more major snowfalls, temperatures remained decidedly frosty and the fields were therefore still a uniform white as far as the eye could see (about four miles, due to the hilly terrain). I took a few short walks to reacquaint myself with the local scenery, disturbing a couple of hares (Lepus europaeus) and a rather fat common kestrel (Falco tinnunculus), and watched enterprising collared doves (Streptopelia decaocto) eat sprouts by perching on the top of a plant and leaning over to attack the stems. Apart from a small wind turbine at a nearby farm and the ever-expanding distribution centre at the main road, the old homestead looked exactly as it did years ago (a marked contrast to the continuous demolition and construction in Korea).

The poor weather meant that I was housebound for quite a lot of the week, but this did allow me to finish going through all of my stored possessions and take approximately half a ton of books and bric-a-brac to our local Oxfam. I now have the onerous tasks of estimating how much volume everything else takes up in order to get a shipping quote for the move to Canada, and of listing the more interesting things on eBay.

As the time of typing, temperatures are steadily edging up and we should have rolling green hills again by the end of the weekend. Run-off is filling the streams (flooding will be the next annual unforeseen transport chaos-causing disaster), and the hedgerow birds will be able to find their own food instead of relying on the fat-and-insect pellets I requisitioned from the supermarket. If there isn’t another big freeze, this will have been one of the shortest and most intense winters in living memory.

 

Extreme weather warning

My flight back to the UK from Japan went by in better-than-expected speed and comfort, partly due to the surprisingly good selection of films (including The Last King of Scotland, Gorillas in the Mist and Cry Freedom – I didn’t have time to watch Goodbye Bafana). We touched down ahead of schedule in light snow (perhaps 2″; heavy snow by British standards), and then had to sit on the runway for three hours wile a parking space was cleared for us. Of course, I missed my train back North and had to jump on a (much) later bus, eventually getting back about 27 hours after I’d left the hostel.

I woke up very late to find an unusually-thick blanket of snow covering the landscape as far as the eye could see. Over the next few days, more fell and little melted and most of the evening news was given over to the annual chaos on the roads, panic buying, salt shortages and doom-laden weather forecasts. I wasted little time in getting outdoors (having heaved my cold-weather gear all the way from Korea), and took a short ramble over on Marsden Moor with activist extraordinaire Matt (who you may remember from other UK posts) and Emma. The scenery was stark and blinding, with a biting wind blowing all the way across the Pennines, and we admired it for as long as we could stand the cold before retreating back into the valley.

 

Two days in Tokyo

For my last few days in Japan, I went back to Tōkyō – the huge sprawl of concrete and neon that gave me my first taste of this country almost exactly two years ago. Oddly, being there didn’t thrill me as much as it did before; I had either become desensitised to vast urban conglomerations during my time in Seoul, or was just too familiar with the place for it to have the allure of the novel. Most museums and shops were still closed for the holidays, so I spent a lot of time on foot exploring new neighbourhoods and avoiding the teeming crowds pressing into the temples and shrines to make their New Year offerings.

One thing I had read about that I quite wanted to photograph was the cosplay-zoku (Costume Play Gang), an inconstant group of (mostly) teenage girls who hang out on Harajuku’s Meijijingu-bashi (a wide bridge near Meiji Shrine) dressed as characters from manga/anime series or computer games, or in whatever unique and subversive style has taken hold that season. Unfortunately, almost everyone was engaged in New Year-related activities and most people on the bridge were disconsolate photographers.

In no particular order, I also browsed Ueno’s kitchen supply street (featuring shops selling only plastic food, red lanterns for your izakaya, split hangings, automatic melon deseeders etc.), went to look for the ultra-nationalists at Yasukuni Shrine (they were also off for New Year), stumbled across hundreds of goths queuing for a An Cafe concert, followed a truck selling yakiimo (roast sweet potato) by literally singing its virtues, got harangued at length on a bridge over Tōkyō Bay by an elderly homeless guy pulling a recycling cart (who also apologised at length and then disappeared when I got up to take a photograph of the sunset), watched feral cats try to catch pigeons (who were in turn trying to get breadcrumbs from people eating lunch in the park), wondered aloud at the profusion of purpose-built bagel-, banana- and onigiri- (rice ball) lunch boxes, heard a recognisable Neon Genesis Evangelion theme ringtone and, perhaps most importantly, made final preparations to get my flight back to Europe tomorrow morning. Next stop, London.

 

Farewell to Fuji

Although I’d only visited two of the five local lakes, I had plans in Tōkyō and so bid the area a fond farewell. Before leaving, though, I made it a point to walk the short distance across Lake Kawaguchi to take a look at the mountain both at night and at dawn. Thankfully, the weather was still clear and I was rewarded with swirling snow, colourful clouds and even a recognisable constellation.

 

Across the lakes

I left Kyōto early on a bright and sunny day, for what I expected to be a 10- or 11-hour journey to Kawaguchiko (河口湖), a small town at the base of Mt. Fuji. Everything was running ahead of schedule (I’d managed to get to the station a little earlier than planned and take advantage of a quicker service), and exactly when my confidence in an early arrival was at its peak we ran into a huge snowstorm just outside of Ōgaki. The train slowed to a crawl, punctuated by fifteen- to twenty-minute waits at each rural station (with the doors open), though services in the other direction seemed completely unaffected. Even the Shinkansen services were delayed, meaning that the storm must have been severe even by Japanese standards (on a related topic, Shinkansen services yesterday were delayed due to a “track invasion”, which I think may be a euphemism for a suicide). We emerged into glorious sunshine at Nagoya, and ran straight into the next flurry a few kilometres later. I eventually rolled up fourteen hours after I’d boarded the first train, rarely so glad to see a resting place.

I awoke late the following morning to almost painfully bright and sunny weather – perfect for getting blinded by the snow on the gigantic volcano a mere 25 km away. When it’s not hidden by the other mountains in the region, it completely dominates the skyline and constantly draws your attention with its looming presence. To get myself acquainted with the region, I puffed up Mt. Tenjō (天上山) near the excellent K’s House hostel and got my first clear (and highly impressive) view. I followed this up with a quick walk around the nearest part of the lake, and then headed for the mountains.

I had initially planned to walk down to one or two of the other local lakes, but quickly came to realise that the distances were much farther than they appeared to be on the trekking map. Having walked as far as Lake Saiko (西湖), I decided that I’d get my view of Mt. Fuji at sunset from the lofty peaks of Mt. Ashiwada (足和田山) and proceeded to follow a very poorly-marked trail up to Sankodai (三湖台 – with good views over Aokigahara/青木ヶ原, Japan’s top suicide spot) and Kouyoudai ( 紅葉台) before almost running back to the main peak of Gokodai (五湖台) to catch the last light. Just as I was packing up my equipment, the sound of bear bells alerted me to the presence of another (over-cautious) hiker – the first person I’d seen on the trails all day.

 

We’re relaying the bedrock

My initial plan for my second day in the Kansai region was to head down to the temples complexes at Ise (Shinto’s holiest site, containing the sacred mirror of Amaterasu) and/or Kōya-san (Shingon Buddhism’s holiest site, reckoned to be the spot where Miroku Buddha will return to Earth to collect the faithful), but after much train timetable browsing I realised that both would entail around eight hours of travel for two hours of sightseeing. Not wishing to spend any more of my limited time in Japan on a train than necessary, I instead went out to the far more easily-accessible city of Nara (奈良; a former Japanese capital that predates even Kyōto).

Upon arrival, I joined the throngs making their way over to the temple complex of Tōdaiji (東大寺) and did my best to avoid both the worst of the crush and the hungry deer. Like Miyajima, Nara is infested with Sika deer (Cervus nippon) who hang around waiting for people to feed them (one reportedly ate a traveller’s JR Pass). This led to many comic scenes as children of various nationalities got frightened by them, ran away, got chased, got rescued by parents and then tried to eat the deer biscuits themselves.

The main hall of the temple is gigantic, and so I walked around to the picturesque mountain just behind it to get a better photograph. However, the it turned out to be closed for redevelopment (how do you close a whole mountain for redevelopment?) and the only things there were a few hopeful-looking deer. On my return to Kyōto, I took a very roundabout route back to the hostel and hiked the mountain just behind Kiyomizudera – I had been hoping for a panoramic view of the city at sunset, but was met only with dense stands of cedar.

 

Fox news

Although I’ve been to Kyōto (京都) twice before, I wasn’t about to pass such a rich concentration of Japanese culture by and so decided to take a couple of days to see some of the things I hadn’t had time to in previous visits (it also made a convenient stopping point between Hiroshima and Mt. Fuji). I based myself in the north-west of the city (determined more by where had vacancies during the busy New Year period than by where was best-placed for the sights I wanted to see), and so had a lot of walking (and hence exploring) to do. I struck out early in the morning, and immediately stumbled quite by chance up on a small shrine dedicated to good departures and safe journeys. I made an offering to keep me safe on my way back to Amy in Canada, and continued on my whirlwind sightseeing tour.

I breezed through several of Kyōto’s lesser-visited temples and shrines in relatively short order, all of them frantically setting up stalls, decorations and signs for tomorrow night’s New Year (c)rush. These preparations aside, they were mostly quiet and serene (I surmised that all the tourists were out at the bigger name attractions such as the Gold and Silver Pavillions), and I was able to explore the plethora of torii, altars and incense virtually unobstructed. The peace even extended down to the river, and I saw my first wild kingfisher (probably Alcedo atthis) – though it was much too wary for me to photograph.

The last place on my list for the day was the Fushimi Inari Taisha (伏見稲荷大社), head shrine of Inari (the Shinto god of fertility, rice and foxes to name but a few areas of influence). What makes this shrine unique is the sheer number of donated torii and the (over)abundance of kitsune (fox) statues – great photographic opportunities abound, and are seized by every visitor with a camera. I wandered around until dark, and scuttled off just before dark lest my gloves not provide enough protection (among other magical abilities, kitsune can possess people by entering the body under the fingernails, but it’s usually young women that are chosen as victims).