I am often asked where I have been. But over the years I have done so many oodles of trips that the answer is blurry- several countries I have been to several times, with little rhyme or reason- sometimes I’d need to travel for work, sometimes I followed my heart someplace and sometimes my heart yearned for someone I’d met on a distant continent. I make this list as a little catelogue of memories and moments as much for myself as for you.

Please note I have defined a visit in the most literal sense of the word. I have noted in the list below if it was just a few hours or a transit.

That’s the most beautiful sunset I ever saw, thought I. But hang on a second. Where am I again?

1. Australia

Born and raised in Sydney, you can take the boy out of Australia but you can’t make him drink… or something like that. Comfortable with the Australian wildlife despite several unfortunate encounters.

The 12 Apostles on the Great Ocean Road, Australia

2. USA

Lived and worked in Portland for 18 months and did research in Delaware for 6 months. Went on an Alaskan cruise. If you are where you’ve been, then I’m approximately 8% American, based on time spent there.

America…… America….

3. Mexico

Only visited Tijuana once as a kid. I remember having fun though. I must rectify this situation.

4. England

Too many visits to count. Probably the place I was least interested to travel to but a revelation of history and culture and now one of my favourites.

London, England

5. France

Three or four visits. Met friends there that I will never forget but will never see again.

The eerie underground tunnels of the Paris Catacombs

6. Belgium

Visited once; got notification of my TER (final highschool grade) here.

7. Netherlands

Visited once as a kid, walked through the red light district of Amsterdam with my parents.

8. Germany

Worked for several German companies, too many visits to count. Visited for Oktoberfest. One of the most historically interesting places and home to one of my favourite capitals- Berlin. Doing my best to learn the language.

The Berlin Wall, East Berlin

9. Switzerland

Three visits for work and play.

Looking over Jungfrau from Thun, Switzerland

10. Italy

Three visits and home to Venice and Rome, probably the most exotic places in all of Europe.

The Grand Canal. Venice, Italy

11. Austria

Visited three times. Broke my wrist here snowboarding. I can recommend the hospital system.

View from a little cottage in the Austrian Alps near St Anton, with a barn attached that smelled of cows. Stayed here for 2 nights

12. Thailand

Three visits. All of them completely crazy and resplendent with unexpected adventures (both good and bad).

Thailand adventure time. Ko Phi Phi Leh.

13. Norway

Two visits, travelled extensively. Coming from Australia, I was intrigued by this other-world of mountains and ice. I’ve been almost everywhere from the party South to the wild North, during both the cold dark winter and the glorious summer.

Flåm, Norway

14. Sweden

Visited once, extensive travels there as well. Many good parties.

Camping in the rain and a crappy tent in the Stockholm Skärgård (archipelago), Sweden

15. Spain

Four visits including an epic roadtrip adventure from Malaga to one of my favourite cities, Barcelona. An acquired taste for me, like a good red wine.

The isolated abbey of Montserrat, Spain

16. Singapore

Too many visits to count. Stopovers, friends living there, work colleagues living there. Check out Confiscated Toothpaste’s definitive guide to the island city-state.

Colonial Singapore. View of the Arts House and Asian History Museum

17. Maldives

Visited once, spent 10 days living on a boat and surfing.

Having fun after a day of motoring from surf break to surf break, Maldives

18. Denmark

Visited Copenhagen once and drank a lot of Danish beer.

Christiania in Copenhagen, Denmark

19. Finland

Having a Finnish ex-girlfriend meant several visits including living there for brief periods. And extensive travels, from Helsinki in the South to Inari in the North. Had my best Northern Lights experience here and also went dogsledding.

Somewhere near Juorkuna, in the north of Finland

20. Estonia

Visited twice. Tallinn is a wonderful city and very interesting due to its modern history.

The walls of Tallinn, Estonia

21. Tahiti

Visited once, threw coconuts around. I was supposed to be there for a couple of days longer, but my flight from LA had to turn back midair due to a cracked windscreen. So instead I spent some more time in LAX instead. Joy.

Island men, Tahiti

22. Cook Islands

Short transit while on my way home from Tahiti hungover and tired early morning, but wow! Imagine a stunning forested volcano with the runway on the beach and the breaking waves right next to you as you taxi to a terminal the size of your loungeroom.

23. Scotland

Visited once, loved it.

Riding in the late, late, summer sun on the Isle of Skye, Scotland

24. Japan

Visited twice, the last time for an epic snowboarding trip. Was here during the 2011 9.0 earthquake. Also had one of my strangest travel experiences here.

Niseko, Japan

25. China

Worked with several Chinese companies, 4 visits, and stayed with a family in a regional area a few hours drive from Shanghai.

A barge packed to the brim with coal on Lake Tai, Wuxi, China

26. Brazil

Fiancee is Brazilian. Four visits and will get married there in 2014! Rio is one of my favourite cities and has some great surfing.

Looking towards Leblon and the Two Brothers mountain as the sun sets over Ipanema beach. There is plenty of football kicking going on all day

27. Czech Republic

Visited Prague once for the weekend, incredible place.

Prague, Czech Republic

28. New Zealand

One visit, roadtripped both islands with an ex. Plenty of amazing places but Queenstown is my favourite.

Despite what you may have heard, New Zealand really is full of sheep and mountains

29. Canada

Been twice to Vancouver. Does that count?

The Capilano suspension bridge, British Columbia, Canada

30. South Korea

Visited 3 times for work, but South Koreans know how to party and there was plenty of that done as well.

If anything, I think Seoul could use more neon.

31. New Caledonia

Visited once on a South Pacific cruise from Sydney.

Isle of Pines, New Caledonia

32. Argentina

Transited on way to/from Brazil.

33. Chile

Transited on way home from Brazil.

34. United Arab Emirates

Visited twice and found the more traditional Arab areas fascinating. Check out my 10 Cool Things to Do in Dubai.

The incredible Sheikh Zayed Mosque in Abu Dhabi, UAE

35. North Korea

Only visited North Korea by crossing to the the North side of the UN conference room in the Joint Security Area in Panmunjeom. Would love to visit properly some day.

Looking towards North Korea from the UN Joint Security Area, Panmunjom. South Korean soldiers guard the border, which is the concrete threshold between the huts.

I would love to know if you have been to any of the above, what your favourite countries are, and where I should travel to next??

The post List of Countries I Have Visited … Plus a Photo for Each appeared first on Confiscated Toothpaste.

“You know that Sarah girl?” said my brother in London on the other end of the phone, “apparently she thinks you’re cute.”
“She does?” I asked. Sarah was a stunning blonde Irish girl. I hadn’t in a million years thought she might be interested in me. “What would make you think that?”
“I know, I couldn’t believe it either. Her sister told me.”
“What? When?”
“Last weekend”
“Why has it taken you 5 days to tell me that?”
“I’m telling you now aren’t I?”

And with that brief exchange with my brother, who was living in London, I packed my stuff into my backpack and got on an overnight bus from Inverness, leaving Scotland a day early despite having had a lovely time biking in Skye and hanging on the cold sands of St Andrews. The bus took 14 hours to London, via Glasgow. There’s only two things about that bus trip I remember, one being a guy with really stinky dreadlocks who sat in front of me for the whole 14 hours (think mouldy cheese), and two people who were having sex in the seat in front of him when they thought the whole bus was asleep. Unfortunately they were precisely the two memories I’ve been striving to suppress.

London Tower Bridge, the stuff dreams are made of… apparently

And so it came to be that I arrived back in London a day before I was due to fly out to Japan and took Sarah on a night time visit to… Tower Bridge? Seems a bit of a strange choice of venue thinking back on it, but it seemed to make sense at the time. And so then in turn, it came to be that I awoke hungover on the morning of my flight, looked at my watch and panicked. My brother had flown out to Ireland very early in the morning and I had assumed (wrongly) that he might wake me. Never assume! My sister, who was living at my brother’s place in London, woke up and asked what was wrong. “I’m late,” I said, throwing clothes into my pack. “Shit. Really late.”

I hugged my sister goodbye and hot-tailed it down to Balham station as fast as I could. To my horror, the station was closed. Some kind of signalling problem. Why does this always happen when I’m late for a flight? Security guards turned me away at the entrance and pointed to the Southern overground rail station around the corner. I headed to buy a ticket, but there was mass confusion in the peak hour rush and the queues for the ticket machines stretched down the street. Damn it. I was going to miss my flight. I weighed up my options, and then jumped the turnstiles, ticketless, backpacks and all. “Oi what’s that geezer doing?” I heard someone behind me say. I didn’t stop to turn around and ran onto a packed sardine train just as the doors were shutting. The packed commuters grumbled as I pushed my backpacks into them. “Sorry, sorry,” I apologised to all and sundry, sweating. Little did I know how fortunate I had been that the underground Northern Line was suspended that morning.

At Victoria station, there was more chaos. A scrum of people competed to get through the turnstiles and out of the station. I had no ticket and no time to spend queued up. So I went up to a guard and said “Mate could you let me through, I’ve no ticket and late for my flight.” To my surprise, he said “No problem” and opened the disabled gate for me to pass through. Wow: it’s amazing how well sheer brazenness works sometimes. Finally, I sat on an underground Piccadilly train, enroute to Heathrow. I calculated that I would have just enough time. The day had been saved.

Or so I thought. Because the train began running really slowly. And then it pulled into a station and stopped, which would be nothing unusual, except 5 minutes later we were still stopped. I looked frantically at my watch. The seconds ticked by and nothing happened, no announcements were made. Soon we had been stopped for 10 minutes, then 15 minutes. People looked sheepishly at each other, looked out the train doors, but the station was almost deserted. Finally, after 20 minutes had elapsed, the train shuddered back to life. The loudspeaker was silent, and still nobody came on to tell us why we had been stopped. The train pulled out of the station, and station-by-station made its way slowly but steadily to Heathrow. There was 45 minutes remaining til takeoff as I rushed up into the terminal. As I ran my gaze caught a plasma screen showing the BBC News. The label across the bottom of the screen shocked me- “THE ENTIRE TUBE SYSTEM HAS NOW BEEN SHUT DOWN”.

How could this be?, I thought. I had just been on the tube! Mercifully there were no queues at check in or security and I made it to the gate just as boarding was wrapping up. Some stragglers were watching another TV screen before boarding the flight. The anchorwoman was talking about a “major incident” on the London Underground. But I couldn’t stay to sate my curiosity as they were about to close the gate. I jumped on the plane and we took off for Helsinki, Finland, where I would board another flight for Osaka, Japan.

In Helsinki, 5 hours later, the news reports were now indicating that a brutal and pathetic terrorist attack had occurred. It had happened at 8:50 and I had arrived at Heathrow at 9:10, twenty minutes after the attacks. Not only that, but one bomb had exploded on the Piccadilly line, on which I was travelling, but on a different train. In addition, it turned out there had been a plan to bomb the Northern Line, which hadn’t been running due to signal failure. I was stunned and it suddenly dawned on me that nobody knew where I was. I called my sister from a payphone and she was beside herself. “Where have you been?” she yelled. “Why did you not call earlier?” By strange coincidence, my parents were due to fly into London that day from France. My brother was in Ireland and not able to get back to London for some days. My sister was alone and she was scared. “Why did your plane even take off? They shut the airport.”
“I don’t know Steph. All I know is I’m going to Japan. Just relax okay?”

Pachinko parlours consist of rows and rows of colourful lights, gaudy music, and slowly vegetating patrons. Photo: Tischbeinahe

By the time I arrived in Japan, it all felt like a bad dream. I remember seeing a man reading a newspaper in Kyoto with photos of the horror back in London. It didn’t seem real. With the miracles of international air travel and jetlag, I could hardly believe that I had been there. At my hostel in Kyoto, they told me that I was too early and that there were no beds available yet. I groaned and explained politely that I had just come from London and that I was stressed out and could I just have somewhere to lie down for a while. Kindly, they obliged. This being Japan, I left my shoes at the door of the hostel as required and went upstairs and crashed out.

A few hours went past, and I got up excited in anticipation of a day of sightseeing around Kyoto. I ran down to the door in my socks and my shoes were nowhere to be seen. This can’t be happening, I thought, as I searched through the pile of other people’s shoes. But my shoes were gone and they weren’t coming back. I spoke again to the lady at the reception. She was very sorry but I knew it wasn’t her fault. It was some stinking lowlife backpacker (the worst kind) who had decided to help himself to my near-new size 11 Vans. To make matters worse, this was the only pair of shoes I was travelling with – I was really doing the backpacker thing on this trip. The only other footwear I had were thongs, and it was definitely not thongs weather. I headed off into the outdoor drizzle in my thongs cursing at the pavement.

A pachinko machine, with pins, target hole, and dial for selecting force with with to shoot balls (lower right). Photo: Michael Maggs, Wikimedia Commons

At some point I was wandering through the colourful Japanese city streets when I came to a Pachinko parlour. Not knowing what Pachinko was, but dazed by the neon lights, chiming music, jetlag and the past 24 hours, I wandered into the parlour. There were rows and rows of strange machines that resembled a cross between a poker machine and a pinball machine. I am not sure what possessed me, but I inserted a 500 yen coin and was immediately surrounded by excited Japanese attendants, all falling over themselves to explain the object of Pachinko playing to the crazy barefoot Westerner.

Before long, I started getting it. Pachinko is a game in which you shoot small ball-bearings through a network of small pins, finally landing in some hole in the bottom of the machine. You turn a dial to control the force with which the balls are shot, and the idea is to land them in one particular small high-scoring hole. If you can do that, you win some more ball bearings, which drop from the machine into a metal receptacle similar to coins dropping from a poker machine.

I couldn’t quite see the difficulty in this game- I started landing all the balls in the high scoring hole, and so I just kept making fine adjustments to the force with which the balls were shot out, and they kept landing mostly in the high scoring hole. My winnings bounced into the metal basket. The Japanese attendants whooped and cheered and soon there was a crowd of whoopers and cheerers watching me go. “Play again, play again!” they laughed. The balls that were coming out of the machine started overflowing their receptacle and were bouncing in every direction on the hard tiled floor. I could see I was making a mess and I kept trying to stop but all the Japanese people were too excited and kept sitting me down again. The attendants produced plastic baskets from somewhere and began to collect all the balls that were overflowing from the machine. It was a party and a spectacle. “Play again, keep going!” they implored, and every time I obliged, I kept winning. Finally, half an hour had elapsed, I was surrounded by plastic baskets full of ball bearings, and it dawned on me that party or not, I was spending my precious time in Kyoto inside a dimly lit arcade room rather than outside looking at temples and cherry blossoms. So I finally disobeyed the wishes of the attendants and stood up.

Pink plastic baskets full of pachinko balls. Photo: Michael Maggs, Wikimedia Commons

Into my open arms they handed me a stack of ten or so plastic baskets full of silver metal balls. “What on earth am I supposed to do with these?” I asked, but the answers in Japanese gave me no clue. Finally one guy grabbed me and walked me down the hall. I saw a stand with teddy bears and candy. Oh that’s pretty cool I thought, I can exchange them for crazy Japanese toys and candy. But the lady gave me some strange tokens in return for all the balls, and the attendant grabbed me again and led me down some stairs at the end of the room. Down the stairs was a whole new floor which was filled with a different set of glowing machines that I recognised- regular poker machines. “No,” I said, trying to back up. “I don’t want to play any poker machines.”

“Here,” said the Japanese guy, gesturing to a slot in the wall. I looked through this tiny slot and could see a withered old man inside! What kind of sick messed up dungeon like place was this? The younger guy took my tokens and passed them through the slot in the wall, and to my surprise, out popped a withered old man hand with a wad of cash. 20,000 yen! (About 250 US dollars.) I couldn’t believe it. “Wow!” I said.
“Yeah,” said the young Japanese guy in English, “you rich.”

At one of the temples in Kyoto in my thongs after having my shoes stolen

I later found out that gambling in Japan was totally illegal, which explained the strange staircase and the strange old cashier inside the hidden dungeon. I possibly could have been arrested. But I was ignorant of all that. Needless to say I strutted my stuff around the temples of Kyoto that afternoon with renewed vigour. Having just visited an ATM at Osaka airport earlier that morning, I struggled to fold my wallet with all the bills inside. Really, I’d had some strange luck those days. I’d had a hot date, I’d avoided a bombing, and though I’d lost a pair of shoes I’d been immediately rewarded with enough cash to buy several new pairs. It got me thinking about fate and chance. Even so, I’m still not sure what the moral of the story is.

The Philosopher’s Path in Kyoto… pondering destiny and the meaning of life. Do some things happen for a reason?

All I know is that I went back to Japan again a couple years later and put money in a Pachinko machine and despite knowing what to do I promptly lost. So Pachinko is not the path to glory and riches I thought it might be.  I was in and out within 5 minutes, minus 1000 yen, and my travelling companions were smug and decidedly unimpressed by Pachinko parlours. Since I’m a scientist, I’ll just conclude that the mystical travel god Boris the Benevolent was looking over me those few days and that it wasn’t meant to happen again. Either that or there’s some sort of conspiracy by evil Pachinko companies in Japan to hook unsuspecting shoeless Australian white boys on illegal Asian gambling.

What do you think? Are some things meant to happen? What crazy unexpected adventures have you had when travelling?

The post From a Terrorist Bombing to a Pachinko Jackpot appeared first on Confiscated Toothpaste.

On March 11 2011 at 2:45 in the afternoon my mate Brad and I were on a train on the Yurikamome line in Tokyo which had just pulled into Shiodome station. We’d arrived in Tokyo the night before. We’d spent the day in the Odaiba area near the harbour, we’d walked across the Rainbow Bridge and the beach on the other side and we’d gone to Mega Net, a big Toyota showroom with historical car museum. Now we were on our way to meet our other travelling companion Matt (another Matt) who had spent the morning at an industry trade show. As the train pulled up and stopped at a station, the doors opened and I noticed that the train was bouncing gently up and down. I thought this was a bit strange, but I looked around at the Japanese businessmen across from me and they looked slightly concerned, but still calm. Japanese people do not stress very easily! Brad would later tell me that he thought it was a really fat person getting off the train, which I thought was pretty funny. I just thought the driver was pumping the brakes for some reason, like you might do in your car sitting at the lights.  When the bouncing got slightly worse, I wondered “what is this driver doing?” As the first few people began to jump off the train I started thinking “Oh my god there’s something wrong with this train, a malfunction or something, I’m getting off”. Brad was standing right near the door and got out before me and when I jumped up, even all the super calm Japanese businessmen jumped up and bolted off the train as it really started to rock violently back and forth.

Schoolkids at Tokyo Harbour a couple of hours before the earthquake. The area would later be inundated as ocean levels rose following the tsunamis

“What the Hell is Going On?”

I wrapped my camera bag around my shoulders, feeling strangely guilty that I had taken all my possessions with me. To my shock, the platform began moving back and forth. Meanwhile the train was being smashed violently against the platform and the far wall and I was so relieved to not be one of the poor people still aboard.  With the platform moving back and forth as well, I realised something was badly wrong, but being from Australia, far from any tectonic fault lines and where the ground can always be depended on to be solid, I still couldn’t quite believe what my brain was telling me. “What the hell is going on?” I yelled over the racket to Brad, who replied, “I don’t know, an earthquake I guess!” An earthquake! I think there was somebody yelling stuff through the station PA system, but since we don’t understand Japanese, and because are brains are not calibrated to the sensation of the earth moving like it was the ocean, it took us that long to work out what the hell was happening.

The Yurikomome line is elevated above the ground level and so the platform we were standing on was one storey above ground level. I could see people on the street level looking startled and some people running. My own instinct was to try and get down to street level, but unfortunately the exit to the platform was a long ways down the platform from where we were standing. There was an escalator about 10 metres from us that had been bringing people up from the street level to the platform, and I decided that I even though the escalator was running in the wrong direction I was going to run down it anyway. However at that moment the shaking had become so violent that it was hard to stand up straight, let alone run, and all around me, Japanese people were calmly holding onto anything bolted down and not running anywhere. In fact, Brad had joined about 10 people who were holding onto recycling bins in the centre of the platform, so that’s what I did as well.

Riding Out the Earthquake

I figured that since the roof was triangular, and the recycling bins were directly under the apex of the triangle, that we were reasonably safe should the roof of the station collapse. When I looked up through the glass apex of the roof and noticed that skyscrapers above us were rocking back and forth, I wasn’t so sure however. It was at that point that I realised it was a pretty serious tremor to be moving skyscrapers around like that. The whole time the quake went on I was thinking calmly and rationally and in slow motion. And my adrenaline was really going, in fact it was one of the biggest rushes I’ve ever experienced. I had this memory in the back of my head that earthquakes rarely last more than 45 seconds, having seen the news and spoken to people from California and such places, so I kept thinking, “it’s nearly done, it’s nearly done”. And then sure enough, it got less violent, and then it was over.

As we evacuated the station, we looked up and saw skyscrapers all around swaying like trees in the breeze. This went on for maybe 10 minutes after the quake. So our first thought was just to walk somewhere where a skyscraper wasn’t going to fall on us. Very quickly, the sky was full of helicopters. In the end, we followed our train line to Shimbashi station, the huge JR station we had been heading for. We figured the trains there would still be running. They weren’t, and thousands of people had been evacuated onto the carparks and open areas outside the station. Just as we got there, about 20 minutes after the main quake, an aftershock hit (it was a 7 magnitude, we found out later), and the ground started swaying again. A 4 storey building quite close to us had a big VISA billboard on it, and the billboard was lurching like it was going to fall off the roof. People scrambled to get away from this building, but I noticed a guy sitting up in one of the windows of the building just sitting there like it was a normal day. A TV tower in the distance bounced back and forth as though it were a 30 cm ruler that somebody had flicked with their finger. I had a real sensation of standing on a boat which was going over waves. I began to feel a queer seasickness, made all the more strange by the fact that we weren’t at sea!

Crowds outside Shinbashi station after the first big aftershock, 30 minutes after the major tremor

Peak Hour Chaos

Well, all the cars and shops and everything were still operating as normal, so we thought we’d get some lunch and figure out how to get back to our hotel in Shinjuku. This was a mistake, because we could have caught a cab then, but very soon it became peak hour and millions of locals poured onto the streets. Everyone was on their phones, the networks went down, the trains were not running and we saw businessmen fighting over cabs. We were still pretty excited about our first ever earthquake experience and were discussing what magnitude it was. Since nothing appeared damaged, we figured it was about a 4 or a 5. When we went back to Shimbashi station after eating, we noticed many people gathered around a TV screen, and when we went to have a look, we were stunned to see huge tsunami waves approaching the coastline filmed from a helicopter. There was also a number “8.4″ surrounded by Japanese characters, which we realised was the actual quake magnitude (this was later corrected to 9.0). Hoping that she spoke some English, I asked the young girl close to us where the footage was taken. She replied “Tsunami”. I said “yes, where?” Then she showed me on her phone and it was a hundred (or a couple hundred, I can’t remember) kilometres north of Tokyo. Suddenly, I realised we were still close to the port, and we noticed that everybody was walking inland. So we joined the crowd.

We saw cracks in buildings, we saw one building that had lost all its glass, and we saw billboard spotlights that had crashed into the street. But the lack of any major earthquake damage was astonishing. I suspect that if the quake had hit closer to town, that much of the city would have dropped, particularly the low level brick buildings. But it is a testament to Japanese building standards and technology that the whole city could shake and sway like that but remain standing.

Broken windows from the earthquake

My phone was filled with text messages from concerned family and friends in Australia, but although I seemed to be able to receive messages I found that I couldn’t send any as the networks were jammed. This was agonising as I was unable to let my worried mother know that I was alright. Meanwhile, there were no cabs, no buses. On and on we walked, for hours, guided by the compass on my iPhone, since we had absolutely no idea where we were. My ankles and knees, all strained from 2 weeks of snowboarding, were burning. I received texts from family members and friends back home, but could barely reply to any of them because of the jammed networks. We got a text from Matt saying he was back at the hotel and asking where we were. After 4 hours of walking, we finally arrived back there at about 8 pm, to a  lobby full of people. The elevators were out so we walked up 13 flights of stairs to our room. The stairwell was cracked from the earthquake and bits of paint and plaster lay everywhere. In our room, the kitchen was full of things that had fallen over and drawers that had come out and a speaker lay on the floor in the loungeroom. There was no sign of Matt and it was spooky. We had been in the room about 30 seconds when another aftershock hit, so despite being barely able to stand up on my sore ankles, we bolted back down 13 flights of stairs again, the building lurching.

It turned out Matt was in the lobby with his laptop in the restaurant, watching TV news on the earthquake with a bunch of other travellers. Where the mobile networks had failed, we found that the hotel internet worked great and I started posting updates on Facebook. The lobby was filled with tourists too scared to take the elevator up to their rooms. One group were performers from Cirque du Soleil, and people were clearly freaked out. The apocalyptic scenes of tsunami destruction and wrecked nuclear power plants on the TV certainly didn’t calm anyone’s nerves. But the trains and airports were all closed and we knew we weren’t going anywhere for a while. Meanwhile, it was freezing cold outside and sleeping outdoors was not an option. So, we went out and got some sushi, drank some beer and saki, and then braved the 13 flights up to our room to sleep fully clothed, ready for a panicked evacuation we feared would come at any time.

Nightmares

Sleep is not really the right word, because there was very little of it. Everytime I drifted off, a real aftershock or a dreamt one woke me. At 3 am, a huge aftershock made the building grind back and forth. It is a horrible sensation to hear the sound of concrete under stress all around you and to see solid walls jerking, knowing that you are 13 floors up in the air. I picked up an emergency bag containing my passport and asthma meds and made a beeline for the emergency stairs.

“No,” said Matt, “we stay.”
“Really?” I asked, pausing just long enough for the shaking to get stronger. At that point I lost my nerve and ran down the stairs to the lobby on my own. Part way down, on about the 6th floor, I stopped to see if the building was still shaking. It was, and I could see the walls of the stairwell moving and could hear cracking. So I kept running. But after spending half an hour in the lobby, I decided I had to return to the room. I found that one of the elevators was going again. My ankles on fire from snowboarding, walking 4 hours and running down flights of stairs, I decided to take the lift up.

“Is the building safe?” I asked the guy on reception as I got in the lift.
“Cannot guarantee!” he replied enthusiastically. “Good luck!” The elevator made it to the 13th floor uneventfully. I found Brad and Matt wide awake with the TV going, laughing at me for my cowardice in escaping the room.

View from the 13th floor of our hotel- hoping for no more big aftershocks

After the earthquake train services were shut down across Tokyo in order to allow rail damage checking

A New Day

It is quite something to wake up on a Saturday morning with the sun shining, knowing that you have survived the night. We still had one more night to go before our scheduled flight to Sydney on Sunday, which looked like it would happen as the airports and trains were now reopening. Tokyo was very much business as usual that Saturday, it was pleasant on street level knowing we could run for an open space when the aftershocks happened, and we started to get used to the whole “unstable ground” thing.

We even went out clubbing on Saturday night in Rappongi, the alcohol happily dulling our paranoia. There was no sweeter feeling than waking up with the sun shining on Sunday morning, jumping out of bed to an aftershock, hungover but happy that we had a day of sightseeing before flying home. The whole Fukushima nuclear power plant radiation issue was not exactly comforting, and despite the claims from the government that the plant was safe, a feeling that this was going to get worse before it got much better reaffirmed my enthusiasm for leaving that night. In the airport throngs of people crowded the ticket counters, desperate to leave the country. We strolled past with tickets pre-booked weeks earlier. We were lucky in many ways during this experience and could have had things much, much, worse.

I will always remember my Japanese earthquake experience and the lovely Japanese people who remained calm and at their posts to serve travellers throughout. I know that quite possibly many of these people had relatives who had been affected, or they worried about the days. I hope that they were able to pick up the pieces and recover. You can help by donating to the Japanese Red Cross Society 2011 earthquake relief fund.

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