I walked all week and paced the sun until my fatigue started to turn dangerous. And at 3pm yesterday afternoon my blistered feet shuffled into Tokyo as the first crack of upbeat civilisation greeted me with open arms. I set off 10 days ago from Osaka with nothing more than a tent and sleeping bag strapped across my back. Thought I’d made a plan at first but figured where was the fun in that. So I chucked it aside and decided to simply go wherever caught my eye. So for the next week and a half I wandered aimlessly across the countryside and coast of Japan, only stopping when fatigue and hunger told me to. I wound my way from Kyoto and into Shiga, and, from there, followed the historic Tokaido highway, passing through countless valleys and coastlines, through Aichi and Shizouka prefectures, and ending in Tokyo. And even after a combined 450km of crossing amorphous conurbations, off-road national parks and seemingly endless highways, I’m not too sure if my ‘plan’ succeeded. But the biggest takeaway from this trip was the importance of consistency. Waking up in frigid conditions all alone in the wild and forcing myself to keep going. Step after step, day by day. To create a physiological template of consistency and grit, to which then I can attempt to bring back to my everyday life. It’s this sort of travelling that excites me the most —going from a place of great quietude that comes from a trip of such, to the chaos that awaits me back home. And though a picture can and will never do this trip justice, this one image of what I awoke to perhaps comes the closest. And oh how lovely is that.
