Tony Robinson-Smith - Back in 6 Years. A Journey Around the Planet Without Leaving the Surface

BACK IN 6 YEARS

A JOURNEY AROUND THE PLANET WITHOUT LEAVING THE SURFACE

TONY ROBINSON-SMITH

Copyright Tony Robinson-Smith, 2008.

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact Access Copyright, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call 1-800-893-5777.

Edited by Laurel Boone.
Cover photograph Corbis.
Cover and interior design by Kent Fackenthall.
Printed in Canada by Quebecor World.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Robinson-Smith, Tony, 1964

Back in 6 Years: A Journey Around the Planet Without Leaving the Surface / Tony Robinson-Smith.

ISBN 978-0-86492-504-6

1. Robinson-Smith, Tony, 1964- Travel. 2. Voyages around the world.

I. Title. II. Title: Back in 6 Years.

G440.R716A3 2008 910.41 C2007-907461-8

Goose Lane Editions acknowledges the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program ( BPIDP ), and the New Brunswick Department of Wellness, Culture and Sport for its publishing activities.

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To Nadya,
the brave woman who shared my travels

to my mother and father,
who taught me to be independent and inquisitive

A plane went overhead, flying west in the clear sky. With glasses of Krug champagne in their hands, the First Class passengers were studying the menu: parfait of pheasant and goose liver, smoked salmon mousse and fresh squid salad and a frise salad with smoked duck julienne, followed by turbot with prawns and apples, roast rack of lamb, or crab leg and prawn ragout, and someone was saying, How is the quail breast today?

Down here in Inner Mongolia, an old man squatted holding a bowl against his nose and flicking rice grains into his mouth with chopsticks.

Paul Theroux, Riding the Iron Rooster

Sweet are the uses of adversity Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.

As You Like It, act 2, scene 1

I sit in my study, teapot at elbow, stack of beat-up notebooks to one side, folding map of the world open on my desk. What a map. Torn, tatty, taped along every fold, smeared with the juices of smashed insects, stamped with the dirt of fingers, spattered with grease from campfire frying pans, stiffened with sweat and seawater. Unfolded a thousand times, refolded, folded back the wrong way, jammed in a rucksack, sat on. Survivor of six years of surface travel.

I trace my finger along a black ink line that crawls across it. It begins at a blob in England near Birmingham. A date is scrawled beside the blob: 20 Sept 93. The line heads south, over the English Channel, through France. It crosses the Mediterranean, then plunges into Africa. At the southern tip of South Africa, it shoots northwest, out across the Atlantic Ocean to Brazil, hits the coast just below the mouth of the Amazon. Then it turns south, reaching down almost as far as Cape Horn. Next, a long wriggle north through the Americas all the way to Canadas east coast, across the continent, and back south to San Diego. Then over the Pacific to Japan, spearing Hawaii and Guam on the way. Like a snake, the line writhes through the Orient to Australia. There it flattens out, heading almost due west on the Indian Ocean towards Africa, zigzags finally up the Red Sea and wanders exhausted through the Middle East and Europe back to where it started. Next to the blob near Birmingham, another date: 27 June 99.

The journey that began one damp autumn morning when I stepped out the garden gate of a little cottage in a sleepy village called Sapcote in Leicestershire, England, had really started in my head several months earlier in Japan.

I had a furnished fifth-floor apartment in Kumamoto on the westernmost island of Kyushu, a teaching job at the local airport and a girlfriend named Akemi who owned a Nissan Sunny hatchback. I took Japanese language classes twice a week and did karate at the dojo in the evenings. I ate miso soup, boiled rice, raw horse (a Kumamoto delicacy) and chocolate-coated biscuit sticks called Pocky that Akemi brought over to my place last thing at night. I took my vacations by the sea. One day these things were all right. The next, they werent.

It was May 1993. I had arrived in Japan five years before with the intention of becoming Bruce Lee. English language teaching would finance my stay. That plan hadnt worked out. After a fall off a slippery mountainside while on vacation, I spent eighteen months recovering from two fractured heels and a cracked spine.

But Japan was good to me. I learned the language well enough to move from Tokyo to the countryside and live comfortably. I found a high-paying job running an English school owned by All Nippon Airways. With a distinct lack of grace and a great deal of sweat, I earned my black belt in karate. I loved my grinning karate master, who took me aside from the class from time to time and roughed me up. I loved my kanji teacher, who was preparing me with devotion for the National Japanese Language Aptitude Test. I loved the good-natured Japanese and was grateful for the hundred times they had slid back their rice-paper doors and treated me like visiting royalty. I loved sushi. I even loved nato, fermenting soy beans usually disliked by foreigners.

Five years, however, was enough. My suit-and-tie job was grinding me down. I was fed up with bowing and being polite, with breathing second-hand smoke, with listening to Japanese students butcher English. I had collected more than enough bruises at the dojo. Memorizing the two thousand kanji needed to read the daily newspaper was addling my brain. And it was time for a change of diet. Karaoke nights with Mister Oda and Mister Ito, All Nippon Airways administrators, had lost their appeal.

Mado o akeru wa dame, Tony-san! chuckled Mister Oda on one of his frequent drifts over to my corner of the office. Opening the window is not allowed, Mister Tony. Oda-san had switched to his summer suit: the light grey instead of the dark. It looked as if hed ironed it that morning. Still the same navy blue tie, though, I noticed, knotted with enviable precision. The windows on the third floor were heavy, sound-resistant slabs of glass not designed to be opened. You had to pop the catch on one, then lean into it with your shoulder. There would be a gasp and an out-rush of smoky air. Then a gust of wind would shoot in and scatter everyones papers. After that, the prehistoric roars of parting airliners heaving themselves into the sky, company lettering in white on the blue tails, bellies full of people going places. For me, another day at the office stretched ahead.

Kondo no kinyobi, karaoke wa do desho ka? How about some singing this Friday? I stiffened. Not the bar with the watered-down whiskies, the bowls of glossy rice snacks; not the endless debate about students progress in spoken and written English. Please, not the choice of two songs in English: Yesterday or I Left My Heart in San Francisco.

Chotto sawatte mo yoroshii desu ka? Would it be all right for me to touch it? Last time, Masami, our hostess for the evening, had insisted that I lift a trouser leg so she might verify that