Spring walks

I think Sapna, the Indian restaurant that used to be in Suzurandai but is now in Kobe, is my favourite restaurant ever. This is great, because I’ve never really had a favourite restaurant before. Sure, I had a more than passing affection with Little Creatures, the Thai place in North Perth is fantastic, and I’m a total sucker for Hoi’s Kitchen, but I certainly didn’t frequent any of them in anything close to a regular fashion when I was back in Perth. It’s an all new experience going somewhere where the staff know what you’re going to order, how you like your food and actually make curry that’s spicy when you ask them to make it spicy. It’s kind of cool being a regular.

But I digress.

They say that eating spicy food causes your brain to release endorphins. This is why eating spicy stuff makes you feel good and is why people get so addicted to hot food. I’m not sure how much truth there is to this but I will admit that after enjoying a decidedly awesome mutton curry at Sapna on Saturday afternoon I was feeling so good I decided I would walk home from Kobe.

To put this in perspective, it takes roughly an hour to reach Kobe from my house utilizing both a train and a bus. The train is particularly expensive because it uses special equipment to stop it sliding down and off the track as it descends the mountain. It is a not insignificant hill which is itself a not insignificant distance from Kobe. What the hell, I thought, it was only 2 o’clock, and it was a beautiful, warm spring day.

Rather and take the easy way out and follow a road up the mountain, I figured if I just headed straight into the hills, once I got a bit higher I could work out where to go from there. So off I slogged. My route took me past Venus Bridge, a famous Kobe landmark. Basically it’s a pedestrian bridge in the mountains above Kobe where couples go to look at the night view of Kobe and stare wistfully into each others eyes. For some reason a tradition has sprung up whereby couples visiting the bridge attach a padlock to it. All the locks have some kind of message written on them in black pen, usually limited to the ERIKO LOVES YUKI!!!!! variety. The bridge is now almost totally covered in locks, so much so that they’ve built a special wire dome behind the bridge that people can hang locks on if they can’t find a spot on the actual bridge. This kind of creative vandalism is something you don’t see often in Japan, and I think it’s a pretty cool idea.

Venus bridge conquered, I continued on my merry way into the hills. About an hour later, I was a good deal higher up, working my way along a path that ran next to a small creek. I came across a little cafe and decided to stop for a drink. When I say cafe, I mean it in the loosest possible sense, it was more like a mess hall for scouts or something. Anyway, it was run by a prehistoric couple who had the strongest local accent I’d heard in a long time. I ordered a coffee and the woman asked me whether I’d like to have it outside. I said sure, that’d be great.

So I wander outside and grab a bench in the shade looking over the creek. I hear a door slam and the grandma comes stomping over:

“You had to go and sit in the furthest seat, didn’t you?”
“Uh, sorry”
“That’s two coins”
“Sorry?”
“Two coins”
“How much?”
“Two coins”
“Two coins of what?”
“Two hundred yen.”

I only had a 500 piece, so I give it to her. She glares at me and stomps back inside to get my change. At this stage I’m plucking up the courage to ask her which track I should use and trying to work out what the best way to say that in my limited Japanese is. So out she comes again and I ask

“From here, is there a path that leads to Suzurandai?”
“WHAT?! ”
“Uhhh, a path that leads to Suzurandai”
“You’re crazy!”

...and with that she breaks into rapid-fire local dialect which I basically gathered to mean that I was, in fact, completely insane and should probably be committed to some kind of mental asylum.

She goes back inside and I can her laughing and going on about it. “Yeah, to Suzurandai. HAHAHAHA.” Then she emerges a few minutes later with a big map and grandpa in tow. Grandpa spreads the map on the table and whips out a magnifying glass. He’s very calm and measured, the polar opposite of grandma who’s still ranting to no one in particular about the absurdity of life, the universe and everything. “So, we’re about here, right? You’d want to walk up to here, and then across to Kikusuiyama, and then down into Suzurandai. I think it’d be about 3 or 4 hours. I’ve never done it though”. I looked at the map and it really did seem a quite ridiculous distance. Plenty of time to try that later in the year.

I finished my coffee, walked back down the hill, and caught a train home. I found a mexican restaurant on the way back and had tacos. I think I made the right choice.

Permalink Posted in Japan on Monday April 11, 2005.