even farther than beyond! (2 of 8)

more un(t)raveling around Tokyo

 after a short (and wet) night, morning Wallis on the crest trail up to Mont Tonodake.

For those of you who want to practice some Spanish and learn about our arrival and first days in Japan, magnificently hosted in Tokyo by our friend Hiro-san, you can follow this link. For the others, here are some actual, non-fictional, real-life, "everyday" stories (as usual). And for those who randomly clicked their way here, but quite don't know how - and didn't really want to hear about us at all in the first place, welcome, feel free to read on as much as you wish, go back to the beginning of this adventure, to the beginning of the whole thing, or at least check the pics!

This being said, we can start right where we left it in the previous episode: with some of our stuff stored at Hiro-san's and two light-ish backpacks, we went on a circular adventure around Tokyo. With a local train of the Sagami line, we first headed to Shibusawa then went until the end of a tiny local bus line, to a nice little village in the middle of nowhere at the foot of the Tanzawa mountain range. We wanted to get to the Tonodake and Tanzawa summits, both holy, both the goal of ancient Shinto pilgrimages and both renowned for their stunning views on Fuji-san. Concerned by the heat, we decided to take a nap, rest the whole afternoon and evening under the shade of some trees by a river, and wait until the night to do the 5-hour hike up. In this narrow time window of farniente, Futuna finally decided it was time for him to get rid of his hair and beard : people in South Korea and Japan kept staring at him as though they'd just seen a devil or an absolute freak wandering wild and threatening their organized, neat everyday routines... On the subway, along the road, at the convenience stores : everywhere we went, they'd look at him awkwardly with a mixture of fear and disregard. Sometimes though, "a man has to do what a man has to do" (as John Rambo once said), and so we did. Below are the evidence, the from-before-to-after-all-through process and the result shown in colour pictures:

Futuna before (old boy-looking scary freak), during, during, during, during and... after the ritual shearing ceremony (no poodle was hurt) !

Yeah! That felt much better (and much lighter!) without the fluffy being we philornithically donated for the birds to insulate their nests before winter. Bio-construction knows no borders! Our initial idea was to hike at night all the way up to the mountain refuge below the summit, set a bivouac up there and wake up early to go see the sunrise on Fuji-san from the top... The evening passed slowly and as the light started to fade, we had a warm dinner of instant noodles and miso soup. We took the backpacks, took the headlamps and took the clear trail up the woods. With the night came some fresh breeze and many animal sounds responding to one another in the darkness of the forest. The moon followed us high up, sailing silently through the trees and making the halos of the headlamps barely unnecessary.

"how to deal with your leech issues: a guide for functional analphabets".

We met a late bird classic seagull coming back to the village in sneakers and shorts, with no lamp but a small (empty) bottle of water... Thanks to a successful advocacy campaign, we now knew enough about the deadly vampire-toothed leeches waiting for us at each and every step not to fell in their trap. And - although very graphically - also knew how to deal with those who'd make it to our legs anyway. On we went. We walked fast and soon passed two refuges with people having dinner and listening to the radio inside. Headlamps off, trying not be spotted nor heard - as though they were to force us in for a warm soup and tea! As we progressively lost both the additional supply of the moon and the shelter of the trees, we started to realize the weather had changed the wrong way : the low gray clouds started to rain on us as we got off the forest and along a ridge leading to a third refuge. The intended bivouac was becoming increasingly unlikely... Under a thin and cold rain, we set shelter between/under two wooden picnic tables we paired on the terrace in front of the (closed and tight-locked) refuge. The night was long, windy, wet and sleepless, but the sun woke us up nicely and we decided to go straight up to the summit of Tonodake to enjoy the views and have our breakfast facing gorgeous Fuji-san in the magnificent beauty of dawn's light... When we reached the summit, we found another refuge at the very top, whose staff were drilling and screwing a wooden porch like crazy before the weekend's crowds arrived. And, as for the impressive and harmonious figure of the emblematic volcano, well, this:

hiking long hours, unsleeping under the rain, checking the horizon, searching Fuji-san: can you spot it on the second picture?

Our breakfast was nice enough anyway, and as the first couple of early hikers arrived, we decided it was time to go back down and enjoy another train ride beach-bound: urged by the need for a shower and lured by the image of a midday swim in the sea, we took the backpacks and left. The trail looked somehow different with daylight: the kilometers of fully-equipped wooden platforms, stairs and footbridges now seemed even less necessary than the night before! Not much to fear from the terrain, not much to protect us from - except, maybe, the herds of vampire-toothed leeches hidden in the moist soil. On our way down, we crossed many (like very very many!) local hikers going up, sweating their a--es off along the steep steps, but shining in bright clothes and brand-new gear. Most of them were looking at us with a mixture of pity (for our ridiculously heavy loads), surprise (to be meeting gaijins there) and some sort of... annoyance? bitterness? jealousy? over-heat? A little bit of each, probably. Let's call it the seagull's complaint.

the long way down (and up) along the anti-leech footbridge across the woods...

Their incredulous looks meant something we understood like "how come these gaijins with such miserable outfits and such big backpacks are already hiking their way down at such an early hour of the day, while we locals are hardly in the first half of the hike?" The feeling they transmitted was like: "How dare you?", but a very educated and polite "how dare you?", disguised with just a little bit too much smiling and hand-waving. Nothing a big ear-to-ear gaijin smile and a solemn "ohaiou-gozaimassss", with an excessively long sssss, couldn't solve. Down we went, passed the two refuges and a spring we had missed in the dark just fifteen hours earlier or so. We got back to the trail head and were lucky not to require the saltbox. We took some time for an instant coffee with milk and a nap with an old cat before getting on the bus back to the station, then on a series of local trains to Kamakura: a fancy, famous, touristy (and quite posh) beach town. For our Fwench readers (and maybe the Britons as well), Kamakura is some kind of Tokyo's Deauville, cabins included but with no international movie festival (yet). The Belgians and other Brel-ists could also use a sensible comparison with Knokke-le-Zoute, mainly for the invasive seaweed and crowded lines of cabins. Kamakura, we learnt, was also quite famous for its big big buddha: allegedly the biggest sitting Buddha in Japan. As most of you probably know already, each and every Buddha in any country is the something-est Buddha in a certain amount of space. If we had a Buddha in the garden, we sure enough could state it were "the lamest Buddha in the whole Ariège", or "the lightest wooden Buddha of all cities beginning with a T." - just to name two of the many titles available. Anyway... In Kamakura, we intended to see some temples, the beautiful botanical garden, the giant sitting Buddha and, well, the beach. All this, we did and it was well worth it, nice and easy. After all, sightseeing around traveled places is NOT a crime, even for two amateur un(t)ravelers!

bamboos, green and old stairs in Kamakura's park ; more bamboos, cave temple and a litter of hinari foxes ; the one and only surfers' paradise!

It was, after all, just a matter of walking kilometers with our stuff, enjoying the views, the sun and the sea. We also intended to camp one or two nights around town, confident that, this time, the weather would be indulgent/nice/fair. Alas, poor Yorick (and Futuna)! This we didn't and it was really (to quote Tina Turner) nice, but rough. Again that night, the rain found us hidden somewhere by the beach, followed us along some desert streets and chased us deep inside Kamakura's park. There, after a technical stop at some remote restrooms where we cooked dinner, showered and changed clothes, we found a secret little shelter and slept dry until the first jogger and gardener passed by shortly after 6 am (!!!). We packed and left without looking behind, headed back to the beach for a yummy breakfast, then sun-dried some clothes while we had this long-deserved and long-expected bath in the fresh waters of the Sagami bay. Nice!

"shabu-shabu", another of Japan's cuisine best kept secrets!

We also made sure to visit the giant Buddha, of course. It was, indeed, a big one. Maybe not so big. But quite big already. A great Buddha, really. One of the best Buddhas in the country, for sure*. And when it became crystal clear that the rain was going nowhere and spending another night wild-camping (and slightly unlawfully, or at least in a grey zone of legal void on outdoor sleeping in urban areas) was not a reasonable option anymore, we got on a train and returned to Tokyo, where Hiro-san and his girlfriend Hana-san treated us upon arrival with a gorgeous and dangerously yummy "shabu-shabu". Not among the most famous Japanese dishes, shabu-shabu is an under-rated wonder: some kind of fondue or sukiyaki, where thin pieces of meat, shrooms and vegetables are cooked in a katsuobushi** broth. The dinner was amazing, Hiro-san and Hana-san's company just great, as usual, and the whole situation of being back in Tokyo and being received with such a warm welcome even though it was just... 4 days after leaving (!!) made us so very happy the trauma from this latest episode of rainy bivouac healed right away. The next morning, and after a short but dry and comfortable night, we were ready to start exploring Tokyo again for another couple of days. But that's gonna be a next chapter and that's gonna be within a few days... For now, back to the yummy-ssimo shabu-shabu, whose name is supposed to represent the sound of the thin pieces of meat you dip in the boiling broth. "Shabu-shabu", do the pieces of meat in the hot liquid just before you swallow them slurping and touching the sky: Oh! the dishes you'll eat... Another wonder (last but not least!) about this amazing recipe is that, once everybody has eaten enough seaweed, meat and veggies, the remaining (used) broth is heated again and serves to cook a wok-ful of rice. Oh! The rices you'll cook... We went to bed stuffed, exhausted and super thankful. The latter, we still are: thank you so much Hiro-san!

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* About the ---est Buddhas in Japan: there's a very very famous one in Nara. If our sources and memory can be relied on, Nara's is supposed to be the biggest WOODEN Buddha in Japan ; whereas the black Buddha in a temple in Tokyo's northern suburbs (make sure to check our next episode if you happen to be curious about this topic!) is allegedly the biggest STONE Buddha in Japan. Kamaura's is, we already said it, the biggest SITTING Buddha in Japan, which implies there must be a biggest RECLINING one somewhere in the country. An un(t)raveling unicum postcard will be sent to the person who'll provide evidence on the biggest reclining Buddha in Japan in the comments below!

* About the katsuo-bushi: it's been introduced and talked about enough in the previous chapter, but feel free to ask anything you need/want to on this topic anyway... I personally feel sorry that I might not be factual enough about Japan, but I'm dealing with this issue. I'm fine, thanks! Really...

avant la lettre - the U.S. chronicles ep.05

Previously on the U.S. chronicles (which in part took place in Canada):

the old Troll told us: "I'm gonna tell ya something and you better-a-listen carefully: you guys are doing the right thing. Cause when I was young I went to Mejico on the thumb and by that time twas a whole different story.

But now people are scared and they're scared because they own things and stuff. And all this stuff makes them slaves of money then they fear losing it. But the real wealth is love and happiness and trusting each other in a world of compassion and communism..." And so on, for about two hours. Twas really cool! A friendly Dharma Bum style fellow! He dropped us just on East Sherbrooke Avenue and it already smelled like home. All we had to do was take a bus back home and that was it: the most awesome wild, chaotic, random, unplanned J. Kerouac-style trip ever...

not sure what the pic is supposed to demostrate but, anyway, it's like, ye know...

After that, a long shower and a long night of sleep, I started the big visit of "the rest of the people I knew in Montreal". The tour began with Stéphanie, a Couchsurfer friend I had hosted for one night four years ago, in Toulouse. We met to supposedly just go for a drink and it became a long, beautiful, crazy night wandering in the Mile End, stumbling on street coincidences and random wonders... We had a beer at her place with her flatmates and then went for a walk in the neighborhood. We then tried the best bagels in Montreal : warm and chewy, just out of the oven, perfect according to all NYC standards. And even way better, according to locals... Yummy! We met a friend of hers, whose name I already forgot (was he Carlos? Anyway, let’s call him Carlos and forgive my poor memory). Carlos was having a cigarette break in front of his little bar slash art studio. Carlos was a painter-sculptor slash bar-tender. Carlos was from Chile, probably close to his 50 and he looked pretty much like Gérard Lanvin: a vieux beau ténébreux, with dark tired eyes, a nostalgic shade of sadness floating inbetween his face and the rest of the world, as if coming from both his throat full of heavy tobacco smoke and his mind full of the remembrance of a life that was sure enough tough. Hey, wait a second! His name was Marco! Marco, of course! To start again with the whole description, please follow the instructions: 1) Go back to the beginning of the paragraph, 2) re-read it changing all Carloses by Marcoes. 3) follow his adventures throughout the next paragraph...

Here we go: Marco explained his bar was on its way to be closed. He wanted it closed because he wanted it to become his full-time art studio (no slash anymore, if you want). Basically, it looked like he loved the bar stuff, but he eventually realized the customers were a problem for the slash-artist part of his complex and versatile self. How was that? Well, customers were an issue for Marco because they wouldn't let him paint and sculpt in peace! They would enter the bar slash art studio anytime of the day and night, and ask for strange things, like getting drinks in exchange for their money... So at that point, I asked with a smile if we could get in and get a drink. Well, at that point, he kinda smiled back warmly and showed us in. 

instant magic caught on 35mm film at La gruta, Montreal.

The place was tiny, dark and a total mess. It was called La gruta (the cave) and the wall paintings together with a few unfinished paper-icicles confirmed, if necessary, the very nature of this little hollow of the world: a slash art studio place! Marco gave us some red wine in a couple of coffee mugs and showed us his ongoing sculptures. Real nice, actually. Then we crashed on an old couch and started talking, while he kept staring at his tiny universe, old posters of Quebec art and folk festivals, French existentialist books and some Marguerite Duras best-sellers, a chessboard, a bunch of Art-Déco antique pieces of furniture, postcards from Paris, Nebraska or Valparaiso, and some paper bags of yerba mate from Uruguay forgotten on top of an old piano. A surprisingly un-assorted couple entered and saluted us. She was young, tall and slim, hippy-looking with long blonde hair and a thin dress ; he was older, round-shaped and hairless, rigid and sweating in a grey suit. They were friends – maybe, though not likely, lovers – and sure enough friends of Marco. While they got to the bar to get a drink, a goofy skinny old dude with mad professor's hair and toothless laughing mouth sat at the piano and explained to me in an ol'buddy style that it was his own piano, and yeah! he did know how to play it... an improbable and unsquare schizophrenic pentatonic bluesy stumbl-y improvisation followed. His right hand was trying to escape from the irregular 3 chord frames the left hand was clumsily-but-not-randomly building down in the bass notes. The blues melted in a honky-tonky not-so-funky raggy waltz (and God heard it was good, and God was happy). The tempo slowed down a bit, right before a little souvenir from Chopin popped between his bony fingers. And suddenly, it was over. Nice enough, actually. We clapped and he was so moved as we were and his eyes suddenly glittered with emotion like it had been a while since people last clapped at his piano skills. The un-assorted couple happened to be here with him, on purpose, for their weekly singing session. She knew how to sing. He was shy and didn't seem totally confident with the two of us being here as an impromptu audience. We smiled and offered to leave and they said “No no no, you’re gonna sing with us!” right before they started singing their mosaic repertoire of standards and old folk songs. As we looked at each other in silence with Stéph and Marco (and Marco's eyes said so much more than his mouth), the trio seemed to warm up and something finally raised from our collective music making and silent, attentive support... A lot of emotion, a Jacques Brel’s tune and another wine later, they paused and we escaped after many hugs and loving farewells...

high heel fetish, warm colors and blurry couples: a humble tribute to WKW.

Back on the street, wandering again, we ran into a milonga where a young couple of tango teachers had just given a masterclass. He was from Istambul, she was from Buenos Aires. They looked so young, they looked so beautiful. They had been dancing Nu-Tango together for ten years now, and teaching it for about five. They were amazing. Their students were totally amazing too and I couldn't remember seeing so many great dancers packed in such a small place at the same time. Ever. The music for their new tango workshop was difficult. Not the obvious Gotan Project stuff. I recognized non-conventional covers of Goran Bregovic & Iggy Pop's Arizona dream main theme and Tom Waits' Jockey full of bourbon. Plus a lot of beautiful things I had never heard before. The couple of teachers and the couples of students were so elegant, so sensual, so beautiful. Each one in its very own style and fashion. Each one with their tricks and mood and little routine secrets of dancing, breathing and sensing tango together... Oh my god! It's no big surprise team games gather more people than tango: there is no place here for shouting crowds and their all-you-can-eat philosophy. Conpenetración... How can you possibly reach such levels of sensibility, empathy and sincere expression? Get connected so intimately to somebody and knit with him or her such a beautiful, ephemera piece of moving art? How can music be transcended by four feet, four shoulders, four hears and two souls in one single motion? I'm afraid I'm madly in love with tango... We next had some tapas and red wine, walked on for a while talking and finally had another warm chewy bagel from the oven at the other best-in-town bagel bakery. It was already very late at night and we'd had about enough beauty and magic for one single day and it was time to go to bed.

the Cirque du Soleil at home and at their best...

Spent a few extra days in Montreal, all with nice people and old friends and beers and bike riding and such... One extra thing is worth mentioning, though, if only one : a night at the Cirque du Soleil brand new show, Totem, in their home, in their beautiful fairy tales' resident yellow and blue chapiteau house! Robert Lepage's new show is amazing. The stage is a giant turtle's shell and skeleton, the scenography complex and delicate. The lights and the live music are perfect, the whole design and artwork, beautiful. The performances elegantly linked together on a powerful oniric, highly symbolic promenade along the evolution of human kind. Where ecology and mythology, pure circus and contemporary aesthetics, high flying acrobats and feet-on-earth high-tech wizards meet… Expect nothing but pure enjoyment, dream and wonders! Totem won't be shown in Europe except in Amsterdam for about a month in October. So, I really recommend all my French and Spanish and Austrian friends/readers to book already a low cost flight and a ticket for the show (talking about the ticket, which I reckon is everything but cheap, but so worth it, a huge thank again to Kim for inviting me: you made the kid in me happy and amazed big time...)! Those people take the circus experience so much further than any other. Hey, mommy and daddy, if you have nothing to do in October and don't know Amsterdam yet, go spend five days there, visit around. And of course, go see the show. Honest, it's great!

After that, with the idea that Montreal had already treated me with more than one could possibly expect, I got on a greyhound bus and crossed the border again down to Burlington, Vermont, to breathe its laid-back, arty, hippy feel along the Champlain Lake's bank. Met Laura back there and we went hiking for a few days in the beautiful Green, White and Black Mountains. We met and followed the Appalachian Trail again (even though much farther North than a month before), eventually reaching the summit of Mount Moosilauke, aka the "Bald place", aka the "Gentle Giant". Hot, sunny weather, nice landscapes, great talks and Go playing at a great little mountain lodge (Dartmouth College Ravine Lodge). Oh, the easy and fulfilling life in the wilderness!

the bald place, the gentle giant as high in feet as our Mont-Blanc is in meters ; land'art river cairn: this is a few one my favorite (DIY) things!

We then went camping, sunbathing and doing Japanese-style land'art with stones along a nice although mosquito-y river. We got scared to death at night by a psycho-killer freak walking around the tent, moving branches and doing strange, creepy throat sounds. As there was nobody around at some kilometers and all the gear, baseball sticks, guns, pepper sprays and such were in the trunk of the car, and nothing at hand – not even a swiss knife – we stayed sitting in the tent without moving, exploring the silence of the night with our eyes shut, all ears, looking for any clue about where exactly he was and what he was waiting for to kill us. We got ready for an attack, or a gunshot accross the tent's thin walls, feeling totally helpless... Then the silence fell, again. No feet stepping around us, no throat sounds anymore. Just the silence. Worse than ever, then, right in the eye of: right in the quiet before the storm... Only when the sun rose and the morning came to greet us over the river, did we dare to crawl out of the tent to check around and eventually discover, at some distance from there, a dreadful psycho-killa grouse making through the bushes the exact kind of foot and throat sounds that almost killed us the night before. Ah ah ah ah ah. You're not funny, the grouse!

nostalgia made in Woodstock, aka 3M revisited: music, muppets and moth.

Later that day, we headed to Woodstock, NY. THE Woodstock, I mean. THE one and only Woodstock where all these guys I spent my teenage listening to, went and played about forty years ago. THE ONE AND ONLY F---ING WOODSTOCK!! It is a regular little town stuffed with old hippies who never left and went on living a hippy life, listening to John and Yoko and opening a few hours a day, when they remember to do so, some crappy second hand and tye-dye tee-shirts stores. You can buy Bob Marley's swimming-pool towels, Jimi Hendrix' chewed guitar picks and all the usual hippy goodies and pseudo indian-jamaican-dharma-rastavibes stuff... Summertime and the living was easy (and pretty slow, blame it on weed smoking which apparently is a national sport here). If you ignore it is on the whole somehow a ridiculous dusty cliché, it seems to be a nice place to be on earth. Woodstock. God! Looked for a place to set the tent, thinking it would be easy in Hippylandia and every single ol' hippy would invite us to stay at his place and offer couch and food and pot ad libitum. But nope. It seems they grew a bit - say - capitalist. Or prudent, at least. And on each and every little piece of ground, frontyard or garden, there's a little plastic sign saying "POSTED - PRIVATE - NO TRESPASSING - BEWARE OF ATTACK DOG" and such. Surprising, uh? Wasn't private property supposed to be a robbery, fellas? All of a sudden, this “peace, brother” thing sounds like a sad malentendu, right? Yeah, you can peas’ wherever you want but on my lawn"... I'm definitely too naive. We then spent another day in and around the Catskills National Park, by a beautiful lake whose long Indian name had so many K, H, A, L and Ms I wasn't even able to read the first half of it. Swam in the lake, dived from the cliffs, slept in the sun. Saw birds and salamanders and many golden retrievers and finally drove back to NYC.

another peaceful anonymous lake, somewhere upslake New York...

In nice New Palz - somewhere along the way - we had a beer and BBQ dinner: NP was a deliciously laid-back equivalent of Woodstock, where the hippies were 20 to 35 y-o instead of 70 and the beers, slightly cheaper. During the happy hour (from 5 to 10!), a beer you buy gives you another one for free and each drink gives you a free BBQ burger. In other words, buy a four bucks beer and get two beers and two burgers. In other words, go to New Palz, get more drunk and fatter for less! And make friends meanwhile... Although very late at night, heavy traffic and a terrible humid pressure cooker heat were waiting for us in Brooklyn. This (the heat, I mean) is supposed to be the same for the next few days – say until the end of my adventures here, and consequently of the US chronicles. We went to the Invented Games Festival in Brooklyn, where people presented and introduced everyone to the games they invented, with names like Freesball, Golfketball, Froccer, Soccolf or even Basketsbee. From the etymology, I’ll let you guess what their concept of "inventing" a new game is… Originality and dizziness to the fullest! Wooooh! If not nice, it was a least sort of funny. Sort of. Hem...

Today is June, 9th. It's f---ing summer-hot and sunny on this side of the street Atlantic.

I'm now chasing the last souvenirs* and postcards to take back with me and guess my next post will be from Barcelona. With some inspired conclusions and considerations, hopefully.

So again: take care of yourself and of your beloved ones.

It's been a pleasure having you all with me during this adventure.

Peace, love and happiness to all!

* not the least of these: an Extracycle "free radical" kit for my bike! Had fallen in love with this freaky hauling beauty
after trying Jeme's one during a few days in New Orleans. ;)

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avant la lettre – the U.S. chronicles ep.02

Welcome to the second chapter of this travel diary from the U.S. of A. (click here to check the first one). First observation: the delay to write and post is already getting huge! Quite. It looks like finding a quiet, pleasant and cozy little hollow of the world with computers and an internet access - plus, say, a fan - is way more difficult in this western developed and modern country than in Laos or India.

thrift shops: the best kept secret of the U.S. sub-culture?

Yeah, I know, it makes sense: backpackers traveling through India or Laos with nothing but sweat, motorcycle burns, imported beer hangover and mosquito bites need those internet cafés much more than any of the average local North-American citizen on a daily shuttle between work, shopping mall and home. And each and every single store, museum, park, pharmacy or gas station offers free wifi to the customers. What I don't have, however - and it's my fault, I reckon - is the neat, smooth, brand-new and trendy, aluminium alloy Macbook air with long-lasting ion-battery, simply to keep in touch with the world... If there's a crisis in this country (and almost everything around indicates there has been one not so long ago and the next one is already on its way), then Apple (after deducing all the money Bill Gates didn't waste in expensive malaria-vaccine programs) is probably of the very wealthiest among the big companies' family. Had never seen so many Apple devices in my whole life! Looks like every single individual owns at least a couple of them. Impressive…

We got to New Orleans 3 days ago and I’ve been looking for this moment since last Sunday. I'm running sooo ridiculously late. If I belonged to the half-full-bottle-seeing kind of people, I would say I'm still on time for the third week report. I also realized I gave no title to the first episode (something like "New York, New York", although easy, would definitely work). The second's will be An Appalachian paradox. Any suggestion for future titles is welcome, even though I won't pay for it. Let me take you back to a couple of weeks ago:

We left Brooklyn on a sunny sunday morning. The trunk was filled with stuff, so was the gas tank. Only in this case, the stuff was - obviously - gas. Soon enough, our stomachs got filled too as we bought these delicious chocolate and pumpkin, bran and mango, squash and blueberry muffins. They took us (or maybe the car did, I couldn't say) through a good series of highways, bridges and junctions, all being Memorial of something or somebody, all the way across New Jersey, then Delaware, then Maryland, to Washington DC: a nice and easy cruise. There, Laura was supposed to meet some friends and family, so I took the car on my own (woooooh!) and wandered around Columbia and the northern suburbs of DC, cruise-control on, speed regulator at 25mph, automatic gearbox on D4, coffee with milk in its recycled plastic mug ("CAUTION, LIQUID INSIDE MAY BE HOT") just by the side of the hand brake. and Mr. Dylan on the stereo, of course. Sweet. No use of your feet, no need of your hands: driving becomes an experience of total irresponsibility and peaceful passivity.

DC-tecture: the best kept secret of the U.S. Government's creative abilities?

Later in the evening, went downtown to meet my friend Zia. She was one of my very first CS guests from Toulouse, about 5 years ago now. She settled in DC years ago, coming from the Phillipines  after almost 2 years travelling and couchsurfing around Europe, then through Turkey and the Middle-East to Pakistan. On her own. And back to South-East Asia. She’s now studying and working there (in DC). And enjoying, as strange at it may seem, this bizarre heterogeneous and unnatural, rather bizarre city. To me, DC looked like a huge residential area built around a fake, artificial core of pretentious administrative palaces. They all look like those birthday cakes we drew as kids, massive pre-colombian pyramids of cream and fruits and candles, with columns and ancient-greek-latino-colonial-empire-rococo stuff. Everything is set up with gardens and fountains and memorials and large avenues whose pattern you can easily imagine to be, when observed from the sky, that of a proud fishing eagle, a gigantic dollar symbol or something like that... DC probably gives that sensation because this is exactly what it is, though. While walking around looking for Zia and not understanding exactly where she was supposed to be waiting for me, "with white trousers and a big brown hat", I remembered with a tender smile the megalomaniac cities I used to built on Caesar III or Ages of empire years from now. With all their impressive big temples and universities and hospitals and oracles and coliseums in the middle, with a star-shaped main square, then geometric, rigid, square streets with monotonous, homogeneous housing lots...

contre-jour, obelisc and a dream of peace on earth...

Well, I guess either they programmed those video games after DC's architectonic concepts, or they've been playing Caesar III for years until it eventually influenced the way they then drew their cities' maps! With Zia (she indeed whore white trousers and a large brown hat, in such a unique fashion I immediately understood why she considered this information would be of any help trying to find her among the crowd!), we wandered around the Capitole, Obelisc, Ministeries and Memorials. Saw this awkward Monument to the Wars, whose stone rhetoric and golden lettering seem to glorify the US' wars, deaths, conflicts all around the world, with special emphasis on US' Victories. When it maybe should, instead, quietly and humbly call for silence, memory and future peace. Especially, this thing about victory confused me a little bit: I thought that in the end, nobody was ever victorious in a war. And if we talk about Korea, Vietnam and WWII, I'm not sure victory means a lot. I remembered them some of the very intense feelings and emotions that struck me in Hiroshima's Peace Park and Paris Mémorial de la Déportation, then haunted me for months. The sensations emerging from this Monument to the wars is quite distinct, actually: nowhere else did I ever witnessed a glorification of war and victory over the enemy. I thought in the end, we could only be sorry for saying yes to the universal un-solution... Imagine the gravity point of the core of the very center of Washington DC. Try to see it from the sky and see how it's the heart of the administrative and political machine of this country which pretends to be ruling the world. And see how this very center of everything is a memorial glorifying horror, glorifying hundreds of thousands, millions of death, as the price for victory, democracy and freedom... Scary shit, isn't it?

imagine all the people, living life in peace.. you may say I'm a dreamer (...)

Okay. Enough about that. The Potomac river and all the heavy official stuff were really nice in the evening light and I recognized in just a second this big statue of whose-President-is-it? Lisa Simpson visits and shares her existential doubts with... Is it Jefferson? Many calls here, at the centralita, to say "it's Lincoln, you ignorant!" Who said TV sitcoms couldn't teach you anything about Culture? I took some (hopefully) nice pictures and experienced a subway problem with improbable delays. Talking about the subway, I loved the James Bond stylish design, like a 50's secret cave labyrinth of deep, dark, impressive concrete corridors and tunnels. We then spent the night at one of Laura's friend and the next morning, we'd had enough of DC. Back to the present: it is a Monday morning, we take the car again and leave: sunny day, light traffic, a fresh breeze. After a dozen of housing blocks with neat lawn and trees, I'm suddenly driving this average automatic gearbox big car on the mythical Road 66, surrounded by huge long trucks, heading South-West to Front Royal and the Shenandoah National Park, just on the northern part of the Appalachians. A few days before, checking a route on Google maps, we discovered the Blue Ridge Parkway, going all the way down from Shenandoah to the Great Smokey Mountains and decided we might want to drive it instead of any highway.

Road 66: a myth threaded with orange plastic cones...

Shenandoah is a beautiful mountain park where we camped for the first night after a couple of hours hiking under a bright green canopy full with mosquitoes, mosquitoes and mosquitoes. A bunch of lovely adorable park rangers in their early forties, a bit fat in their tight sexy brown uniforms, proudly wearing beards and hats as if they were to be shot for a Village People video clip, introduced us to the rules of the park and made sure we had enough specific knowledge and strong ropes to hang the food and toothpaste properly... because of the inquisitive clumsy dreadful friendly-but-dangerous black bears that would sure enough come visit our camp during the night. Oh my god, the bears, the beaaaars! We actually met no bear at all. Not even one. Not even from far away. And on the whole, let me think… we met nobody at all. Hey, wait! Not true. There was this young stupid tender and maybe motherless deer which pretended to have dinner with us and share my air mattress. No way. "Get out of the tent, you half-civilized piece of wildlife! Buzz off! If you ever happened to have a conscience, you'd be ashamed of your lack of self-esteem and consideration for your wild animal condition!" Hem, always trying to give lessons… We named it Jean-Claude (because its sweet eyes and cute look reminded those of a famous kung-fu master from Belgium), thought about slaughtering it in order to smoke one of its skinny gigots into a piece of coppa and finally had to throw stones at it until it gave up following us. Believe me or not, wildlife is not what it used to be. Next day, we had a 7 hour long hike along and around the mythical AT (the Appalachian Trail). For those who ignore about hiking, who don’t shiver and sigh at the sound of the letters HRP or think GR10 is a post-translational variant of an obscure Glycosaminoside Receptor, the AT is a hiking trail that goes 2.000 miles along the Appalachian range from North Carolina to Maine. It is hiked by old hippies and bums with white beards and dogs, young hipp-ish freshly graduated students, middle-aged hippies on their way to somewhere else and many other kinds of walking hippies. Quite in the spirit of Kerouac's dharma bums. Nice. Indeed. Saw some waterfalls and some disgusting reddish pale legged worms and glittering insects, entomologist and photographer friend Dr. Olivier Esnault would have been glad to meet. Took the car and drove down the Blue Ridge Parkway again. So beautiful. Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god! These views and landscape and the Harley Davidson low riders we kept crossing! "Oh, the places you’ll go", once said the other.

under the Shenando-shade ; creek waterfall picmic and bath ; looking straight into the worm eye.

Stopped by a lovely lake (Sherando lake, if I remember it well) to swim a little bit (Yucks! Oh, the disgusting soft material lake bottoms are made of and one has to step on, or in, before actually swimming) all the way to the small desert island in the middle. Surprisingly, we got attacked by ticks there. What the hell do they do on a desert island where there are no animals at all on a regular basis? Is this why they yawned and screamed and jumped on me the second I stepped on the shore? Were they zombie mutant ticks waiting for a prey to haunt, on this cursed island? Or were we to blame for interrupting their quiet hypobiosis? All I know is I now have to check myself up for some erythema migrans and other Lyme's disease symptoms. Played Go on the bank of the lake’s small creek until the park rangers abandoned the place, then crawled into the campsite restrooms to meticulously shower and check for extra ticks, do the washing-up and fill our water bottles. Then took the car to Jefferson National Forest where we set the camp in a bizarre creepy round clear in the middle of high dark pines (or maybe spruces). I spent the night awake listening to strange forest sounds, fearing a nightmare mutant zombie psycho-killer would come and murder us in quite a Twin Peaks atmosphere. Or even worse: take my soul and eat it with garlic and chives until the end of eternity...

Mountain Top Removal right by Mr. Gibson's place in West Virginia.

The next morning, we left Virginia for West Virginia: to Beckley then Rock Creek, kind of an end-of-the-world remote area where cell phone service doesn't even exist. There, we wanted to meet - and spend some time with - a bunch of eco-activists living on a squatting-in-the-woods community called Climate Ground Zero. Check for them on the net! These guys have been fighting and volunteering and non-violently acting against Mountain Top Removal (MTR, check for this too) for years, now. MTR is a really cheap technique to extract coal: you basically burst mountains off with tons of dynamite, from the top, then shake the hundreds of tons of rocks you get to separate the coal. Once it's done, you fuck up hundreds of thousands of gallons of pure river water to rinse the coal and throw all the stones and trees and natural garbage you produced down in the valleys, burying square miles of villages, fields, forests, streams and such. As you can imagine, the whole process needs huge amounts of heavy metals, chemicals and such, so as to purify and prepare the coal. And the incidence of cancers, selenium poisoning, asthma and other allergies in this area is of the very highest in the country. This part of West Virginia, "coal country", is poor, very poor and just so so poor. Among the poorest in the U.S. Coal extraction brings jobs and wages, of course, but basically brings money to the few big oil companies which bought those mountains for nothing 50 years ago (quite often, for just a box of cheap booze – the price for a good hangover and a signature). Now, they are simply turning this lovely region into a dirty, flat, sterile, poisoned ground.

the copperhead baby I almost stepped onto: true guardian of these mountains?

We met the community and spent 24 hours with them. Visited Larry Gibson (check for him), the lill' ol' man who spent his whole life fighting MTR to save the small piece of mountain he calls his home. Very impacting, charismatic, old guy. We followed one of his young activist followers (following a follower, ain't that something Jacques Brel talked about in one of his songs, uh?) to the edge of an active MTR site, about 200 yards behind his solar-powered eco-friendly non-Ikea home-made little cabin. I took some pictures and could try to talk about it but it's hard to do. And to imagine. Or make you imagine it. "It's difficult to see what is not here", says Larry. And after a while he adds, sadly "people here don't do anything. They just don't realize MTR is killing us". He walks a bit more. I almost step on a big copper head viper taking a nap on a warm stone in the shade under a tree, and don't realize until they tell me to just move on the right, fast... He he he. I now got a lovely picture of it. Beautiful animal. Yyyyyks. He also says (Larry, not the viper) something like "When you breathe it, when you eat it, when you live it everyday of your life, you just cannot see it. Go and tell people". That’s what I'm doing right now, I guess. Well, I’m trying, at least.

the outdoor kitchen @ Climate Ground Zero, right by the pétanque ground...

We then had a beautiful dinner back at the community, played this game of throwing horseshoes to touch a stick, like our pétanque, talked with this bunch of eco-hippies, all coming from different parts of the country and from different walks of life, to just volunteer for the project. Only a minority of them is from West Virginia. But some are. One of the youngest, not even twenty, was born in Rock Creek. As soon as 16, he began working as a nightguard for B & M, on an MTR site, and about 2 years after, decided to quit and join the community… he explains to me, half proud, half cynical, that he went to THE elementary school. And survived it, he adds. I’ve heard about THE elementary school earlier in the day: there’s only one elementary school in the whole area, and it’s about 600 yards under the gigantic pond where the coal is soaked and rinsed. The shadow of the coal silos run through the school’s playground everyday, more or less by the hour the kids are out playing. Neither the county, nor the state, nor the federal government, nor the oil companies did anything to move the school. And one of the community's biggest victories, after more than ten years, is the volunteers raised the money and got the ground to build a new elem school far away from the pond. Not a big deal, but something. Somewhere in one of the dirty houses and tents, between cooking dinner, doing the dishes and playing music by the fire, I read or heard this phrase from Gandhi I liked : "if you believe one single being cannot make a difference, then you've never been in bed with a mosquito"... This was my good night-sentence to chew, here at Climate Ground Zero...

the perfect guitar, outfit and background for Stevie Ray's Life by the drop.

The next morning, we had breakfast and talked with them all, gardening a little bit, or better said strumming an old cheap guitar while they were gardening, watching at my coffee with milk getting cold on the wooden porch of a house on its way to fall apart. White and grey waters tanks, solar panels, compost, green restrooms, home made greenhouse with tomatoes, avocados, radishes and strawberries. Nothing is thrown away, everything eventually serves and lives a second (third, fourth) life. Military camp equipment, old wooden boards, rusty nails and all you can imagine is abandoned around in a fancy romantic bohemian mess. Ah, and there's no shower. NO SHOWER !!! Fuck. Why do you have to be dirty and sweaty and eventually have scabies (don't laugh, they had scabies at the camp a few months earlier) to be a good eco-activist volunteer? You cannot be half the way to something else, do you? Is this right? Or maybe? Or at least clean a little bit? Just a little bit? No way? Sweep the kitchen floor once a... month? Nope? Okay... I couldn't stay much longer I'm afraid. Noon: the car is packed. We leave after sharing hugs and hand shakes (scabies... uuuuugh!) and emails. Those people are nice and their work really inspiring. Amazing, actually. If you manage to forget about scabies and this young ascarides-stuffed puppy sleeping on the kitchen table, eating in the plates to be washed and licking everybody's mouth after licking its ass. Sigh! Veterinary studies don't make it easy to live with hippies ;) Even though they may eventually change the world…

Mountain Top Removal illustrated: there was a hill with trees, there's now a flat piece of Mars instead...

We headed back to Virginia and drove all day to the South, to finally enter North Carolina as the suns went down: the skies were so beautiful, from pink to orange to gold ans ash... On a desert road on the way to Asheville, we stopped for dinner at an odd desert restaurant. A tired middle-aged blonde waitress, sweet and smiling, served us decent truckers’ food. A phone call to Monica, our Couchsurfer host for the night, to let her know we wouldn't make it tonight because we were still too far away. Just a bit later, we were driving in circles in a residential suburb of Black Mountain, desperately trying to find a place to set the tent. Hem, not that easy. On the next morning, we reached Asheville, a lovely arty, hippy-chic, little town. Monica said there were basically two streets: the trendy one with expensive art galleries and the bohême one with vegan fair-trade shops and cafés. That proved not to be exactly true: there was also a huge Greenlife organic store where we filled the backpacks with grains, fruit and cheese before going hiking in the Great Smokey Moutains.

desert road from Vegas to nowhere, someplace better than where you've been...

On the car park, just in front of the store’s entrance was a street musician playing an old electric bass. Tall, black, in his late fifties and with a mustache, he was the local version of both the Glover: Danny, for the look and Roger, for the bass. And he sure knew what to do with a bass. Somewhere between Marcus Miller and Mr. Wooten, he stood there smiling, slapping his incredibly phat grooves with a steady thumb and a tambourine under his right foot. Not even sweating. I had my watery fair trade organic french-brew Nicaragua coffee with milk while listening to him and had a look around before going back to the car. Even the old mamas with their groceries trolley seemed to be shaking their booties off the walkways to his grooves. Won’t you take me to… funky town? A long hour later, we entered Cherokee, gate of the Great Smokeys. I won't be long about Cherokee and the Indian reservation: Imagine a zoo where the sick, sad, depressed, fat animals would be human beings in ridiculous costumes and paintings. With little road signs showing them RAIN DANCING and mimicking THE WAR TRAIL or such. Well, if you can imagine that, plus the cheap booze and the dozens of Indian gifts, Indian crafts and Indian souvenir stores, together with the poor old men covered in feathers and make-up, forcing their toothless smiles for one dollar, you'll get a pretty accurate idea of what Cherokee and the Indian reservation look like. Ah, almost forgot. It's also full of all the black bears souvenirs, posters, magnets, tee-shirts, liquors, skin or furry hats, jewelry made out of bears teeth and such you can possibly think of. Ah, almost forgot. All the above, plus all the restaurants having mountain river trout on their menu. I was astonished and sad to find myself in Montmartre, on Las Ramblas, in Lourdes and Sigean at the same time. If it wasn't so sad, it would be revolting, I guess... We drove on.

a Great Smokey Morning.

Another while driving along a silvery stream and we entered the Natural Park. We left the car where our 3 day hike was supposed to take us, and quickly got a lift from une gentille française living in Atlanta, to get where our 3 day hike was supposed to start from. After twenty minutes of silent walking along the trail, civilization was way behind us. Fresh crystal waters on small singing creeks, big trees, butterflies and flowers and bushes and scents and stones and fuck, nature in the Appalaches is so amazingly beautiful! We lasted four hours to reach Mount Leconte, the second summit of the range, and there set the camp by a mountain shelter. Anti-bear equipments to hang the backpacks, anti-bear recommendations, anti-bear ladders to the shelter, anti-bear prohibition to cook in and around the shelter... Looked like we were in a remake of Romero's Dawn of the Bears. Ah ah ah. Actually, I wouldn't see no bears during the next 3 days, although their presence was almost touchable. On the trees and the trails, at least. Eight hours of hiking the next day, a good positive and negative elevation and my 18 kg backpack reminded me I'm not so young anymore. We crossed and followed the AT again, met some old hippies with long white beards but no dogs because due to the bears, this one happened to be the only section of the AT they couldn't hike with their dogs... Met two nice guys working for Alsthom in Knoxville and a nice couple from Birmingham at the second shelter. Made a bonfire and chatted with them for a while. I looked for any possible occasion to fill my camping shower bag with water, let it in the sun for a couple of hours and then hang it to a branch to enjoy a delicious warm shower in the woods. Rhaaaaa! I know it for sure now: home is not a place, it's a state of mind. And a foldable camping shower makes it easier to feel at home! On the morning of the third day, we finished the hike with a long steep three hour trail from the bottom of the valley up to the ridge, where the car was waiting for us. Feeling dirty and sweaty but the weather was perfect and the breeze was fresh at about 5.000 feet. Packed everything again in the car, had a short rest in the sun, then left. We drove the Cherolahah Skyway, another secondary little road following the Appalachian range, then entered Tennessee and headed south to Chattanooga where CS Andy was waiting for us.

the beautiful, unreal, Great Smokey Mountains, floating in the clouds like Miyazaki's Castle in the sky.

We easily found him at a bar, silently talking to his pint of amber ale, then followed his rusty Westfalia VW van to his place. He was a thirty something tall blond hippy with dreadlocks, working three nights a week at a bar downtown and lived in a small wooden house with two friends, surrounded by trees, bicycle parts and pictures from his travels. A genuine sports freak: Andy climbs, rides, hikes, paraglides and rafts. Plus, at that time, he was saving money to make it to Toronto by bike the next summer: more than 2.000 miles riding (is it what he said? isn't it too much?). Pas mal, eh? Like most CSers, Andy was a charming guy, had a nice conversation and a delicious sense of home-made, DIY design. Made us feel comfortable and at home in about two minutes. Very CS, you know, like so very easy-going and so totally friendly. Seriously, now: why does CS seem to gather the nicest people on earth? Or, better said: how come most of the nicest people on earth decided to gather on CS? Spent the evening together at his place: we cooked some vegetarian lasagna, Colombian salad with fresh cilantro and a delicious guacamole he prepared adding sprouted lentils and soy beans to the genuine recipe : excellent! I also tried some arepas with a non-conventional corn-flour. They were a complete disaster although we survived eating them... Hem... We then spent a while talking around local beers before showering and falling dead in bed.

along the crisis highway (1): Birmingham, Tuscaloosa, Rock City...

Next morning, supposed to go rock climbing, the rain started falling right after breakfast so we spent the morning crashing on the couches in the living room, watching the rain on the bright green of the garden, talking about life and everything and nothing in particular and finishing the lasagna and the beers while doing some laundry. Then we said goodbye and he went to work and we drove south through Tennessee, on our way to Alabama. We crossed Birmingham: an abandoned, desert, ghost, depressing as much as depressed zombie town and found no place to have dinner on a cold grey monday evening. We made it to Tuscaloosa and had the best hamburgers one could possibly dream of. Huge. Heavy. Fat. Juicy. Tasty. Way too big. So totally unhealthy it was a pleasure to just imagine the triglycerides filling one's arteries. Plus, the french fries were battered in beer before being soaked in the boiling oil. Jesus! That was so f---ing good it had to be a sin! After spending two hours looking for a national forest or anything suitable to camp around Tuscaloosa, we finally hid both the car and the tent behind some trees and bushes, hoping nobody would come by. Quiet night, holy night. The next morning, as usually in these circumstances, it was quite a funny experience to discover in the bright daylight the place we had chosen the night before while it was dark: the main highway was way closer than it seemed and all the trucks could probably see the tent, had the  drivers looked at the road while driving. We were lucky enough they all watched TV and read the newspapers while cruising on automatic...

along the crisis highway (2): entering Greensboro.

We crossed Greensboro, a small town severely hit by the crisis, and entered a pie café called PieLab. Check for them, they're worth all your consideration. In the middle of the deepest crisis, a bunch of cook and graphic designers built this unique cozy space to both cook and sell pies and create sustainable design, ads and stuff. Nice people, creative and positive, who created jobs, life and activity, as well as different kind of workshops for children and adults, in a neighborhood deeply affected by the crisis. No need to say the pies were fantabulous and the coffee, organic, fair trade and, well… watery. ;) The rest of the day was not especially exciting, driving south through Alabama. We listened to Janis Joplin, Taj Mahal and a bluegrass band whose name I couldn't remember. They were really good and their tunes took us and kept us awake until we entered and while we went all the way through Mississippi down to Louisiana. At the Alabama Welcoming Center, we met the scariest hostess  ever, who "kindly" (understand: County Sheriff style) asked for our passport numbers, phone numbers, address, blood type and about how long and where we planned to stay in Alabama, just "so as to help us have the best possible stay there" (seriously? that's all you've come up with?).

Greensboro, catfish capital of Alabama: its welcoming shops (lol) and the PieLab, home of the most amazing lemon pie ever!

Later on, we stopped at a lovely Trucks' kitchen on the highway. Fuck, this creepy old fat women looking exactly like the one in Stephen King's Misery. And the trucks' kitchen was exactly like in my dreams (from the american road movies of my childhood): sitting at the bar, eating eggs and sausage and grits with Fox News. And this middle-aged fat woman, named Shirley, with a white and red shirt and curly hair, refilling for free your mug of watery cafe and calling you Babe. Well, she was a Tracy, but everything else was pretty similar to the cliché of the Shirley waitress. I then spent several hours sighing, nose against the window, as miles went by, counting the road kills along highway 59. Interestingly enough, the raccoon disappeared progressively, as an increasing amount of armadillos began to make their way to the top of the charts. Maybe twenty to thirty dead armadillos just on the right side of 59 South. They look so cute! I wanted to stop and take one and stuff it. And shivered each time I imagined them alive...

last miles of the road to NoLa: perfect timing and the sunset on Lake Ponchartrain

We reached Louisiana in the evening, crossed the Lake Ponchartrain on an amazing, seemingly endless bridge and entered New Orleans with the sunset. We drove along the tramway to a lovely neighborhood to meet Rachel, our CS host for this first night. But that's another story...

 - Got an extra minute for some conclusion?

 - Okay, but try and make it quick, please: we're off schedule already...

 - Great, thanks! Well, it was an amazing week, full of beautiful people, places and moments. A very impacting, very inspiring week. Dense and full of great ideas, causes and fights. And an interesting contrast, all along this 1.000 mile long mountainous range. A contrast between the most preserved and protected natural spaces and the most devastated ones ; between acute environmental awareness and aberrant industrial, urban and suburban development ; between sustainable alternative consciousness and crazy blind straight-in-the-wall capitalist consuming behavior ; between creative, positive solutions and huge, global issues ; between Indians in cages and hippies at war ; between coal and trees ; between shopping malls with KFCs and the most virgin nature ; between chronic crisis and indecent wealth ; between yesterday's mistakes, today's consequences and... tomorrow's solutions? Hopefully.

That's all folks, see y'all next week! Love to all. Remember to take care of whom and what is important in your lives!

happiness is the way: take the right turn and head off the beaten track...