Daily Archives: November 23, 2012

Metrics to Live Your Life By

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Classic Tom Jones in his pomp. Perhaps a touch random for this post, but a storming tune nonetheless

 

Everyone measures their lives differently. I have a friend who swears that highest form of human achievement is business; I have another friend who swears that highest form of human achievement is poetry. A question that has been on my mind recently is how to compare experiences and how to measure “success” when you are travelling. (jumping straight to the answer, I think the fact that Lucy and I are able to do it at all is already success enough for me, but let’s not allow that to get in the way of this post, eh?). In the meantime, how’s about this for some travel-appropriate metrics:

First, the classic Boston Consulting Bull*** two-by-two matrix, plotting those two well known orthogonals “Epic” and “Comfortable”.

This splits experiences down quite nicely:

  • Night buses? Long flights? Traipsing round dark towns looking for your hotel? Bottom right!
  • Camping in Tibet in double down sleeping bags? Eagle hunting on horseback in Kyrgyzstan? Cocktails under a huge animatronic singing frog in Las Vegas? Top left, yeah baby!
  • The classic James & Lucy blogtastic “it may have shortened my life by several months, but … holy crap it was amazing!”. Volcano trekking in Vanuatu, boat tripping on the Sepik – top right all the way!

To me, the art of enjoying travel involves balancing interesting and new experiences against the level of perceived discomfort involved. I think this is the reason Lucy and I are traveling reasonably quickly this time around, and why we end up at gentle odds with the gap year students we meet. After all, sleeping on floors palls pretty quickly once you are past 30, and we are familiar enough with the simple mechanics of travel to take the shine off, say, long train journeys. Perhaps we also now need a higher level of stimulation to make all the travel worthwhile – not for us the sitting on a beach for weeks at a time having a nice holiday and, like, finding ourselves man.

It was in contemplating the bottom left sector – the nice holiday – that I came up with the second travel metric: blog density. Now, we don’t live our lives for the blog, although we do greatly enjoy writing it (most of the time!). For the last couple of weeks we have been having a very nice time, but it has felt a little more like a holiday than the type of travel worth taking time out of life for. It has been the hardest, grittiest experiences that have stuck in our minds and ended up making their way onto the page. Recently, a lovely week in Nepal passed by in a single blog post; two active weeks in Japan has been condensed into half a dozen; whereas Papua New Guinea left us feeling pretty battered but with the urgent need to write down what we had witnessed every day and more.

Anyway, it’s a nice theory (even if meta blog posts have less pretty pictures than some of the others). To test it in practice, we have three days in Bangkok sorting out visas, a few days with Lucy’s Mum and Dad at Angkor Wat and after that it’s off to Burma. Stay tuned!

Box Ticking

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We have been to Japan before. A two week holiday a few years ago whetted our appetite for all things Japanese, hence our desire to shoehorn a return trip into the gap in our itinerary caused by the immovable blocks of Christmas and, er, the North Korean National day in September. We loved it last time, and we loved it this time. But we had some chores to complete.

Last time we were here we ranged all over the country, we skied in Hokkaido, we took the Japanese equivalent of the Orient Express (for which you have to win tickets in a lottery), we temple bashed in Nara, misery touristed in Hiroshima, monastery stayed in Koya-San, and Kabuki-ed in Tokyo. We ate everything we could get our hands on and stayed in a range of high and low class hotels the length of the country. But we missed out on a few things – seasonality, time constraints and mild case of culture shock prevented us from doing everything we wanted to. Hence the requirement for a little box ticking.

Well, you know your life isn’t too bad when your mandatory box ticking involves going to a Sumo tournament and tasting poisonous Fugu puffer fish. Life is tough, yet again.

Sumo. Well. It’s amazing. The bouts typically last less than ten seconds, but that misses the point. It’s the mandatory four minutes per bout of facing off, warming up, strutting and posturing that really make the occasion. Our American friends won’t know what the hell I am talking about at this point, but do you remember that time when the Scottish ladies’ curling team got a gold medal at the winter Olympics? For about three days everyone in the UK suddenly became world class curling experts, able to discuss at length the tactical implications of scrubbing vs polishing ice, stone positioning and the correct usage of the slippery and spiked shoes. It was bizarre, and it overtook us at the Sumo:

“Oh, look at that decisive foot stamp. He’s so aggressive. He’s definitely got the upper hand”

“What an effective ceremonial-salt-chucking there – the Yokozuna’s overhand salt toss. Punchy!”

“My lord, he leaned so far forward on his hands there in warm up! How can the opponent possibly respond?”

“Did you see the half-hearted honorific brow mopping there? His fighting spirit must be broken!”

(and, my personal favorite, from Lucy) “He’s wearing lovely green pants. I think he’s definitely going to win.”

Sumo is deeply bizarre, heavily tied up in ritual, almost perfectly opaque to outsiders, and definitely worth a visit if you happen to be in town when a match is on.

Eating Fugu on the other hand, is deeply bizarre, heavily tied up in ritual, almost perfectly opaque to outsiders and worth doing just once in your life for the sole reason that you can say you have done it. We journeyed to the spiritual home of Fugu in Shimonoseki (where even the manhole covers have cartoon blowfish on them) and tried a full “setto” of blowfish in a specialist blowfish restaurant. Our English friends won’t know what the hell I am talking about at this point, but … well … Meh. It was just chewy sashimi without any of the famed mouth numbness that signifies near-poisoning (interestingly the Japanese word for “sashimi” isn’t actually “sashimi” but “o-tsukuri” – who knew?).

Perhaps they don’t serve the good stuff to foreigners; perhaps we don’t know the Japanese for “hurt me, chef”; perhaps we had too much beer for lunch. Anyway – tick.