Walking and talking
The monthly boondoggle for premium subscribers. In this installment, covering miles in rural Japan.
One afternoon last week, I was on the edge of a highway somewhere, I don’t remember where, when all the miles caught up with me.
Months ago, I was invited by Craig Mod to join him and Kevin Kelly—and six other people—to go walking and talking in rural Japan. Craig is an author and a photographer. Kevin is the founding editor of WIRED magazine, also someone who spent decades backpacking in Asia. The guys have been doing this for years: organizing walk-and-talks around the world, where they invite people to join them for a week’s excursion, such that everyone gets to know each other, gets to know a landscape, all while talking day and night.
In our case, the landscape was the Nakasendō, the old pilgrimage route in Japan that connects Kyoto to Tokyo. And the plan for each day was to walk around 10-15 miles—on trails in the mountains, on roads through small towns and cities—before an evening stay in a ryokan, traditional Japanese inns that have serviced travelers for centuries. (Also: one night camping in yurts.)
All of this while we moved through the daylight hours in pairs, in conversation, then spent dinner together as a group around a single table, under the stipulation that the meal would be passed in further discussion—moderated by Kevin—about a different topic each night, as suggested by one of us.
What is your personal philosophy? Who were you previously? What, for you, constitutes enough? Lightweight stuff like that.
Regular readers here know I’m a big walker; if writing is how I think, walking is how I find balance between writing and not-writing, socializing and being solitary. So, it’s hard to imagine a better trip for my interests.
