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Following the tragic demise of internafrica, I have had no online forum for you to keep track of my oriental adventures and mystic agitprop.
That was not the end. That was not the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning....

I arrived in Okayama, Japan from Cape Town (via Johannesburg, Hong Kong and Tokyo) after a total of tenty-two hours in the air. At the time of writing, I am going into my fourth month here, teaching Japanese teenagers about South Africa, Global Warming, Plate Tectonics, Geopolitics and sometimes English. My first bit of exploration took me to Kobe, the site of the most devastating Japanese earthquake in recent history, and then on to Kyoto, home of the famously ignored protocol for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. I had my first experience of an onsen, or bath-house, and visited my first Buddhist temple. It was a gleefully headlong immersion in Japanese culture, enhanced by exquisitely prepared meals of river fish, lotus root, bamboo shoots, sweet bean and gold leaf.

After a week of sitting around at school wondering what the hell I was there for, I set off for Hiroshima on the famous bullet train, known here as the Shinkansen. The occasion was the 60th commemoration of the atomic bombing. I set a lantern afloat on the river to join thousands of others, a glowing constellation of memory. If peace were a substance, it was here that it would be most tangible. It is a beautifully resurrected city. One day I'll return to see what its like on a normal day.

The next adventure was to climb Mt. Fuji to reach Japan's highest point. It was more difficult than expected, especially with a hangover from an all night party on the bus on the way there. Mercifully, we climbed at night by the light of a full moon, which illuminated the cloud cover beneath us. The tops of the clouds basked in silvery lunar illumination, yet they also glowed from underneath with the light of some of Tokyo's many sattelite cities. Two of us reached the summit before sunrise, and that space between night and day held eerie whispers of the unimaginably vast cauldron of geothermal energy beneath our feet as we stared into the dark void of the crater. Its the most scared I've been since arriving, but the fear was soon warmed away by sunrise at 3776 metres.

A few weeks later, I set out on a slightly tamer mission to the World Expo in Aichi prefecture. The theme was "Wisdom of Nature". The irony that the site of several hundred hectares was until recently a forest was lost amongst the teeming crowds. I visited the South African Pavilion, bought rooibos and felt my first real twinge of homesickness while watching a video of a perfectly peeling wave at Llandudno. I also got to see Lucy, the world famous Australopithecine skeleton, and a few robots, which was a nicely significant juxtaposition. Unfortunately, there were so many people present (somewhere in the region of three hundred thousand) that most of the exhibits were clogged by half-hour queues.

I have had a few other minor adventures and one or two misadventures to date, but for the most part I have been inventing things to do in my oodles of free time at school, and learning how to live alone, engaging in such wondrous activities as cleaning the sink, doing laundry, ironing etc. First-World amenities abound, but Orion is upside-down and I am separated from my roots by a lot of spacetime.