Gunkanjima
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: We’re still in Tokyo. It’s one of the world’s great cities.
Gunkanjima
A while back, my sister sent me an Instagram photo of an abandoned island off the coast of Nagasaki; it looked eerie and historical and photogenic and probably haunted. I immediately wanted to see it. I love mildly creepy places.
When we arrived in Nagasaki a couple of weeks ago, toward the end of our five-city whistle-stop tour of east-central Japan, I was tired. We’d been going-doing-seeing for three weeks, and I wanted nothing more than to sit in a coffee shop and process our experiences and drink a mocha and lose myself in a novel—preferably something light and perky with a happy ending.
But being a diligent maker and checker of lists, I saw that Gunkanjima Island was our next agenda item (after the Atomic Bomb Museum: thus my need for some light and perky escape reading), and tasked Lee with figuring out how to get us there. He, being a diligent maker and checker of spousal happiness, did exactly that. He found the website of the company that does the tours, read that English is only offered on Tuesdays, and learned from the reviews that a lot of people get seasick on the boat ride.
It was a good idea until he said seasick. That made it a definitely questionable idea.
Then two things happened: first, it started to rain. Then, Lee slept wrong and woke up with vertigo.
This was his second-ever vertigo attack, and he has learned a pretty effective technique to fix it, but it did seem like a bumpy boat ride in the rain might not be a great idea, under the circumstances. Plus there was that whole seasickness possibility, and suddenly I was relieved to have an excuse to just skip Gunkanjima Island entirely.
I finally realized that the main reason I wanted to go was so I could tell my sister I’d been. (Hi Frances—guess what! I didn’t go see that abandoned island, even though it was just-right-over-there.) Perhaps that wasn’t a strong enough reason, because ultimately my aversions to seasickness and rain won out.
Instead I sat in our hotel room and made a map of chocolate shops in Tokyo and was happy and definitely not seasick.
It’s a scenario I struggle with on a near-daily basis—I think of it as an occupational hazard of full-time travel: sometimes we just get tired of touristing. In the early days, I tried, but it didn’t take long to realize that no one—even people who live normal lives in one place and go to work at the same office every day—can live at full-tilt all the time.
It’s tempting, though: full-tilt living. We have to make deliberate choices to avoid exhaustion and burn-out, on a daily basis, and also on a bigger-picture basis. My daily choice was to skip Gunkanjima Island; the number of museums/sights/activities I’ve chosen to skip in 8 years could fill a book.
We choose to skip things on the schedule-level, too. We could’ve chosen to travel more in Australia, but we knew we’d need some solid downtime after buzzing around New Zealand for three weeks, so we chose not to see any of the long list of things I want to see on that continent (Dear Great Barrier Reef: please don’t disappear—I still really want to see you). Instead we stayed in Melbourne, where we ate croissants and I spent long, luxurious afternoons in bookstores and wandering in various parks. I didn’t have time for much else—I was too busy being lazy.
Sometimes I think, ‘Damn, I wish I’d gone to that exhibit-show-temple-restaurant-monument.’ Not often, though.
That’s life, right? It’s a choice. It’s always a choice.
Take care,
Lisa
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